Bekah's Design, Art and Animation

Week 10, Concept Art Finals

bekstersdesign — Wed, 12 May 2010 10:06:16 +0000

This project went through several stages before reaching the finals that I have here. Although the project was always going to be based on the book Ecstasia, originally I had intended to do four digitally painted portraits of the four main characters. The project then evolved into concept art for the book, as well as the portraits. I focused on four key settings from the book – because I’d never digitally painted before, these took up the bulk of my time and effort; I still wanted to put faces to the characters, so I made sure to at least get some basic lines and colours down. I’m really satisfied with how the settings turned out. I only wish that I’d managed my time better and gotten to do more of them, and more of the characters.

Clicking on the images will bring you to a bigger, more detailed version.

The main streets of Elysia:

The loft in Elysia:

An alley Underground:

I also converted black and white versions of these images to simply show value, and messed with the areas of contrast.

There was one more scene I would have liked to do, but unfortunately, I didn’t quite get to it. I couldn’t decide which scene to flesh out, so I made some sketches of different viewpoints. Tom helped me to rearrange some things and make them more visually interesting:

And the portraits:

Calliope:

Paul:

Rafe:

Dionisio:

production, penultimate week

bekstersdesign — Wed, 05 May 2010 03:51:47 +0000

This is a snippet of what I’ll be working on in the class work session tomorrow:

I really, really need to push the value, contrast and lighting to make these scenes really pop. It’s going to be a LOT of work this week, but I’m confident that I can polish off four well constructed pieces by the end.

I also put some base colours on the portraits, so that they would at least be more than line drawings:

Crunch time.

in between updates

bekstersdesign — Mon, 03 May 2010 04:27:38 +0000

Here are some updates I’ve made to my existing scenes:

Fixing the perspective:

Final Fixed persective:

Sketch Variety:

production week four

bekstersdesign — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:46:47 +0000

Tom was absolutely right; my color choices for the last drawings weren’t really appropriate. I really just wanted to get some value in there, and used the brown instead of black, but it didn’t make sense visually.

This week I tried to get in some more sensible colors. Hopefully these make more sense, and stay true to the source material. I also posted quotes with them.

Two of them are from above ground (Elysia) and two are underground (Under).

Elysia:

“This city is like the colors when rainwater mixes with oil in gutters. Abalone iridescence shining on the surface of the dark.” ~~ “The carnival yard was almost deserted now, but the Ferris wheel revolved, casting light like a planet for a sky that offered only darkness and toxic drizzle.”

“Huge oval mirrors in frames of silver roses reflected the tapestry cushions and the urns holding bright candy, thick chalky sticks of burning incense or transparent silk blossoms.”

(I tried to make the colors more indicative of an electric, smoggy city.)

Under:

“Until he saw the first real color down here — the painful red neon of the letters. ‘UNDER,’ buzzed the sign.”
(I tried to make the sign look like it was glowing, here)

“The only sound had been that foul-smelling water lapping, whispering, but as they neared another shore where some ancient subway cars stood decaying, Rafe heard something else.”

As the blog mentioned, I’m kind of panicking at this point. I’m really unhappy with how far along I am at this point, compared to where I should be. I will most likely be stopping in on Wednesday morning to talk to Tom. Thanks for the feedback!

production, week three

bekstersdesign — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 05:47:48 +0000

Background drawings:

Some of the backgrounds were very zoomed out, so I wasn’t able to get specific details of characters in: instead, I implied characters.

Can’t wait to paint them.

production, week two

bekstersdesign — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 05:35:51 +0000

Here are the sketches I did for the full body views of the characters: (my apologies for the poor scan…)

Since I have problems with backgrounds, I went to the CCAD library this week and checked out a lot of reference pictures for interior and exteriors. I’m hoping this will help me in getting perspective and detail correct so that within the next few days I can have several well developed backgrounds for the characters.

Here is the image I will be working on for Julie’s workshop tomorrow:

end of judge week/production week #1

bekstersdesign — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 02:56:19 +0000

What I’m currently working on:

Here are the final base drawings for my four digitally painted portraits [click for bigger versions]:

I’m loosely following this tutorial, in that I’m making a rough sketch, putting in the colours, laying in light/value and then detail. Right now I have the finalized drawing… I was planning to lay down the base colours this week but got really, unpleasantly sick this weekend and didn’t quite get the chance.

Over the next five weeks I will be colouring and rendering these four portraits as well as polishing up the corresponding landscape concept sketches so that they can be presented together to form a coherent whole; a general idea of Ecstasia.

I talked to Tom at the end of class last week and he said to move on with the production stage, but if judge posts are still needed from me, i’ll be more than happy to get the questions/feedback up.

designer post, week #5

bekstersdesign — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 06:01:23 +0000

Official project proposal and description:

My final product will be a series of complete digital paintings of the four main characters of Ecstasia. Along with these, I will present model sheets for each of the characters, so that their full appearance will be conceptualized (clothing, posture, etc.), as the digital paintings will be primarily portraits. I also intend to have a few polished drawings of settings in the book. The goal is that once all of these elements are grouped together, a real feeling of the theme and tone of Ecstasia will shine through for the audience and hopefully inspire them to investigate the book further.

I’m very interested in the idea of concept art still, but really decided to focus more on the characters than the locations (by making the character portraits the more developed, digital paintings), as the characters are the true heart of the book.

Time to get working!

designer post 1, week #4

bekstersdesign — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:10:54 +0000

This week I did some brief exercises in photoshop to try and test my tablet and how it works with digital painting. I got used to the movements and hotkeys, etc. I mostly followed the tutorial examples and worked with how to get the desired effect:

I also set a colour palette:

Still need to finalize landscape sketches/model sheets so that I can soon begin the paintings.

ecstasia project, week #3

bekstersdesign — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:57:29 +0000

According to the schedule, we weren’t required to post this week, but I wanted to jot down my progress anyway:

Last Wednesday was my one-on-one meeting with Tom and I found it extremely helpful. We discussed the fact that what I am doing is essentially concept art for the book Ecstasia. He gave me some really great recommendations of concept artists and I spent some time this week researching and looking at different types of concept art. (Fun fact: there are several concept artists coming to do a ‘visiting artists’ seminar at CCAD on April 1… I have class during the scheduled time, but I may ask my professor if I can check it out!)

Here are some of the artists I looked at:

I did a couple of location/scene sketches for “Under”

But I’m having a hard time making the sketches for Elysia, the city. Everything I draw seems to come out wrong and doesn’t feel right to me. Elysia is so layered and rich and gaudy… I’m having a rough time condensing this into sketches. I’ll keep working on it.

Need to finalize character outfits and poses as well.

**Also: I checked out the author’s website. There wasn’t really anything in the contact section, but she does have a blog and a facebook… I would feel a little odd contacting her through facebook (it seems a little unprofessional to me), but I will still see if there is some way to ask the author a few questions/start a dialogue.**