Journal of dbaumgart

Journal of dbaumgart

By dbaumgart

I'm a freelance 2d artist; My portfolio can be seen here.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

My external blog: artscum.wordpress.com

Friday, October 30, 2009

Digital Painting, More AO

Posted - 10/30/2009 11:23:11 PM

Of digital painting...
Right, these are for Aragon Online.
More obsessive perfectionism -- this time showing the progression of the images!

Yes, back to this one; I decided it needed to be clear that this guy was important rather than some dude tramping about in the woods with a bow.
1: old version, (some missing steps go here, the rest is almost polish because I didn't really save all that much)
2: revised version, more flare, visible face
3: sized up hand and body (made head relatively smaller); it's easy to totally botch proportions when you don't spend a lot of time on a sketch beforehand (I did use reference though!)
4: added the posse back in, slightly altered.
5: gave him a crown to make him royalty of some sort, made the trees all pretty (after going for a walk in the park, looking up a lot, and reading O-san's observations on how painting blurry things with a sharper brush looks more dramatic. Turns out, it does. [Pst, O-san -- write more painting tips.] )

1: old version (based on a picture of me, actually; though I assure you I don't look all that much like a goblin; really! When I can't find a pose by random googling, sometimes it's easy to just snap myself with a webcam and work from that. It's a great way to go about drawing hands.)
2: sized down to allow for more epicness in the picture
3: gave him some bling to look higher-status; again, showing a leader of goblins rather than a grunt.
4: the change here is a bit hard to notice at first, but it's important -- look at where the shoulder armor hits the chin. I dropped the shoulders down a bit because the pose looked cramped and weird.
5: final polish and background! I tried to give the outfit/shield a bit more variation of texture, brought in some hot orange underlighting, gave the fur trim and face highlights, made the scar a bit more badass, showed some teeth for a nice sneer. And yeah, totally going for some Kurosawa with the banners in the background. Note a very loose regard for horizons; this is expressionistic; proper perspective must be sacrificed for drama.

A new one this time. Lots of fun.
1: first sketch -- orcish knight leading the cavalry. (I wasn't quite clear if they're supposed to be riding horses or worgs, so I left it unclear.); I also neglected to save the first version of the sky, so you see the final sky in the background prematurely.
2: Started around the face, the focal point of the picture, and sort of started rendering in an outward spiral. Note orange underlighting versus cold blue light from the top; I love that, makes for very easy contrast.
3: More rendering out and around.
4: More rendering outward, the cape, arm, reins, some hair from the mount; added the background banners ("A red banner with a black fist").
5: Cleaned up more rendering, cheesed the levels, gave the face much more contrast so the eye is drawn there, and rendered the clouds more carefully. I really love the colors going on with the sky.

...and pixeling.

And I also made seasonal crops tiles!

Don't you just love the contrast of scale between tiny pixel art and digital painting, of the mundane and epic? Yeah, the context is probably unkind to the crops, but they're really more central to the gameplay.

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Journal of dbaumgart