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I'm a freelance 2d artist; My portfolio can be seen here.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
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| Saturday, February 6, 2010 |
  Sweet Legitimation & Space Trader Portraits | 
Posted - 2/6/2010 10:13:55 PM | [Adapted from two posts on my wordpress blog.]
Fire up the Gaslamp
[The mini logo-crit I received: Drop the background buildings, emphasize the lamp by sizing it up relative to the frame, and use consistent font weight rather than fake caps. And wow, does our website ever look 1998; This is going to change.]
As of January 28, Gaslamp Games is a real business entity with ownership shared between three partners, of which I am one. We have some things brewing and some income looking near certain in the near future. And we're not beholden to anyone but ourselves because we're crazy like that.
This is the feeling of legitimation.
All these years and years of throwing my time into a hole: planning System Shock 3 in English class in highschool ("This isn't art class!"), filling sketchbooks with tile designs through college (and coding a few of them over some obsessive months), developing technique over two occasionally painful and generally poor years of freelance work; and I remember years and years ago having this vision in my head of what I wanted a particular computer game to be, after dreaming about it, when I was 11 or 12. Then drawing games out on whiteboards and running them for my friends -- strategy games on world maps, fantasy magic adventure games on landscapes, space combat games with a series of whiteboards showing the ship view, the galaxy map, the battle map. (If I'd known what D&D was at the time, you can bet I'd have been all over making little worlds in it.)
It is all coming together now.
No one ever told me outright that games weren't a serious business, but I always preempted such doubts by thinking them myself. I remember one night a couple years ago seriously considering giving it up, just getting a "real" job, regular work and stable income, to get on with the sort of life everyone expects a person to make for himself. I'm glad I didn't. I cannot express how much I love the idea of managing to earn a living from my creative work, and at that, to have have creative control in said work.
We've made this a real thing for ourselves, not just (ha) a game. It's going to be great.
Character Portraits for Space Trader
I recently finished some graphics work for a Facebook game called Space Trader. Do check it out, if you like.
Part of the job involved painting some space opera style character portraits. I like saving the states of paintings as they progress so I can build a timeline showing development of the work, which is just what I've done for these four portraits.
Click the picture to see it at full size.
Self-commentary:
1. Grizzled space-commander
I figured he'd look good in one of those cold-war era looking command/control centers where everyone's face gets illuminated from below by instrumentation. His uniform is a somewhat cold gray to feel more at home in a futuristic military organization while possibly on a spaceship . And I swear, my instructions just happened to make him look like Sarge from Quake 3, but then I think the cigar-smoking tough military man is a common enough archetype -- the concept was crystal clear from start to finish. I also pulled the old cold vs warm lighting from different sides trick.
2. Gruff feet-on-the-ground sergeant type
I went with some peripheral suggestion that he has powered armor and some weaponry. There's some destruction in the background to show that he's just blown something up or he survived getting blown up. Either way, he's a survivor. I'm not quite happy with the eyes and no doubt the lighting is a little erratic. (And I realize again that I need to practice a lot more drawing people's faces, because lots of things are just a bit weird feeling. I find myself falling back on generic solutions to the problems of rendering faces when I use no reference.)
3. Helpful repair bot
Robots are easy -- they don't have to look like people, and I'm great at machinery. (All the junk in the background? I love that stuff.) The shape of the head evolved to look a little friendlier, less like a skull, and I figured that yellow is a friendly color that denotes construction and repair. The head still looks a bit flat, and the main lens not especially round, but it'll do, I think.
4. Creepy bad guy
The first sketch was way too Destro, so he had to have a hood up if he was to remain metal-faced. (Metal-masked bad guys seem pretty common, don't they: Destro, Dr. Doom, uhm ... I'm out of ideas, never mind.) Or is it even a mask? I don't particularly know. Still, it's great practice to try to draw facets of reflective metal at weird angles with all kinds of indeterminate light sources -- it forces me to wing it and try to make it look as believable as possible rather than anything like "realistic". Ceci n'est pas une pipe anyway. The face evolved to being sharper and more lizard-like as I went on to look more, well, evil. Do note all the lines of the green pipes converging behind his head, bringing the eye to the center of the image. Yes, artistic trickery again!
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| Dredmoring | |
Posted - 1/5/2010 5:29:36 AM | Been very busy. Enough said!
(Oh! Just over two years now as my own man -- as a freelance artist, I mean. Wild.)
Ah, Dredmor, you elusive beast:
These screenshots are some UI finalization and polishing, along with a new feature or two; I'll discuss what's going on in each.
On this screen the player chooses seven skills to make their character. (The skill pictures are cute aren't they?) Little change here but for the UI receiving some polish to replace rough layout-boxes with in-theme parchment and stone. And, if you like, here are some earlier shots of the same screen:
Then you choose your name. This screen could use Back and Done buttons and the text could be centered, but it's looking to be almost there. And here particularly you can see the background painting I had a lot of fun drawing. It's typical me painting: strong colors and thick, dark blacks.
Our hero appears in-game! A comparison to some earlier screenshots show how far the UI is coming along.
A note on the life/mana bars: I had quantized the life and mana as hearts and stars, respectively, so that the player could keep easy track of how they were faring. Problem is, the game does not count life in units from one to nine -- it's really some crazy number that changes based on your level and other factors, so what the bar shows is what percent of your total hitpoints you have. It's more appropriate as a continuous meter than a line of icons.
There's also a Doom-style animated portrait in the bottom-center (which needs to have its art finalized). I always thought that character's face in Doom was charming when he gave that big grin after finding the shotgun and I felt all icky when he was hurt and dripping blood everywhere. So my thought was that we could make the character come to life a bit more, connect more with the player of the game, if he had a little emotive face that could react to the gameplay.
I don't know when Dredmor is going to come out, but I'll definitely be shilling for it more with nice pictures before release.
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