Jordan's Class Self Portraits in Photoshop

All of these are self portraits I made relatively quickly, my sketchbook drawings will be added soon!

First I was really self conscious and didn't know how to start but by just doing lots of quick drawings it really helped me and I had a lot of fun in the end!

Simon's lesson: Image Planes and Batch Rendering

In Simon's lesson today we created a few polygons, rendered them and then imported the render into Photoshop where we painted over and then put it back into Maya as an image plane and material for the polygons. We then added a sphere attached to a curve to create an animation, batch rendered it and made it into a video in After Effects.
This Maya/Photoshop technique is ideal for times when there is no camera movement required.

Jordan's Class 9/3/15

Yesterday in Jordan's class we first painted our own hands including getting the colours right, which I found particularly difficult as the colour of my hands seemed to change all the time so a colour swatch would be dated after about 5 minutes.

The second exercise was to recreate a still life out of a collection of photos which was very interesting, as there was a great emphasis on tonal values and shadows.

Thumbnails to Kandinsky

These are my first 16 thumbnails exploring Kandinsky, I am concentrating mostly on forms and colours while trying to imitate oil painting in Photoshop.

Invisible Cities: Argia. Exterior establishing shot, lower exterior shot and interior shot.

 exterior establishing shot

lower exterior shot

 

 interior shot

 

 

I have chosen these as my final shots as they portray the mood of Argia very well and show how the people live underground. All of these shots were first drawings from my sketchbook which I scanned in and painted over to keep the perspective and shapes and sizes as close to my imagination as possible.



@ Jordan: Exterior shots

For a quick look to see how both exterior shots go together; I think the contrast between light and dark is nice in both of them and even though the colours in the low angle shot are very different from the establishing shot it all can be explained by how colours change over distance.

Please have a look and comment if anything seems amiss! I already blurred the stairs after Emma pointed out that they are the only thing that has sharp edges, now it all fits together much better :)

Exterior low angle shot

My exterior low angle shot is getting there, I know the perspective in a few places is a bit off but quickly learning it is not as easy as it sounds :p I like the colours, they feel cosy and inviting but it looks more like a comic book at the moment, definitely needs improvement! Will work on this again this afternoon.

Saturation, burn and dodge tool on exterior establishing shot

Does the lighting look alright? Or is the background too shiny? I reckon the really light bit is where the sun shines through a bit, or at least where daylight seeps in.
I am very happy about the progress I made with the burn and dodge tool, at first it didn't work until I clicked the right layer, now I'm really happy with both tools! I also played around with the colours:

Exterior Establishing Shot

This is the first exterior establishing shot draft I'm happy with, it's not perfect yet and I haven't checked the colours but want to work on the next one in the meantime. Any thoughts?

Interesting

I just selected my thumbnail with the marquee tool and copy-pasted it onto a bigger canvas and half the picture vanished! It only shows on here what I did yesterday and today, nothing else. Odd. Will try and upload all my images properly!

Argia: Explaining the air supply and transport methods

Unfortunately when opening the file I forgot to select transparent background so I simply turned down the fill to 56% and started drawing the colours onto the underlying layer, taken from my colour palette, which gives this picture a bit of a washed out look.
This picture explains where the fresh air gets in as the Argians simply rely on the caves and tunnels to sort themselves out. These are just small crack in the surface that let air in, but not rain for example as that would likely flood the whole city. There is always some draft coming through and the stormy season can be quite rough underground, as your drying clothes might fly away if not secured properly.
The transport systems exists in stairs and mechanical lifts for goods which is difficult to handle by one person only but it can carry a great load. The stairs are present on any floor and represented by the diagonal lines going up and down. They are nice and broad and not too steep and some have even pretty decorations.

This picture shows the original colours I was using, without the fine lines. I just really like the look of it, as it is bright and happy and you can still see all the important patterns and what's going on.

Colour palette for Argia (first try)

These are the different colours I will be using for my city, on the left side is more the colours of the walls and the clothes and on the right it's plants and water. I am trying to use as many autumn colours as possible, but the green of the plants is very light because they have been under the earth for so long. The water comes in 3 shades because of the difference in colour when it comes to depth, as there is quite a deep lake in the middle of the city I will try and distinguish between very shallow, normal and deep water.
All the colours might change if I don't find them suitable, but it's a start!

cat drew a dragon, my try

Photoshop with graphics tablet yay

Some Maya and thumbnail talk

After having some problems in accessing the Maya tutorials I have now made it 45 minutes into the character creation tutorial and can proudly present my progress on my pencil character, there is more to come! I just can't get anymore Maya in my head right now so will try again later... But I made my first gif based on Simon's instructions.


Also, I have done a lot of thumbnails in my sketchbook and am only missing 6 cities which is easily manageable to finish by Tuesday but since I lost the wire that connects my phone to the pc I thought I'll wait until tomorrow and scan the thumbnails during my lunch break. The library seems to have scanners in E Zone 2 so that should work!

Thumbnail Exersize no 4!

This one was hard..ish, how to draw houses that are not there was fun!

Graphics Tablet try outs

My first tries with my own graphics tablet, the first picture is just generic scribble and the others are the thumbnails for the first three invisible cities! Yesterdays lesson was very helpful because we changed a few settings on my tablet to make it easier to work with and I learned lots of shortcuts and how to use brushes a bit more.