Art Blog

Currently doing Storyboard Revisions on American Dad.

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I’ll see myself out

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Hello friends, this is the long awaited tutorial on Line-Quality, Art-Style, and Same-Face-Syndrome.

Line-Quality is improved by building Muscle-Memory.

You build muscle memory through Drawing-Exercises.

Art-Style is developed over time through Observation and Routine.

Routines such as… Drawing-Exercises. 

And now for… the Ultimate Drawing-Exercise-Routine!

It’s called Snake-In-A-Basket!!

Draw any kind of snake inside of any kind of basket. You have 5 to 20 minutes to complete it before each/every Big-Serious-Illustration to tackle. No more, no less time!

Draw it… NOW!

(my example that I drew in GIMP)

Art-Style is not necessarily what you think it is. A fairly common style issue discussed in artist circles is the inability to draw the same character twice while retaining their likeness or the lack of uniqueness which makes our art (recognizable) distinguishable from another’s “oh! YOU drew this!”.

Here are the fastest pathways to attaining the elusive Art-Style:

Repetition!!!!!

Recurrence-of-Thematic-Elements (everyone is sad, robots, someone is always shirtless, etc)

Same Color-Palette used for everything you draw

Same-Tools (line width, brush set, same paper, canvas size)

or Same-Program

(examples of palettes!! you can’t go wrong with having a rainbow)

Some Amount of Explanation:

If you draw on the same size or same scale (A6, A5, A4, A3 | B6, B5 | Letter) or in the same orientation (Landscape or Portrait), it helps you learn Composition intuitively by training you to make use of the space you have. Also it’s easier to print out and frame if you draw on common photo print sizes 4x6, 8x10, etc.

Even if you make a lot of use of Blend/Blur and you’re more of a Painter than a Cel-Shader– deciding to use a Set Personal-Default-Color-Palette instead of randomly choosing them on the Wheel/Triangle-Thing will still give you enough stable consistency.

Onto the next thing!

Same-Face-Syndrome is normally caused by one of two things. If it’s not one then it’s the other: Same Shapes or Same Details.

To make noticebly different characters you have to Exaggerate.

Circle, Square, Triangle, Rectangle? Short, Wide, Tall, Thin?

Before you try your hand at drawing any Face or Body Type, draw another Snake-In-A-Basket first. 

You think I’m joking?

No. I’m not.

So to wrap up, you need to Warm Up to draw, you need to make a color palette and stick to it –or just use the same Crayola pencils, or the same kind of Bic pen, same kind of sharpie, .7 or .5, and have themes like “plaid flannels for everybody” or “hoodies and jeans”. Find those things you can execute consistently, like hatching or stippling, and if you like it, stick with it! 

Hope this helps!

Now draw a SNAKE-IN-A-BASKET!

[frogonadogonaloginabog]

Why the snake in a basket though?

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This is the alternative looks a bit more abstract. The Snake-In-A-Basket makes use of different lines going in different directions but in one visually comprehensive Object. Its purpose is to build confidence in making long, medium, short lines.

[camposantoblog]

Hi! I’m Matt Wilde, an old man from the North of England who has worked in visual effects, lighting, and rendering for games since the last century. Most recently, I worked on Variable State’s Virginia. Previously I was responsible for blood, magic, and urine in games as diverse as The Lord of The Rings Aragorn’s Quest (magic/blood), The House of the Dead: Overkill (blood/urine), and Dancing with the Stars: The Official Game (all of the above). Now I’m contributing VFX and rendering to In the Valley of Gods at Campo Santo.

Putting together our announcement trailer provided plenty of challenges, but one thing I spent a fair chunk of time on didn’t actually make the final cut: a scene where Zora and Rashida wade through an ancient flooded passageway.

The starting point was this thumbnail sketch from art director Claire Hummel:

To bring the scene to life, we’d need nice-looking water, which wouldn’t be convincing if it didn’t react to the motion of the characters and surrounding geometry. A game that does this well is Resident Evil 7 (especially if you’re a fan of floating corpses, like I am).

To this end, graphics programmer Pete Demoreuille (who apparently does exist even though he doesn’t have a Twitter profile) created a GPU-based simulation using a “shallow-water” approximation. It’s a little more accurate than traditional video game techniques, as it accounts for the water’s depth and computes its horizontal velocity along with height. For collision with the characters and the world, a “signed distance field” can be precomputed for the static environment, and characters are added in per-frame by attaching primitives (capsules, in this case) to bones in their rigs. Got it?

The end result is a number of dynamic textures which are fed into the shader for the water surface’s height, normal, velocity, and distance from a blocking object. Timo Kellomäki’s work on water simulation in games is a great reference.

With these at my disposal, I set about making an actual shader, starting with a simple flow mapping texture—the flowing determined by the simulation. The output is brightened depending on factors like surface normal and velocity. The below was captured right out of the Unity editor and was immediately fun to play with. Imagine the capsule is a rubber duck, like I did. For about a week.

I gradually built this into a more watery-looking shader with the addition of normal mapping, depth-based transparency, caustic lighting effects, and probably some other things.

By this time the passage scene contained some first pass environment modelling and character animation, so I could try the shader out in situ. But first, Claire produced this handy style guide broken down into layers.

Isolating each element of the material was really useful in getting the final combined effect to work as we hoped it would. This is how it looked with the breakdown recreated in the shader:

If you’ve worked with Unity shaders, you may appreciate that getting shadows to project onto a translucent surface is quite challenging. But I think it was worth the effort to enable the subtly visible geometry under the surface, fogged and blurred by depth.

With the characters and colliders added, the scene was as complete as it was ever going to get. The environment, character models and animation would all be updated in time, and I had plans to add particle splashes, water dripping from the ceiling, and a way to allow the characters to appear to get dynamically wet. But then, the devastating news.

The shot had been cut from the trailer.

Not one to take this kind of thing badly, I quickly brushed it off and it was really no more than a few months and a Balinese yoga retreat later and I was eagerly anticipating my next challenge. Dust motes? Oh no that’s great. Bring it on. I love dust.

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Attention: this is an important photoset

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I’m just gonna keep adding stuff to this post if you don’t mind...

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Attention: this is an important photoset

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The LDR of the future…

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A little Valentine’s day continuation!

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Sample pages from Dante, Héctor and Miguel’s model sheets. This was the Bible for the Animators who were animating these characters. (Via @leeunkrich on twitter)

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The LDR of the future...

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And just a general art-that-I-have-on-my-phone-and-never-crossposted-here dump. Mostly Big Teeth

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And I updated my business cards a while back so they look like this now

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Dang but I have neglected tumblr. Here’s a couple muuuuuuuuch older lineless drawings that you’ve definitely already seen if you follow me anywhere else

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And an astrosprung sketch dump too

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Realized I never posted this here eitherrrr. One of my BG Paintings I liked

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Heyyy tumblr, it’s been a minute. Here’s some Astrosprung stuff

[wannabeanimator]

Treasure Planet (2002) | pencil test / shot progression by Sergio Pablos

[chuwenjie]

I’m so excited to share some of the work I did for my personal passion project/Cartoon Network intern pitch, GIRL GANG! (Ideally I’m hoping to eventually publish it as a graphic novel/webcomic!)

The story takes place in a future where ocean levels have risen and covered the Earth, leaving only chains of islands where continents used to be. On an island in the Pacific, a gang of street girls fight to survive the oppression of the Empire, a civilization from across the ocean that is on a mission to colonize and conquer all the world’s remaining land. 

Some brief character blurbs about the main gang: Miya- the quiet and somewhat shy leader of the gang who talks little but packs a massive punch with her baseball bat; Emi- the gang’s getaway driver and auto specialist and the disowned daughter of a wealthy Inner Circle family; Yuyu- the black market dealer and scavenger with a bubbly personality and an obsession with 200-year-old anime artifacts; and Blue- a Muy Thai fighter who values honor and justice above all else, and defected from her previous gang when Miya saved her life.

On the opposing side, Riza’s gang of wealthy and entitled elitist Inner Circle girls are out to wreak havoc in the Outskirts, and end up clashing with Miya and her gang as a result. Riza is the daughter of a highly influential politician and believes herself to be superior to “Outskirts trash,” while Krystal (the Empire’s number one teenage pop idol), Jin (a cyber hacker) and Momo (a skilled wrestler who sticks with Riza out of a desire to belong) enable her to put the Outskirts in what she perceives to be their rightful place.

That’s all for now but I hope you all enjoy!! I love this project and I can’t wait to fully realize it sometime in the near future. (ALSO: IF YOU WANNA DO FANART- GO RIGHT AHEAD, JUST PROMISE YOU’LL SHOW ME!!) Love, Kat!

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Heeeeey tumblr. I’m knee-deep in this music video rn but I took this shot to color for fun (and to try out some lighting and color ideas) and figured I would share it with you all. Gonna try not to post a lot of WIPs from this project, so enjoy the one you get 😂