CGMA Gallery "Fast Track to Animation"

My work was presented alongside some truly incredible artists from the animation industry at CGMW's "Fast Track to Animation" show. Check out one of my color thumbnails on display at :53 seconds in!

Style and backgrounds

Painted backgrounds/concept for a demo. 

New styles are great to experiment with, it helps you see things differently and keeps you flexible. A character is in the center of this scene usually, thus the central composition.

Character Techniques

Playing with some techniques for faster character exploration.

Hand Painted Textures

The final version of a hand painted texturing project. I took the project from concept to finished 3D textured model. I worked to keep the poly count low and the texture maps efficient, while still achieving the look and feel of the concept!
Concept > Adobe Photoshop
Model > Autodesk Maya

More to come!

An environment concept and some texture work, hinting at more to come! Stay tuned!

Character

A small character sketch for game mechanic exploration. Yes, that character does actually have blue hair :)

Color, Contrast, Lighting

Some more examples of the work I have been doing. I have been learning a ton from some new art I have recently discovered. Trying to think more about color, composition and lighting in each piece alongside content. I think i'm improving!

Jazz Club

A small segment of some exploratory concepts done recently for GTW.

Student Showcase - CGMA, Dreamworks Animation's Turbo

I am honored to announce that some of my work will be shown as part of a student showcase, alongside a book signing event for Dreamworks Animation's TURBO this month in Burbank, CA. CGMA Has been a great tool for me to advance my own abilities, and I have had the opportunity to learn from some incredible artists along the way!

Teaser

A teaser of some of the things I have been working on!

Hard brush technique test

A piece for Games That Work, trying out a few new techniques with harder brushes. Interesting result i think. Maybe ill try some more later. It certainly helps you think about the color!

Light, Color and E3!

 This was a piece I brought up from a sketch to a bit more finished concept.

Original sketch...

I only had an evening to work on this piece, but I hope to continue developing it further as some areas are still rather unresolved or not up to par yet. I do think the direction it is headed is nice however.


In other news: I got to visit E3 this year! I checked out a ton of the new titles, and even got to participate in the EA Need for Speed Rivals gamer tournament! I came in second, but I got a T-Shirt! The game is going to be awesome by the way :)

Also, gotta have some artwork, so here are a couple of airplane tablet paintings. Its getting smoother to paint on the tablet which is pretty cool!

Emotional Color

For this assignment I explored color and how it changes over time based on the mood of each scene as well as the action. The story takes place over three locations, although one I left out was the traveling between the first and second locations (The hut on the mountain to the destination, some kind of castle/shrine)

Study and Extras

 A study from the great Jamie Jones, trying to figure out his water and color choices with more overcast comps. Also, a couple random comps. I liked some elements from each, gotta keep pushing it!

Heat bloom

Playing with the affects of dense atmosphere and lighting.
I reworked it following a critique for a much better composition.

Mood

Not as much time this week for art, which means more rushing on assignments, and less desirable outcomes. Exploring mood is an exciting prospect and I will delve into it alot, now that I have a bit more time :)

Here is one of the pieces i liked from the past assignment of doing almost color script type paintings. quick and rough with basic color/light exploration.

Tablet Paintings

Very busy this past week with non art related things, so I only had a couple opportunities to work. One of those opportunities was while flying, so here are a couple paintings done on my tablet (Asus Transformer). I'm getting more used to the setup, and its alot of fun! Plus, painting at 30,000 ft...

Cinematic Concept Designs

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to develop some concepts with a more cinematic edge to them! The lighting for the night/black market was really fun to play around with!

Light logic

This exercise required using no color picking of any sort. Viewing the reference and using your knowledge of color and light and observation skills to learn the logic of how the lighting would affect objects if you placed them in those environments.

A tremendous exercise! I can already see some of my mistakes, but always moving forward, eh?

Material Coolness!

A really cool bit of cross discipline here. A co-worker, and talented character artist, friend of mine Michael LaMorte grabbed some of the texture spheres I had been painting for CGMW and tested them out as Zbrush materials! The results varied, but some of them came out really cool! I had to share :)

Material Exploration

Some more material exploration. I would have like to take more time analyzing the references and painting more materials, but sometimes work and life gets in the way. I think i will continue this practice though as its a great tool for learning light.

The materials are labeled from top left to bottom right.

Hot Rod paint job

Reflective material

Matte material

Hard candy/semi translucent

Foil

Flesh

Transparent

Gummy Candy

Reel

Something quick I threw together over the weekend to demo some of my work. I would probably view it small since the upload downgraded the resolution.

Rapid Iteration.

Rapid iteration on robotic/bipedal characters for a game pitch. Maybe ill put the final one up at some point!

Basic Color and Light

For this project we worked with basic forms to explore color relationships. We used standard Key, Fill, Bounce lighting setups for with warm and cool. I took the liberty of exploring a bit with materials and surfacing.

Value simplification and Lighting

For this project we were instructed to use only 5 values to recreate a movie still. Each image must represent a different type of lighting and thus a different range of values. Learned some great things from going through this process.

Girls with tranquilizer guns

More costuming and female character designs iterations. And more gray-scale. I also added tranquilizer dart guns, for no specific reason.