25 Minute Speed Paint

Well, I wanted to practice freely without feeling too tied to what I've already done so I went and did this random painting. It'll look great hanging over my toilet.

Background Practice

Today I painted a background for this character paint I did a few days ago. I just get so anxious about
creating a complete piece and I usually struggle with backgrounds. Recorded myself painting and put it on my youtube channel. I liked the result, I feel a little better now!

1 Hour Speed Paint

Ow, my hand hurts. Lets hope I never get carpal tunnel. Trying to make up for the last painting failure. Limited myself to creating something in 1 hour and then walking away. This is what I came up with. I like it.

2 Hour Painting - Previsualization for 3d Portrait

UPDATE: I am now abandoning this stupid thing. Not happy with it. Not sure why. I painted the heck out of it and its just frustrated the junk out of me. Not sure what I was trying to accomplish or what I was going for anymore. Also, I apparently cant paint reflective surfaces at all.

UPDATE: One week later this is the newest version. I still wanted to make him appear more sci-fi-ish. He seems too plain still. I need to practice making for confident and bold changes to my work. Take risks.

Thats what I get for painting on my TV. Contrast and color problems! I hooked my pc up to my computer screens again and set up my workspace in my new apartment now. I revisited this portrait and made a lot of improvements. This was just meant to be something for fun to possibly make a life-like 3d rendering of in Maya later. I still want to just add a few more sci-fi-ish elements to it but I can't come up with anything other than glowing leds on his suit (which is over done).  Heres the updated image.

Ever since I built this new pc a few weeks ago, I've been wanting to push its abilities and make a photo realistic 3d portrait. I want to do something sci-fi-ish. Some kind of really high tech and really polished futuristic character with a neato future suit of some kind. This was what came out of my head when I sat down to draw it out. This turned out looking dirtier and more gloomy than I had intended. I think I'll do another rendition of it and pinpoint the look I was going for. It was supposed to appear clean with smooth surfaces and highly saturated lighting. Although, I like this painting for what it is.

Concept Art - Line Drawing Portfolio Piece

Update: Four more hours of work. It took me a while to find a rendering style that I liked to show the computer in action. I render out a fully lit hologram but it didnt match the style of the rest of the drawing so I redrew it and liked what I came up with.

Nearly finished.

The first rendition of the hologram.

I've been working on this simple concept drawing for weeks. The major challenge here was learning perspective. I know the basic rules but applying them to create an odd set of shapes like in this drawing was very difficult. Then I had to figure out how to draw circles and ellipses in Photoshop, which I never really was able to do. They NEVER come out looking natural.  I usually wind up with what looks like a ten year old crayon drawing. Its upsetting but I decided to just have Photoshop generate my circles for me instead and then I copy and pasted those parts. I definitely learned many lessons while working on this.  Its still a WIP. I need to do a few detailed window sketches of the tiny parts and then add basic value and color.

2 1/2 Hour Paint - Harrison Ford

 UPDATE: 2 More Hours of Adjustments

Definately not happy about this one. It took way too long and I didn't capture his appearance at all. :(  Why is this so hard to do?

If I keep doing these I should get better, isn't that how it works?

40 Minute Paint - Portrait Practice

This speed painting was done with the intent of working quickly without trying too hard to get everything perfect. Some minor proportion issues are noticeable when viewed next to the reference photo. For the most part, I'm pleased with the out come.

Minor Win with Perspective

Night two. One hour more of work.

Used a basic two point perspective unevenly spaced apart and got this in one hours time. I'm satisfied.

More Line Quality Practice/ Hard Edges

New Illustration

I've been working on this for the past few weeks. If there is one thing I learned from this piece it is that I need to expedite my process. I'm fairly happy with the outcome. I challenged myself with a tough angle on the scene. The knees had to be the largest feature while the hands had to be the smallest. It took alot of tweaking to get the right perspective.

The full size image.

Monday and Tuesday's Things - Animation and Mechanical Drawing

Over the weekend and Monday I learned a lot about animating in Maya and setting up a proper skeleton for animation.  I had a lot of issues figuring out how to bind a skeleton the right way, Maya fools you into thinking you've done it right by behaving as if nothing's wrong... most of the time.  Then it just does something random that makes no sense until you start from scratch.  Thats what I did.  And I learned that I have to go in and literally click on every joint before I hit the "Smooth Bind" button.

From there, I was able to successfully animate the looping sequence for the Batflower as it sways in the light breeze.  The pedals animated nicely and I tried making them resemble fabric blowing around in the wind.  The tough part was the draping buds that come from the center.  I had alot of trouble making them flop around freely.  I honestly sort of half assed that part because this is all going to be seen in what will eventually be a 5 second clip.  I'll just slow the animation down it doesn't seem quite as strong of a wind. 

I've moved on to another part of this little scene I'm building.  I've decided to make it a showcase map just to drop in some props I've made and do a few matinee sequences which I'll record and put into my new demo reel.  So, my next piece I'm working on for that scene is an alien computer terminal.  We made a rough version of it for Progeny during my last semester at SCAD but it was rushed and I was not happy enough with it to put it right into my new reel.  I've decided to redo the concept for it and really flesh it out so I can just jump into creating it without having to do a lot of thinking about it.  This is good practice since it is how professionals work.  Think, plan, and design in 2d.  Then just build it 3d. 

I suck at technical drawings of mechanical objects.  I suck at drawing in perspective.  I thought I knew how.  But I now realize the reason I always do characters is because they're so much more interesting than a bunch of straight lines (which are a pain the butt to draw straight with a tablet).  Its so awkward to draw within the constraints of perspective! I'm not happy about it so, I've been practicing perspective and watching all kinds of lessons on how to get it right.  They all say the same things.  I got it in my head.  But when I get to it in Photoshop, it just feels so un natural for me.  I'm used to making organic curvy shapes and rough textures.  Anyways, this is what I spent the day on.

Work in Progress Mechanical Drawing

I'm using different line weights because it helps the drawing read better.  Here is a video I've learned a lot from for this type of work.

Sketchbook Page and Lighting Study

Tonight, I did some touch ups on the drawings I'm thinking of uploading to my sketches on my portfolio.  I thought they needed stronger lines around the outlines and hard surfaces.  It was a good choice because I thought the outcome made the images look more professional and clean. Heres one of the pages...

I was studying a Caravaggio painting.  Hes one of my favorite old masters.  He tends to use dark backgrounds and his subjects are always lit by a strong spot light, giving them a bright vibrant appearance.  He always uses Earth tones for color.  I tried to mimic some of the effects he creates with this quick study.

Caravaggio Example

My Study

Not too bad for a 45 minute exercise.  But regardless, I think I've got the formula down for using his style.

Animation - Painting Weights and Web Site Update

Today, I spent a good 4 hours flipping through a stack of sketchbooks trying to find some decent new drawings to update my portfolio with.  It desperately needs some better work, especially in the sketches area.  I still have to create the thumbnails for the users to click on in the gallery section.  So that will happen soon.  www.christopherjleblanc.com

I have a second interview coming up at a local marketing company.  They need a graphic designer to help with banner ads, template layouts, and HTML website writing.  I'm excited and hope I can live up to what they expect from me.

I'm stuck and can't make any progress on my UDK scene.  I'm trying to animate a prop Bat-flower so it gently sways in the wind.  I'm at the stage where I've layed out the bone structure and am painting the weights.  I thought I knew how to do this but I can't get the weights to stay put the way I need them to.  When I paint one pedal on the flower, the other pedals also receive some of the influence and I can't stop that from happening.  Its stalled me from making progress on the scene and my new demo reel.  I tried locking the weights in and that doesn't help either.  I have no way of knowing where all the weight lies when working on a single region.

The scene thus far.

I also re-textured this prop from Progeny (senior year game project) which I made my senior year at SCAD.  It came out looking realistic and I'm quite happy with it.

I painted a robot figure for fun a few nights ago.  Spent two hours on it and wasn't really satisfied.  I was hoping to have color and and all the values set up and mostly rendered by the two hour mark.  I would at least like to have more contrast in values, general color, specular highlights in a 2 hour painting.  I'm still working too slow.

Thats all I've got for now.

Friday's Work

I started the day off thinking I was headed into work.  At the moment I work part time at Target.  Due to a ton of snow, I couldn't make it in and got to work on art instead.

At the moment, I'm quite overwhelmed with my workload.  There are so many projects that need to be finished and I have trouble focusing my efforts on one single project so as a result things never get completed.  I'm trying to change that so I'm concentrating on finishing the Batflower scene in UDK. Heres a speed paint/concept for the scene I did a day ago.

It seems like everytime I open up a texture, normal map, or UDK material, I go and try to make it look better.  I'm constantly revisiting files as I go along and try to make them better.  It feels like I make little progress.

Today's goal was: Create, texture, and set dress a cave environment in UDK.

What I did:
-Logged into cgtextures.com and downloaded a rock texture.

Photoshop- Took two dirt texture photos I took in Savannah and composited them, offset the image, and clone brushed it to make a tile-able texture.  I also created a tile-able texture for the rock.

UDK -Wasted time trying to find package files so all my props and textures loaded when I opened the cave map.  Imported the two textures, made materials for them, created TerrainMaterial nodes and configured them, created TerrainLayerSetup node and linked in the TerrainMaterials, created a Terrain and set up the tesselation levels, plugged in the TerrainLayerSetup node, deleted it and tried again since it didnt work, spent an hour trying to get the paint Terrain to work so I could paint in rocks or dirt where it was needed, UDK crashed.

-I gave up.  I think I remembered the right way to do it after it crashed which I will try tomorrow.

-During the day, I watched FZD school's YouTube channel. The instructor is a really talented painter and very informed about professional practices.  Great videos.

Yesterday, I watched took a snap shot from the new-ish Terminator movie and did a little color selecting exercise for myself.  I wanted to see if I could choose the right colors or get close enough to match the frame from the movie.  This is what I came up with.

 

I was pleased with the results.  I did cheat some since I outlined the major shapes.  My main concern was only to match the value and color with my eye, thats it..

Thats all for now.

A Place to Put Things

Welcome everyone!  I set up this blog to write and document the things I learn and create on a daily basis since Facebook didn't seem like an appropriate place for it.  Check back often!