Cinematic Matte Painting

So one thing I have been super interested in this past year are matte paintings. For those of you who don't know what a matte painting is, a matte painting is a painted representation of a landscape, set, or distinct location that allows filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment that would otherwise be too expensive or otherwise impossible to film or visit (thank you Wikipedia!). Basically what a matte painter will do is combine paintings with photographic elements (and sometimes 3D elements) to make a scene. You'd be surprised at how many of your favorite movie or TV shows contain matte paintings. Fun Fact: Before computers, matte paintings were exactly what they sound  like, photorealistic paintings.

Ok enough with the history lesson! Like I said I found the subject of matte paintings to be super interesting, so I decided to try my hand at it! One of my guilty pleasures are doomsday films, and what would a doomsday film be without a post apocalyptic shot of our nations capital! Heres a shot of the US Capitol building I found online.

Now heres that same image, but manipulated to look like it went through hell and back!

TAH DAH! One post apocalyptic DC shot at your service! This piece took around two hours to complete from start to finish. It was made up of a combination of photo manipulation and painted elements. In the end I used around 27 different layers to create this I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, considering it was a first attempt. If you have an idea for any matte paintings, feel free to leave a comment down below!

If you're interested in learning more about matte paintings, check out this awesome documentary on the subject.  All the matte paintings you'll see in this are traditionally done, nothing digital about any of them! And if you want to see some examples of modern matte paintings, check out this video!

As always thanks for checking out my work!

Enjoy!

~Josh

Han's Shot First

So a few weeks ago I posted a Demotivational poster of R5-D4 that I painted. I decided that I wanted to print it up for my desk at school next semester. That got me thinking that I want to start making and selling Geeky prints. I was recently on the site imgur where I saw this picture of Harrison Ford pouring shots. Suddenly I found myself thinking of the age old debate of who shot first, Han or Greedo, and thus this latest piece was born.

This time I decided to set out to try something different. I wanted to an entire painting without any linework whatsoever. I have done that before with landscape and environments (see my first blog post here for an example) but I have never done that with characters. The first step was finding the right reference photos. Obviously I found plenty of pictures of Han, Greedo, and the Cantina, but I also looked up photos of people drinking shots. I myself don't drink alcohol, so I knew that relying on my memory for this pose wouldn't work out. After finding the right pose I began to sketch out the piece and got this:

Now that I had my sketch done I began to fill in the base colors of each part of the piece so I could get an idea of my palette.

Once I was happy with how this turned out, I began to add value. After getting some great tips from my friends J.P. Perez and Amanda Bell, who are both FANTASTIC artists who regularly sell their work at cons, I finally felt that I was happy with the piece. 

All that was left was some minor color correction to better fit the atmosphere of the piece and voilà!

I'm pretty happy with  this piece, and I plan on making prints available of this, and the Bad Motivator on very soon!

As always thanks for reading and enjoy!

~Josh

Tales of a Concept Artist

One problem I've had for the longest time was coming up with something original when it came to my art. I could think of cool ideas, but they were always based off of something else. I just didn't seem to be able to think up original concepts on my own. All that changed recently thanks to this program. Since we had to come up with our own stories, characters, and locations, we had to draw to provide concepts in order to get our stories pushed through. Since I was forced to start coming up with original ideas, I began to find it easier to think up things as time went on. At one point, when our team was still trying to get selected, I was providing the bulk of the concept art for character designs. While I would by no means say I'm a fantastic concept artist, I do think that over this past year I have slowly started to get the hang of it.

Recently we had to come up with some concepts addressing two major issues in our film: what type of wings our main character had and how did he go about creating planets. Using the character concept my friend Jackie Malvin came up with, I started to get to work. In my mind I had always had a very clear image as to how our main character, Gan, created planets. I saw his hands swirling around bits of rock, cloud, and crystal as they began to form a planet (think Avatar: the Last Airbender). I did a few sketches to try and figure out how best to convey that. The wings, on the other hand, was something I didn't know how to approach at first. Originally Gan had these huge angelic wings, which I had always been against as I felt that they created several issues in our film. However the faculty loved the idea of wings, so we had to find a way to incorporate them into our film. One day while meeting, a few of us came up with the idea of making his wings out of energy, rather than traditional wings. I really liked that idea a lot, as I had hated the traditional wing design. While trying to concept what these wings looked like, I came up with the idea of incorporating his wings into the planet making process. After sketching out a few different poses, I finally came up with the one I liked.

While I don't know if my idea will ultimately be selected, I am very happy with is, as it's one of the first pieces of concept art that I feel truly conveys what I was going for. I know that I still have a lot of art if I ever want to seriously consider doing concept art, but I feel that for the first time ever I'm finally on the right track. One thing I'm incredibly grateful for, that has resulted from this program, is that I'm finding a lot more things about this field that intrest me.

Enjoy!

~Josh

Animating Myself - Part 1

So I've decided that as a summer project, I was going to attempt to model, texture, and rig an animated version of myself. For those of you who don't know me in real life, my drawing style is "Disney-esque" . When I first saw Disney's Tangled, I knew that if I were to apply my style to 3D, it would be similar to that (this being said, I still feel like I have a far way to go with my drawing style, but I'll save that for a future blog post). I thought it would be fun to have my very own Josh Rig, so that I could use it for my demo reel, and my own personal animation projects. The very first step, and the reason behind this blog post, was to make a Model Sheet of my cartoon self, so I could use it as reference for the modeling stage. For those of you who don't know what a Model Sheet it, its typically a front view and side view of a person, object, or creature that the modeler will use in order to create the 3D model. Now that you know what a Model Sheet is, here's mine!

Enjoy!

~Josh