SwiftThought Games

Tag: Art

Ah that post painting funk

Ok after a little breather It’s time to get back to working on things that are fun. Finishing a painting is both exhilarating and exhausting and I find myself having to take a couple days and recoup my creative energy or I’ll find the need to go back and fix, and tweak and tweak irrisistable. But taking a bit of time away lets me just be proud of what I’ve done and let it be.

After a couple days I had a little fun playing with skin rendering and trying to get a sense of translucency. One of the many attempts actually turned out to become this guy, which has a nice tone to it that I like.

Followed by a couple silly monsters following my son’s obsession with pokemon all of a sudden.

And then this thing.. .. this might become a thing.. it’s still rough, but it’s speaking to me. It started out as a perspective homework.. then became an epic skies homework.. and now it might be something else altogether..

On an art related note, I cracked some oil paints open for the first time in 7 years (it was a disaster then) and … holy cow…I’m loving them..

Something about the transparency and the need to go slow really just works for me.. maybe it’s because I’m getting older and not in as much of a hurry. Not sure exactly what it is, but I’m doing some test pieces and maybe finishing/reworking the initial disastrous attempt and who knows maybe they’ll be worthy of showing on the inter-tron some day.

July 2, 2015
Missed a few

Ok missed a few updates like updates 24-32.. they’re there, just not gotten around to posting them

However on sketch 32 this little guy popped out.

and then I decided he needed a chance to get a world to live in. And by 37 it was looking like this:

Then pulled in some rough textures and and blocked things in a bit more.

By update 40 the trees were looking flat and the overall color was beginning to be a bit washed out.

And that puts us here at update 41, time spent pushing back the stone some and final rendering of the character and more minor details.

Still need to touch up the bear, abird and pants, but we’re 99% there.

May 29, 2015
More Make-a-thing days end of m1

OK so i lost a few days to kids, illness and a mini-vacation to PAX South (which was awesome!)

But none the less, scribbles were made, but i’m having a hard time ‘finishing’ even these things. So I’ve been making myself to more and more thumbnails to just start being able to see the composition before starting on the actual drawing. And i feel that it’s been improving my sense of wholeness of each thing, if that makes any sense. That and watching The Hair lessons on the Magic Box there was a total ‘ah-ha’ moment, where talking about visual rest and the need to NOT render something felt like it clicked. ( see the goblin girl’s hair below)

But finally I’ve watched a bunch of other artist talks and one struck me as particularly poignant, essentailly you should be able to describe your painting in 5 values. Which I did below and a couple of them are fairly successful. Now I used the full range and the same 5 values across the board instead of selecting high key / low key values specific to each thumbnail which was probably a mistake, but I’m actually pretty happy with the graphic result.

Other misc thing a days, that were more of a mental check out rather than focused on actually learning something.

Ok Failing to grasp cloud structure was kinda fun.

Other than the overworked face and broken neck structure.. this was actually much nicer looking 45 min earlier.

February 5, 2015
More thing a day, week 2.

More art and stuff playing around. Trying to make a conscious effort to design shapes that works as a whole instead of just pieces that fit together.

January 17, 2015
Perspective forever

Took another pass at this, and made a binch of thums and eventually came up with perspective I liked.

Then I tossed into the perspective view maker http://drakkheim.com/perspective/grid.php?image=2a811acb319a27b462e6185e36aa491d.png&save=2 and saved out some guides.

Then a little bit of time blocking out some of the shapes and it’s something I’m beginning to think works.

But now it’s time for some holiday cheer so perhaps things will be a bit slow for a while.

December 17, 2014
Perspective Homework Beginnings

So the next homework assignment in the Magic Box is 3 point perspective and basic environment drawing.

Start off with a sketch.

And then go back and really nail down the perspective.

Which I’m in the process of doing …

Still have a long way to go.

December 5, 2014
Flying Golden Turtle Final

I think this is going to be it! Gonna sleep on it but I think this is where this journey ends for this piece. At least for tonight. Barring any last changes I’m looking to get this to a printer this week.

And here’s some details of some of my favorite parts of the painting.
The little path into the forest

The little church and houses on the hill

The turtle.. shell and belt buckle just make me happy.

And my favorite part might just be the little glistens on the water.

November 17, 2014
Almost there!!!

Getting really close to getting this beast under control.

Need one more pass on the mid ground trees and then maybe some more balance adjustments but I’ve stared at this for over a month now and it’s almost time to get it sent off to the presses.

November 15, 2014
A Rendering we go

Foreground just about done.

Mid ground mostly done maybe needs another pass.

Castle almost getting there.

November 12, 2014
New WIP

The doldrums of summer and start of a new school year is like a parasitic leech that sits on your forehead and drains motivation and inspiration right out of you.

But what do you do? You plow through it.

thumbnail / color rough for a new painting.

Pretty excited to see where / how this one goes.

September 30, 2014
TEXTURES…galore

okokok.. end of summer and life gets a litte crazy so it’s taken a long time to get this far.

I know I overdid it, but there’s not a whole lot of structure to work off of in the original.

So I had to pull in a bunch of other references to get something resembling a Victorian dress out of it.

September 1, 2014
Lady Gazelle paint.

Ok a couple weeks of quiet, but not unproductive.

So Month 2 of the awesome yet super challenging Magic Box digital painting course unlocked and the next step is to work on brush skills and economy of brush strokes. So pushing onward, I’ve started rendering out the Lady Gazelle color comp.

And here’s where I’m at.

And here’s the final color comp from month 1, all lasso tool and gradients.

And the original Master’s painting

Man was this hard.

I mean .. seriously hard. I’m a scribbler, and forcing myself to think about EVERY SINGLE STROKE, was at times, frustrating and enlightening on a profound level. But after watching the lesson videos and reading and just examining other peoples work, I’m beginning to ‘get’ it. I couldn’t have even come close to doing something like this 2 months ago, and I already see so many things regarding edges and just stroke economy that I’d never seen before.

June 21, 2014
Homework week 3

More progress on moving along to the color comps portion of the month 1 homework. Next week is looking like not much painting time so I’m going to crunch the rest of this week and see if I can get these guys done.

June 3, 2014
UI and update

UI! That’s right, with a little love I managed to get an in-game UI working for the basic play button (shop does nothing yet) I also got the fundamentals of the in-app options set up and much more, but it’s not really anything that you can see..

After that, I went back and did a minor re-factoring of some of the War Mages will have a few more changes being made this weekend for the beginning of the challenge/training levels. I hope to have that ready for publishing next week.

And finally, it’s been too long but it was beyond time to just play in photoshop for a bit. Granted it suffers from not having a reference and I really should re-work some parts, I’m pleased overall.

That’s it for this week’s update.

September 19, 2013
Reboot

Tough decision made. The original planned February game isn’t going to happen.

The Bad News

As I rapidly approached the mid-month mark I realized that I had actually made Anti-progress… I had started out with working off of the base Jan game and broken it to the point where it no longer had sound, and was actually unbeatable as that would crash it. And I hadn’t even finished adding a single new feature (other than preparing to get the Spine actors put into place)

Then to add insult to injury I found out about Impire, which comes out tomorrow. It looks an awful lot like what I want my game to be, except with a helluva larger budget, and that was pretty damn demotivating.

So I moped, and pondered and had a couple beers.

The Good News

At this point I started going back through my mental pile of old abandoned games to see if there was something that I can make work and turn into a game in 2 weeks. And by golly I didn’t have to go far. My original blog post, in fact. It’s time to do BombBots over again.. except in a fantasy theme this time, on a tablet, in 2d. Oh and finished, seeing as I never finished the Second Life version (LUA server implementation problems), or the Torque Version (TGB never solidified into what I needed). So the goal, is to turn it into a 2 player on 1 tablet/mobile device game. Who knows.. maybe it’ll work out and be fun.

So the awesome thing is that just being ok with trashing the original idea really got me re-invigorated again. So perhaps the Drakkheim games this year will just be all little experiments and then I’ll see what sticks before committing to some grand master plan and in the meanwhile I’ll have a chance to build up a good re-usable codebase and master all the tools I want to.

February 13, 2013