Further Research For Every concept

More Research

Hello guys,

Today I am going to show you further research for my major creature art project this term.  I have been finding it hard to enjoy drawing at this moment since I am not feeling inspired and happy while I am doing it as before.  I will have to push myself a bit just to get over this block since I have to finish this project and work on my personal ones. 

Red Pandas and Caracals

Red Pandas are usually found in the Asian side of the world and their favourite place to set in are the trees in temperature forests. They are are acrobatic and energetic animals and they use their furry long hair for balance and to cover themselves in winter to be warm.  50% of Red pandas habitat is in the Eastern Himalayas although there is only 10,000 of them in the world.  The reason I chose red pandas for inspiration is because of their furry body hair and unique black fur that is covering its lower body.  

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As you can see here, the orange coloured area covered on the map shows were red pandas are scattered around Asia.

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The name Caracal cat came from a Turkish word ''Karakulak'' meaning ''black ears''.  They were once trained by Iranians and Indians to hunt pray such as: birds.  People used to put them in arenas with a number of birds where wagers were made on how many they could take down.  Furthermore, the Caracal cat is wild and it can knock down 10-12 birds while in the air at one time.  They live in dry Savannah and woodland parts of sub-Saharan Africa.  You can find them distributed around Central, South and West Africa, Southwest Asia and the Middle East.  I mostly chose Caracal Cats because of their long ears with the bushy hair on each corner of their ears.

I have chosen these 2 animals as inspiration for my Cat-like creature were I mixed a couple of traits and appearance of these 2 unique animals and added some of my ideas into the creature to make it more vicious and dangerous!   

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 Mushrooms

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For my mushroom creature, I have looked at a number of mushrooms such as: Portobello, king oyster, button  and chestnut, shiitake mushrooms and Toadstools.  The reason I picked two different types of mushrooms (edible, poisonous) is because I wanted to have variety in the game where the edible mushroom is helpful for the player since he or she can jump on it and get to the location faster or jump to a mountain while the poisonous can harm the player if he or she jumps on it.

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Edit: I decided to make the mushroom creature a poisonous creature since I thought the idea of players jumping on them will be quite useless for the players so I made them creatures that will actually poison the players if the players annoy them or get near them although they can be clumsy.

Plants

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For my tree creature, I have looked at different kinds of flowers including: Fuchsias, Orchids, Angiosperm and Bromeliads since they looked the most scary for me especially the monkey faced orchid because I would not want approach them although they are not poisonous.  Another reason I chose these flowers is because some of them do not look like your ordinary flowers that you can look at daily which makes them unique.   

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Here, I found Opium flowers which can cause death since it has chemicals that suppress the nervous system.  It does not look dangerous which makes the human more likely to touch it or get near it. 

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Calla Lilly is another poisonous flower that looks beautiful yet dangerous which can make the human to approach it if not experienced with flowers.  This flowers can be useful to the design I am making since I can add them to the tree creature as a weapon.  This flower will cause skin irritation and a rash if a human comes into contact with it.

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Deep sea creatures

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For my sea creature, I have looked up the scariest deep sea creatures in the world such as:  the Fangtooth fish, Goblin shark, frilled shark and Barreleye since they look intimidating and wild except for the Barreleye.  These are all dangerous creatures that fortunately do not come to the surface of the sea people swim in.  The reason I chose to make a water creature is because I do not like to swim in the sea because of the living things in it (I am scared of them) which drove me to create it.

Learning Photoshop

Photoshop

Hello guys,

Today I am going to show you the painting practice that I did on Photoshop.  It was not easy at all and I was only learning the basics of colour blending and the basic options in it.  It took me a while to know how to blend and at first it was not working out properly and the colours did not mix.

At first, I was not able to blend colours properly since it was my first time trying to blend colours together as seen above.  The blue arrow represents where the light is coming from so that I can give the sphere shading and shine to give it a sphere-like shape.

Here as well as the first step, I used a normal brush to try to mix the colours together.  There was an improvement in my second time trying to mix the colours together since I lack the experience.  The reason there is an orange square to the right is because I might lose the colour, so I put it there so I can use it again. 

To make it easier for me, my friend taught me useful brush settings that I can use in this practice and the painting of my pieces.  He showed me how to play with the opacity and pressure of the brush.  Pen pressure is important since it allows me to play with the line work thickness (size of the brush)  and the way I paint since I can go from hollow to dark while opacity is important when shading since I can lower it and higher it whenever I want to shade.  Above are examples of how a brush with only pen pressure settings would look like, how a brush with only opacity settings would look like and lastly, how the brush will look like if they are mixed together.

After using the first technique, my friend introduced me to a new brush setting called the ''mixer brush'' which can be found if you right click the brush on the bar to the left where you can choose it as seen above it is the brush that is selected (it has a droplet above it).  

To use the brush, I started by making black dark circles as the base of the sphere.

As seen here in the layer panel, the layer selected is where I actually added solid colours and mixed them together using the mixer brush.  The layer selected looks unusual since it has an arrow on it.  This arrow is made to make it easier to colour the spheres since no matter where you colour the colours do not go out of the black spheres which was really useful to me.  To make do this, make a new layer above the layer you want to colour on then hover over the new layer using your mouse and press ALT on the keyboard and left click on the mouse and it will activate.

Here are the results of what I did using the mixed brush, and I can say it is my favourite brush to use since I am comfortable using it. Here I tried mixing 2 colours with each colour in every circle. As an example: the first circle consisted of dark and light blue.  To me, the results were great since it was my first day painting in Photoshop and I got better from the first time.

Here I tried challenging myself by trying a material study (Jello, bubble and metal).  I was really impressed with the results since I made the material look quite the same in the first to spheres!  Although I was happy with the last one it did not exactly look like the metal texture in the picture.  In this practice I used more than 2 hues to actually paint the materials since it was more complex than the first practice I did.

Link to the Material Study

Scale Research

Scale

Hello guys,

Today I am going to talk about something important towards my creature art project and it is SCALE.

Scale is really important when you want to create the creature since it shows the viewer how big or small the creature can look like towards a human being.

Kaiju

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Please press the image to see all the creatures

When you hear the word Kaiju, everybody thinks of one monster which is the most popular monster in the world Godzilla.  Kaiju is a Japanese film genre based on monsters like Godzilla and here are all of them in one picture next to the statue of liberty. As you can see here, the artist used the statue of liberty as a scale for the viewer to see how huge these monsters can be.  This is useful information since it showed me how scaling works. 

Total War Warhammer

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While I was researching about scaling I found the scaling for a popular game called Total War Warhammer.  The scaling shows a mythical beast called the Griffon and it is compared to a horse, human and a demi-griffon.  The first picture just shows the concept design of the griffon.  Although I will not be making the scaling of my creatures like this, it is still helpful for me to look at other types of scaling in the industry.  

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Here are some creature art concepts from the game.  I found those creatures interesting since they have armour on them which makes them look fierce.  Moreover, the second creature caught my eyes because it is a mixture of a lot of animals.  It has a tiger like body, dragon like wings and horns which is unique.  The reason I added these as research too because of how the artist drew the details of the creature's face and armour to give it more personality.

Creature Box Research

Creature Box

Hello guys,

Today I am going to talk to you about 2 creature artists under the pen name of creature box.  I found their artwork through a social media platform called Instagram and I was really fascinated in their work since they had extremely unique creatures.  After seeing them on Instagram, I searched them online and found out that they have a website where they showcase their work and the book that I am inspired by since it has countless designs of creatures because they have been making it for 5 years and they are still going.

I really like how the cover page of the book looks like because it looks simple yet appealing since as a reader myself I would love to see what is inside of it.  In my opinion, if I see this book in front of me, I would automatically open it.  

They inspire and make me motivated because of their book since it has been 5 years and they are still making this amazing book!

 

To start with, this is one of the pages of the book and it consists of different creature concepts with different colours and shapes.  What I like about their work is that every creature looks completely different than the other which shows creativity and uniqueness.  

My favourite creature is the orange one on the top right since I like his design.  What I like about his design is that his skin looks like its a hoodie because its covering his head like a hat.  Moreover, orange is my favourite colour because I like how it looks on characters and creatures.

These are more designs in the same book.  These creatures here look quite the same but has their own differences such as: the green creature has huge ears while the blue creature next to him has horns that look like a moustache and the third blue character has horns and 3 mouths.  These 3 are my favourite concepts and I can definitely get inspiration from them.

Slugterra 

Slugterra is a sci-fi  animation show aimed for kids.  It aired on Disney XD weekdays.  I find the creatures in this show really unique because of the colour usage and how they are painted.

I like how these creatures have a mini version of themselves and then they evolve from cute small creatures to huge intimidating creatures. My favourite out of the 2 is the second creature because of its colour usage.  I like how the purple colour blended with the neon green colour which makes the creature look better.  

Here I would like to talk about expressions.  I can get inspiration from Creature Box because they draw their creatures with expressions and other things: such as adding spikes..etc which shows the character of the creature and if it is wild or evil or harmless.

Here is a very useful creature concept by Creature Box.  It is useful for me since I can get inspiration from it because I am aiming to make a plant based creature and this creature has inspiration from flowers and plants.  What I like about this creature is how they replaced the head of the creature with a flower that has eyes.   

Website: http://creaturebox.com

Script Text Research//Final Show

Script Text Research

Hello guys,

While others researched different fonts, my mates and I added some research of posters that have script text on them to research different types of fonts.

Posters We have researched

Firstly, we have found an interesting classic Coca Cola drink advertisement.  What caught our eyes was the way it looked classic and how the cola logo looked like since it is script format.

We found an anime series poster called My Neighbour Totoro that had a script font on it.  I liked how it looked simple yet creative. 

This is quite a simple logo design for a cycling tournament.  As you can see here the text font used here is definitely script texted  which was the main reason we chose it but I think that it looks quite boring. 

Trying to create a UI for the website //Final show

Wire frame

Hello guys,

It is week 5 and we are currently continuing our website, last week we were asked to try and show some ideas of how the UI will look like in the future when we do and finish the website. 

Here is my try of finding out how the home page of our website is going to look like.  I chose a rather simple feel into the website because I think that it can preview our major projects without looking quite messy.

Looking at other websites for inspiration

Here I looked at a website known in the art industry called Art station.  It is basically a portfolio for many artists since they can preview their work and have job opportunities from it.  I like this website because it acts like a portfolio.

Those 2 websites are kind of simple looking as you can see.  What is great about the first one is that the artist used wix to make his website which can aid us in creating out website.  The other website included a show-reel of her work by having a slide show that can skip and pause pictures for the users to see.

Here is a website for a 3D modelling software painter called Quixel.  What I liked about this website is how you can scroll down endlessly to check out different information about it. I used all of these websites for inspiration and I think it is always a good idea to get research from more than one thing no matter what you are doing. 

Kekai Kotaki

Kekai Kotaki Research

Hello guys,

Kekai Kotaki has been one of my favourite artists since I started playing this specific MMORPG game called "Guild Wars 2".  I found his artwork because his concepts were always shown during the loading screen in game.  Moreover, I look up to this artist's concepts and work because of it's details and painting style and I adore him since he started from scratch and now he works with big companies like Arenanet and Bungie.

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In guild wars there are 5 races which are; Asura which are the small creatures wearing blue glasses, human, Norn (Basically humans but more huge and Viking like), Sylvari (plant humans) and Charr (Bull like creatures).  The player can choose one of the races then can go on and choose a class such as: Warrior, thief, mage....etc. then he or she can jump into the game and play the character they created.  Most MMORPGs are played like that but the difference since usually the gameplay, races and classes which I will talk about in a different blog.  The picture above shows all the races in Guild Wars 2 in different classes.

To start with, the most thing I adore in Kekai's artwork is how he paints his concepts in details yet he manages to give it a sketchy feel into it.  I chose these 2 specific concepts since they were one of the most appealing creature art concepts in his work for Guild Wars 2.  Although my project will not include background artwork for my creatures, I appreciate the quality kekai puts in his concepts since he does not draw on top of photos like other concept artists.

I can relate to these pieces since I am aiming to paint using a similar painting style to Kekai although it will not look the same because of the experience gap between me and him. 

These are another concepts that he did for the game.  I can benefit from these concepts and the ones above that too since my painting style is going to be inspired by Kekai's painting style since I love the sketchy yet detailed concept of his artwork and the colour usage of them.

Having plants as inspiration is useful too since I am aiming to create creatures out of plants so the first picture of the monster plant is useful for myself.  Another useful thing to look on to is concept art sketches like the second picture since it shows more than one idea in one page which is beneficial for developing a piece of artwork.  

The first picture shows more concepts done by Kekai and the one on the right is my favourite because I like how his body is hollow from the inside and fire is flowing inside of it.  The other picture is not a creature but an armour concept which made it into the game.  I added this armour concept into my research because it can be useful for me if I want to create armour for one of my creatures.

What I like about his artwork as well is his usage vast variety of colour hues in one concept art piece by making the colours saturated.  Making them saturated makes it aesthetically pleasing to the eyes although there are a lot of colours in the piece.

All of the artwork was taken from this site click here

Kekai Kotaki. 2017. Guild Wars 2 - Kekai Kotaki. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.kekaiart.com/guild-wars-2.html. [Accessed 08 May 2017].

Kekai Kotaki. 2017. About Me - Kekai Kotaki. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.kekaiart.com/about-me.html. [Accessed 08 May 2017].

Thinking about the my work

 I have looked at further research about red pandas and cats that I will show later in the blog. For my piece that is inspired by Kekai's artwork, I created a unique creature from a mixture between these 2 animals.  Please find the sketch of it below! 

As you can see here, I have managed to create a creature by merging a cat and a red panda together while adding my own tweaks into it to make it look more interesting and vicious.  I added a human scale on the right to show you the difference in size between the player's character and the creature. The creature is huge and wild.

I have faced anatomy difficulties throughout this piece but unfortunate I don't have anything to show since I erased the errors and forgot to take a picture of them.  I found drawing the body of the creature difficult at first since I did not have proper reference to it.  I think painting this creature will be more difficult since I never painted using Photoshop my whole life especially with Kekai's painting style.