Initial Shaken Renders!

Since the last time I posted about Shaken, a lot has happened! As you can see we now have one of our characters fully modeled and textured! The model was done by the amazing James Bridges and the textures were done by the fantastic Ward Silverman. Additionally, we've begun to work on storyboards for the film. Now while I won't be able to show you all of them anytime soon, I may post a few TINY sneak peeks in the future! I'm super excited about this project and I can't wait to share it with you all!

As always thanks for stopping by and enjoy!

~Josh

From Concept to Creation

So as a result of working on Celestial, I have gotten really good at painting planets. Because we are now entering the final stages of production, our texture lead Ward Silverman (check out his site here) has been pumping out some planets with some KILLER textures. Because our film is so planet heavy, today I gave Ward a concept painting I did of a lava planet. I have to say it is really awesome seeing something you painted come to life right before your eyes. Rather than talk about how awesome of a job Ward did, I decided to use this blogpost to show you! I'm currently working on a visual development reel, so this is one of the pieces I will include.

This is the original concept painting I did.

 And this is the finished render of Ward's planet

As you can see Ward did a killer job!

Thanks for stopping by and make sure you check out Ward's site!

Enjoy!

~Josh

Disney Princess Wonder Woman - Piece Breakdown

So earlier this month, my good friend Ward Silverman told me about this auction a local comic shop was doing to raise money for charity. The theme of the auction was Wonder Woman and since I am a MASSIVE DC fan, I decided that I had to participate. I'm pretty pleased with how this piece turned out considering I lined it! Now in the past I've mentioned my dislike of line art and how I finally found a way involving the line tool in photoshop Since that post I've used that method a few times, most recently in this piece, however the one thing I haven't really liked about it is that it doesn't feel natural. With line art, I want to imitate the looseness of my initial sketch and I felt like with the pen tool, I wasn't able to accomplish that. However I recently found this tutorial which covered a way of lining that I had never tried before, and I must say I'm pretty proud of the result! Alright now that I've rambled on about line art, let's jump into the piece breakdown!

So the very first thing I did for this piece was to sketch out the post I wanted. I found some reference pictures online of Wonder Woman in poses and decided that the one I sketched out was the one I liked best.

After I finished the sketch, the next step was the long process of lining the piece. As I was lining this piece, I realized that the face I had was a bit too masculine and that the eyes weren't quite "Disney" enough, so I completely redid those.

The next step was to throw in some color. For this part of the process I just went with the flat base colors I wanted to use, as later I would add dimension with shading.

Now that the piece had color, it really started to come to life! I added shadows using my custom airbrush and used a method of picking color that my good friend Amanda Bell taught my last year.

At this point, I was really happy with the piece as it was all starting to come together.  Throwing in the highlights though, really did the trick.

The final step was to add in a background! I actually lied, because I made this background early on in the process, but I wasn't committed to it until the piece was done. All that was left was to throw in the Wonder Woman logo and to recreate the Wonder Woman title from the comics in a Disney-esque font!

The auction is on December 13th and the deadline to submit art is November 30th, so I hope that I can get this printed, mounted, and turned in on time. I really had fun with this piece as it let me get into my own art style a bit more. Now that I feel a bit more confident with my line art, hopefully I'll have more pieces like this soon. Also over Winter Break I plan on working a lot traditionally to hone my drawing skills, so expect those blog posts to be full of sketches!

As always thanks for reading and enjoy!

~Josh

Creature Concept Challenge!

So before  I get started with this blog post, I'm happy to say that I was recently appointed Editor and one of the Animation Leads on our short film, Celestial! This was very exciting news for me, as these were the two positions I wanted the most. On top of that I also managed to get a job as a Student Representative for Adobe! So expect some great things coming soon!

Ok now back to your previously scheduled blogpost! So the other day in class, as I was waiting for the new scenes to be uploaded for me to edit, my friend Ward was working on UVing one of our models. UVing is basically where you take your 3D model and unfold it so you can paint the textures on it. I happened to look over at his computer and saw that one of his UVs looked like it could be some sort of creature. I decided that it would be a fun idea to try and come up with a creature concept based off of it. I've wanted to do creature concepts ever since I read "The Wildlife of Star Wars: A Field Guide".

Heres what the UVs looked like:

To me it kind of looked like it could be some sort of fish. I had recently watched an episode of the show Face Off where they had to come up with an underground creature design, so I decided to make this fish something from the bottom of the ocean. The large part at the front reminded me of the Angler Fish from Finding Nemo. In addition to that, the body reminded me of a Shark, and the head of a Beluga Whale. With that in mind I began to paint! Now normally when I paint, I sketch out a drawing first, and then paint over. However, after sitting next to Ward the past few weeks, I was inspired to do a piece where I just painted, no sketching whatsoever. Ward is a KILLER digital painter (and our texture lead!) so do yourself a favor and check out his work here!

The first thing I did was pick my palette. I decided to go with a dark red for the body with some oranges as well. I also chose to use a charcoal color, but decided to not use it in the end. From there all that was left was to paint. It took me a few good tries before I finally found myself painting something I liked. I did all of the painting on a single layer, with the only exceptions being the scales and the glowing veins. I really enjoyed this concept and plan on doing more like it soon!

As always enjoy!

~Josh