The Merciless King.

Phwoar! What a post title, eh? I'll get to the meaning of this posts title further down but first I thought I'd use this space to show off other work too, it'll be the usual mix of life drawing, visual design and a little bit of 3D.

Life Drawing

Over the Christmas Holiday we were given a bit of homework to study feet, I can see why because they are difficult to draw and hold a lot of importance for figure drawing. Before I got into drawing my own feet I done a few studies using work from other artists who specialize in drawing the human figure; George B. Bridgman breaks down the figure into manageable, blocky forms, while John H. Vanderpoel builds upon this for a more finished looking piece.

George B. Bridgman studies

John H. Vanderpoel studies

My own

And here are a few pieces from the first life drawing class of 2014, the first one clearly showed I was a little bit out of practice. I really want to push away from my overly square forms, I use it as a quick method to rough things out yet I don't think I ever refine my work enough to lose the initial squareness, this is something I hope to change and I tried to push myself in this lesson to refine a bit more.

10 Min Pose: Christmas + Monday morning hits hard

10 Min Pose: Warming up

10 Min Pose: I like this one apart from the over sized calf 

A1 Size, 30 Min Pose: A challenging angle

Visual Design

I forgot to upload the still-life drawings I did for one of the weeks, so they've been thrown in here. Over the break I also managed to redo the Pumping Station final that I was not happy with, the second attempt went much better I think and I'm pleased with the results!

Still Life final

Pumping Station final V2

3D

Trees! 2 of them in fact. It was enjoyable making an object from nature, the randomness of it was a good contrast to the bin and building. For the creation of the leaves I followed a tutorial where the branches are created in Max, then exported out into Photoshop where you layer everything up and generally make it look fancy then you bring it back in Max as an alpha. The only problem that I still haven't figured out is why in Max my trees look all good and bushy but when they're rendered they look bare and dying.

Both trees are under 1000 tris

Why do they look so naked compared to the top screenshot?

The Merciless King
At last, the exciting bit! To keep us in shape over the Christmas holiday we were given a fun project to do, we had to create our own evil character, it could be Christmas themed but I chose not to do that. This was an open project so I spent a few days just thinking of ideas really, demons, Nazis, zombies, ghouls, you name it but none of these were really ticking my evil box. I decided I wanted to an evil king or lord, someone who doesn't necessarily look evil but their personality is corrupted, look at Joffrey in Game of Thrones, from first glance he looks quite normal but that guy is just a bastard.

With an idea in mind I collected reference and inspiration. Frank Frazetta has been an huge inspiration for me and I thought the way he can make a semi-nude guy explode off the page and have personality with nothing but lighting would be a great thing to try and replicate for my final piece.

Reference Sheet 1

Reference Sheet 2

Once I had a good pile of reference I began to sketch out quick thumbs, mainly to try and find an interesting composition for the sort of story I wanted to tell but to also make sure I had exhausted every possible route. While doing these I went a bit overboard and started to think up the backstory for this guy, sure it was a lot of wasted brain power but I needed to figure what was making my character evil, this definitely helped make the character more believable for me. Once the thumbs were done I done 3 more to flesh out some of the details.

Looking back I wish I had produced a few more larger thumbs to help with my composition and then maybe refined some more to really make sure I wasn't missing any potential favourites. In the end I went with the far left drawing. I hope by having him give a death stare to the viewer and also be walking towards them will add a sense of terror to help push the "evil" of the image.

The Merciless King

I used the moon to create some heavy contrast around his head as I wanted the viewer to be pulled to his face instantly. The burning city in the back ground is there to help show that something bad is happening but I think leaving it as a simple silhouette was a mistake, plus my smoke looks crappy. I was also struggling with what to do with his right hand, which is why it looks stuck in karate chopping action mode. I should have added in a few clouds too to break up the now bleak looking sky. Despite all the small mistake I am noticing I'm still happy with the drawing, I don't think I've ever created a piece from my imagination to this level and hopefully I can learn from these mistakes to make my next drawing even better.