Board 8 > Art / Design / Creative Projects Topic 1 - Will we creative our ways to topic 2?

(+) Yeah! (+)

reupload (took like 5 tries; imgur's having trouble I guess)

https://imgur.com/ywpfLEJ

also I need to figure out a way to avoid the habit of comparing my art to everyone else's

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One thing that helps me if Im feeling dejected from comparing my art to others is to make a mental note of one detail on their piece that really stands and try to implement it in a sketch. Something like how the artist did the shading, the line technique, their form construction, etc.
Trying to osmosis a little bit out of the art thats beyond my current level and using them as examples to grow from can help take that edge of frustration away.

Another big thing can be to try to pay attention to your own progress instead of comparing yourself directly to other artists. Many people have put in tens of thousands of hours and everyone progresses at their own pace.

Also love the Sly, very solid form to him.

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Time for Thaumaturge


edit: definitely meant thousands not tens of thousands. That's a lot of time.


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I get very strong Borderlands vibes from your art style, it's really cool

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Thanks! Hoping to get to texture painting some low poly models in a similar style so might really invoke some Borderlands vibes then.

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so chronologically, the next character up for Playstation All-Stars is Kratos, which is the only character in the game I've actually drawn before! It was about 4 years ago, and looking back at it, at least I can confidently say my drawing abilities are better than they were



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Always fun to go back and look at older art and see how far you've come.

Archer time!


Had a second archer pose that I took fairly far that I might finish up or move onto another class.

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Draft copy of the deck arrived!
Gonna spend a day or two looking them over and see if I feel like making any design adjustments.



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man I'm really digging those

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PSAS #12 and #13



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Very cool, dig the symmetry you went with for the 2 of them. Kratos' face reminds me of something but I can't quite place it.

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Redid the colors and shading for the face card art / stickers.


Going to order 2 more draft decks, one with the full color art and one with the updated shading instead of the flat shading used on the first draft.


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man those are looking slick

I think the full color look great as stickers, but the updated shading looks really good on the cards

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PSAS #14



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I think that might be my favorite one yet, great job on the pose.

Does the Polygon Man meet the criteria to get included?

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xenosaga posted...

I think that might be my favorite one yet, great job on the pose.

Does the Polygon Man meet the criteria to get included?

Thanks! The pose was originally going to be much more uninspired; when I was sketching it, that hand was just going to be the right leg, with both arms raised, but when I zoomed out it just kinda felt like a crouched pose, so I reworked it to go with that

and he's not playable but I'm gonna draw him anyway. And if I'm not totally sick of the project by the time I'm done I might continue on drawing characters I expect to see in the sequel

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PSAS 15. Nariko (Heavenly Sword)



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Away purge!

Great job on the HW lady, whose name I definitely never knew until now.
Which character is up next?

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xenosaga posted...

Away purge!

Great job on the HW lady, whose name I definitely never knew until now.
Which character is up next?

Next is Nathan Drake, which I got started but I've got a busy week this week so I've been taking a break.

Got a basic outline done, but upon zooming out I realize he has... baby legs syndrome

https://imgur.com/VaDulN1

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Haha, gotta love/hate when that happens.
Being able to quickly rescale elements without having to completely redraw them is one of the things I'm loving about sketching digitally.

Hoping to find some time to start roughing out a new deck this weekend.

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PSAS #16: Nathan Drake (Uncharted)



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PSAS #17: Isaac Clarke (Dead Space)



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Looks awesome, getting through the remainder of the PSAS quickly!
Hyped up for that Dead Space reboot.

I'm kind of bouncing back and forth between planning out some new playing card designs and low poly modeling.
Not much to post on either front yet.

Using Illustrator for the cards to try to brush some rust off and I forgot just how much I loathe Illustrator. Most of it's probably due to being so used to Photoshop that the minor differences trip me up, but then there are things like not being able to use the Shapebuilder tool on a standard object with an asset placed from your library.

It's like they want you to use the library to break art into components but then when you use the library one of the most useful tools of Illustrator becomes useless. /vent /I also could just be missing something

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PSAS #18: Sackboy (LittleBigPlanet)



Normally I do these over at least two days (usually one for the lineart and 1-2 for the coloring and shading) but I did this one all in one sitting, partially because the character's design is so simple and partially because I was just having a lot of fun doing it. It was nice getting to finally take a break from all the edgy human characters of the PS3 generation and do something cartoony again.

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Always fun to go back to nice fun bold shapes after some more realistic art. Lets you feel like you can really let loose.

Ordered a deck with the full color carts, these are just the drafts pretty excited to see how the colors turn out on the actual cards.


Just now realizing I should probably change the W and E to Js on the Jacks...

Also started working on a horrific retro screen green version that I'll probably get one printed just to have, still need to get the colors right.


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ooh I bet the Kirby one will look good in that shade

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I think it'll end up the ugliest of the decks but probably my favorite!

Was going to grab a used DMG to try to make sure I get the shades right against the actual thing but holy shit are they expensive now. I think reference images will work well enough.

Retro pinball! The bakground texture on the right one shows up a bit better in person.


Trying out a few different options, I think I'll probably end up ordering a deck with 4 or 5 gradients and see what comes out best on the actual cards.

Thinking about having each set represent a system's screen (Green for DMG/Spade, dim gray for Pocket/Diamond, bright for Light/Clubs, limited colors for Color/Heart)
Not sure if I'll go with that or just go with the full green deck.

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either way they look nice!

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Thanks!
I think I decided to go with 2 more variant decks: 1 all DMG green and 1 Pocket-screen colored but also pocket sized cards!

Can't decide if I want to go small or absolutely tiny.


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Decided to go with the slightly larger size of the two.

Made a little deckbox for it modeled after the Pocket box:

That was pretty fun to design, need to get to the designs for the Color deckbox and the DMG deckbox next.

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Family photo!


And now I think I'm finally about done endlessly tinkering with this project.

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ooooh that all looks super nice

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Thanks! It took a bit longer than I would probably admit to get the composition down, haha.
Kept ending up with a jumbled mess and deck boxes acting like dominos.

I was planning on working on that next deck idea, but might be a little burnt out on cards at the moment.
I feel like I should get back to figure drawing so I don't lose my progress there, but low poly modeling sounds a tad more fun.


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Have you ever considered making your own card game?

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Yes!

Was working on one a few years back that played kind of like War, but with each person having 3 lanes and each lane having a front Attack position and a back Support. It had each player with 2 decks (one for support and one for attacks cards) and they would always draw to 3 of each in their hand.

Each battle only lasted a few minutes so each game would be like a series of matches.

I made mock up cards with a bunch of sketches from back when I was working on it, I'll have to see if I can find them.

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#19 and #20: Cole MacGrath and Evil Cole MacGrath (inFamous)



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I love how absolutely pleased good Cole looks, and is that a tooth glisten? Perfect!

Ended up doing one last deck that I think might end up my actual favorite. The idea for a Virtual Boy version popped into my head and couldn't pass that up.
Have a draft copy on the way, excited to see how the red on black turns out on the actual cards.


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xenosaga posted...

I love how absolutely pleased good Cole looks, and is that a tooth glisten? Perfect!

Lol, nice catch! Feel like I had to make him as much of a Mr. Perfect as possible to really drive in their differences

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and the virtual boy deck is sick

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Thanks, and I've managed to not make any new variations over the last few days! Working on some updates to the box designs though.

Found those old cards I made a few years back, might try to get to snapping some photos of those / attempt to remember the rules this weekend.

And in fun weird news: got a small side gig designing the UI for an album releasing on a game cartridge. Looking forward to working on that.

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PSAS #21: Radec (Killzone 2)



bonus points if anyone recognizes the pose I used for reference

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Oh, some really cool stuff these past couple of pages!

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That pose feels like it's familiar but I can't place it.

And I'm looking forward to more space skeleton robots! Almost ordered a few but managed to hold off.

Here are some of those cards from a few years ago, the art is a mixture of random sketches with no relation to what the cards do. Attack cards were vertical while Support cards were horizontal.


Might try to recall how it worked and get back to fleshing it out, could be fun to come up with actual themes and art for the cards.

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so for anyone that knows more about art than me:

I've been trying to work on finding my art style, particularly working on trying to have better lineart (in SAI it seems like the lines are always just a little shaky and unclean no matter how high of a stabilizer I use)

so tonight I saw a picture on Twitter that seems like the type of art style I could ideally go for, so I just thought I could try and recreate it, just using it as reference



really tried to focus on having as clean lines as possible but mine still don't feel clean enough, and I'm still struggling with proportions

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tried copying their color scheme and shading to get it as close to theirs as possible, just so I could notice differences more



aside from the obvious proportion things, it looks like I also went a lot thicker/darker with the outlines and a little darker on the shading. I really don't understand how artists get lineart that crisp but it definitely didn't turn out terrible.

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Great job with the lines, at first I thought it was the same image.
Lines are an area I've always kind of struggled with too, for a lot of my older stuff I would draw each one several times over to get some line variance and make things feel a bit more lively.

A few bits of helpful advice I got on them over the years:
-Break the entire drawing up into individual strokes so whenever you're inking a final line you know exactly where you're going to start and stop. This lets you really see if you got a line just how you wanted it and can easily undo and retry it a few times.
-Break up areas that have a lot of small detail with smoother sections for variation. Also using sharp corners opposite a straight line or smoother curve can create a very strong look.
-And the big one which you're already doing is try to find an artist that has lines you like and try to emulate their style.
Really try to see what about their lines stands out to you and nab some of those properties for your own style! I spent a whole lot of time looking at Jamie Helwett's Tarot art series: https://www.heavymetal.com/news/check-out-jamie-hewletts-spectacular-tarot-cards/ (so much so that I'm currently looking at one of the Death prints across from my desk!)


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Ooh I love Jamie hewletts work

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PSAS #22: Fat Princess



This might actually be my favorite so far

for fun, the WIP



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Johnbobb posted...

tried copying their color scheme and shading to get it as close to theirs as possible, just so I could notice differences more

aside from the obvious proportion things, it looks like I also went a lot thicker/darker with the outlines and a little darker on the shading. I really don't understand how artists get lineart that crisp but it definitely didn't turn out terrible.

The arms are shorter and thinner than the original, and the original's torso is smaller than yours.

That facial angle is tough to pull off - even if it's in a different style, for head proportions: where the top of the ears attach on the head is parallel with the horizontal middle of the eye, and the bottom of where the ear attaches to the head lines up with the bottom of where the nose is attached to the head. That looks different based on angles, though. :\

There's more fabric and it hangs equally in the front and back on the original. I like the way you recreated it, it's a good [and ANCIENT] way to learn.

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Haha, love the Fat Princess one.
Dude on the right reminds me of the Skyrim mc and the sketch version of the princess makes me think of something from Binding of Isaac.

Picked up a Cricut machine for cutting paper/stickers and while the hardware seems decent the software and company have me thinking of probably returning it.

The hardware is locked to the software which is basically a web site instead of a proper program.
On top of that it limits what you can do to such a degree that it's completely aggravating; you can't design/print if your internet is out, it defaults to importing images at 72 DPI so you have to manually scale everything you import, you can't adjust the size of the paper you're printing to (had to trick it with landscape mode on the printer to not waste huge amounts of sticker paper), has no preference memory so you need to tell it you want to print with system dialog every time, and on and on and on.

Also looking into the company they seem as awful as the software.
They had a change that they rolled back due to user backlash that basically made it so you had to have a premium subscription to use more than X images with it a month. That would be like a printer saying 'You printed 20 different images this month? Give us more money to use your hardware,' absolutely insane.
The wording of the rollback made it clear they plan on trying it again in the future.
</vent>

Was able to make a decent tuckbox after tricking the software to do what I wanted it to do though.


Thinking of looking into a silhouette cameo 4 instead.

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