Professional Blog

In the industry on games it’s either your show reel or you portfolio that will land you that job or position. I have started another(hopefully more professional) blog under the address stephencusdin.com. I need to change some layouts etc and generally draw more and put more stuff up, ideally at the end of the year I want a balanced portfolio of really nice imagery as well as a section for sketches and more practice work. The layout needs work in terms of getting to a full size mage as well, one thing I read recently from Noah Bradley was that artists who have complicated to navigate imagery often get over seen due to the senior person not having time to waster checking it out. His advice was to have large displays of your work with easy access to them. At current it takes me 3 clicks to get any image full size, ideally I would like that to be 1 click. Back to work!

Conceptart.org

http://conceptart.org/forums/forum.php?s=dc2d18bd929e7815363733c465ba28cf

Conceptart.org is a website and community of collective artists specialising in all sorts ranging from professions to out right beginners. This site as well as having a few tutorials and help has the ability to add sketchbooks, this allows the artist to get their work out there and have a good standard of critical analysis.(providing it is updated regularly).

This website has a wide array of media ranging from unfinished 2D sketches to fully rendered 3D animations, this allows you to get feedback and sometimes work alongside people in any stage of the process of design to finished project. There are also live briefs that I need to get involved with as well as start my own sketchbook which is in the making! I’ll update this with a post when I created my sketchbook and also hopefully talk about some of the feedback I get given and where I would g to progress.

Some Sketchbooks that have caught my eye and are what I think around the same level as me (or in range).

http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?249215-Theonlay-s-sketchbook – This artist has good rendering of clothes and faces and uses form well but sufferes from the same problem as me, stiff characters and imagery. I will progress with poses and forms in the future as well.

http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?223942-Rev-needs-to-draw-more-Posting-daily! – This sketchbook is good at poses and shows his references etc which is what I need to do, REFERENCE and use REFERENCES!

The Gnomon Workshop

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/

As part of a PPP brief I have decided to look at the online communities for someone looking at digital art and in particular concept art. This website is a bit different to my other choices due to it being a website that specialises in 3D material as well as traditional drawing and using Photoshop, this website gathers all the different mediums of creating illustrations and concept art. Many artists use 3D elements in their paintings to gather the right perspective or simply block out shapes, others actually model and texture the whole design and so I shouldn’t just focus on the photoshop/painting stuff but also how to light 3D models and modelling as well as they both link to getting proportions and form right.

What I get from Gnomon Workshops as an artist is a variety of tutorials spanning from modelling to rigging to texturing to painting. There is also a community for work feedback and as usually the process of concept art is t then go to the modellers, who better to critique your work. I did state above that this is primarily a 3D online area however they do have a small section of tutorials on Matte paintings and also a small collection of Photoshop tutorial. The biggest downside for this website as a student however is the price of the tutorials and subscriptions as they can be quite pricey.

From a personal opinion I find one other downside of the site is that it is very centered towards the realism aspect of design and less characterised. I am not going to say less stylistic because after BAF my opinion of style in a game is completely different. Realism is a style in its own but again I feel it lacks that kind of meaning.