a couple weeks ago when hamza was crashing my place i showed him some personal stuff on thing that i was working on. he suggested that it would be pretty cool to share it with you dtoiders, so i'm doing just that.

in my short 23 years on this planet, i've worked in a lot of different mediums as an artist. my body of work can be divided into digital and non digital; my most prominent work that people know me for of course, is my digital work. my body of digital work can again generally be divided into 2d and 3d. a majority of my 3d work is actual work work (with an exception to reference models created for my 2d work), thus i can't talk about it, but my 2d work is almost entirely all personal work that i do for fun and that's the creative process i'll be sharing with ya'll today.

i've only been doing 3d work for probably 4 years now. before that, i had been learning how to paint in photoshop for about 3 years, and before that, i was entirely traditional. the time i've spent in serious training as an artist now is about 11 years (i started taking art seriously when i was 12). what's fascinating about art to me, it that one skills set required to do specific craft is entirely transferable to another craft. skills sets from different crafts can also be mixed, which is something i started doing in the last 2 years with 2d and 3d.

all 2d
here's a painting from almost 5 years ago.


i was a freshman in college at the time, i did it as a photoshop painting demo for some high school students, thus i actually have a saved progression of progress. unfortunately, this is my only piece that i'm able to show progression from beginning to end because unlike alot of other artists, i work in one file and i generally don't use more then 3 layers at the most. this partially because i find multiple files a waste of hard drive space and partially because it's a habit from traditional canvas painting that I could never really break. (cause you know, you can't save multiple canvases....)

although this is from 5 years ago, this is more or less the same method i use today, for pieces such as colette's painting (see side bar; i'm now wishing i had a saved progression of that painting to share with ya'll) that are 2D. the main differences now are that I work in Corel Painter for the painting and only do color correction in photoshop, and I'm better at painting now then I was then (although I think I was much better at drawing back then).

integrating 3d techniques into 2d paintings
something i started experimenting with in the last 2 years is modelling assets 3d as reference for painting in 2d. at first, and still a majority of the time, this is only just laying out primitive cubes and spheres for perpective reference. i view 3d as mainly a time saving process, and usually avoid using it in 2d work if it's going to take more time. I first got this idea from sitting at a Midway presentation where they share some concept art from one of their games, and some of the really simple but useful 3d models that were quickly laid out to aid in the painting process. in todays market where speed is very important, this is definitely a very useful technique when used wisely. Although a common problem while using this technique is that the end piece may look more 3d then 2d (thus loosing the emotive quality of painting), a skill artist can generally pull it off pretty well, especially if his original background was painting.

things to note about implementing 3d into 2d.
-great for experimenting with composition/camera angles
-when assets at done, things are easily tweaked
-asset creation can take a lot of time, and isn't worth it all the time
-you have really good structural knowledge of what your making because this is more like sculpture then painting. in painting, you deal more with form. in sculpture, you deal more with space. This is especially important if your modeling things like vehicles or characters, which are generally very advanced things to model.

occasionally, i may flesh out a model in a little more detail if
1) i can do it quickly
or
2) i'm going to be reusing it for multiple works.

usually, these more fleshed out models are really shitty models in terms of quality, but they give me more then enough to paint off of.

you may recognize this one:

from hamza'a painting. this was 25 minute speed model that probably saved me about 2 hours drawing it out manually.

or this one:

which I used multiple times in the dtoid comic. about 30 minutes.

Occasionally, I will invest the time to do a really high quality model if I feel it's worth the time. This is the case with my train models, which are used it alot of current/future works:


these are probably 50 hour models each (so about 200 hours total for 2 styles of engine and cabin cars)

and a painted over:


This was also a the case with Rio McCarthy's painting. However, in this case, it wasn't a time saver at all. I just felt like modelling something in 3D. I probably won't go through this much trouble again =P



I actually spent 50 hours modelling the scene and only 15 painting

When using 3D as a ground work for 2D painting I generally prepare the images in 2 ways.

If rendering time is a waste, I just screen cap the wire frame and paint over that. However, if doing a couple renders may help me work out some of the forms (good for complicated models) I generally output the 2 following renders:

a default lit gray scale render. this usually only takes a few minutes

an ambient occlusion pass. this usually takes about 2+ hours.

and something new that I tried for this very first time on this painting, a surface shaded color pass. Almost every time I do a piece of art, I try to do something I've never done before. This was the something I've never done before for this painting.


These renders are then comped in photoshop or shake. I then drop the opacity of the image down to about 10-20 percent, import it into painter and just start painting over it. During this process I spend alot of time paint backwards or upside down. this helps me spot errors, and is one of the things I like most about digital painting that you can't do with traditional.


and this is the final result at 75% scale (the image uploader resized my shit).

So there you have it. That's a little inside look at how I create some of my artwork. hope that wasn't too boring.