The War of the Worlds

It's a bank holiday weekend! A lot of my friends were heading out to get drunk, but not me. No, sir! I spent the weekend with my face in Photoshop (again). I like to spend my free time as a Digital Artist ;) So for me it was Digital Art weekend!!

Often when I sit up Photoshopping through the night I end up listening to Jeff Waynes - The War of the Worlds. So, I wanted to design a photo illustration as my own piece of fan art. Here's the outcome :)

The designs of the tripods came from a different photo illustration that I completed a couple of years ago. Originally the characters were called Roborgs. They're an inquisitive martian race who are wandering our planet and researching. But for this weekends artwork I turned them into the violent martians from the War of the Worlds.

Here's the process shots.

01: Take photo of Thames river. Try to place recognisable, iconic landmark in the background.

02: Generate HDR of photograph and push contrast/saturation levels to create a more illustrated feel.

03: Sketch loose ideas onto the photo. Work out best character placings to create a comfortable composition.

04: Remove photo and begin illustrating and finalising the design of the character. 

05: Continue the same process for the remaining characters.

06: Complete the first layer of colouring. Select colours that complement the original photo.

07: Second layer of colouring is to add colour gradients, creating a sense of weight and dimension to the characters.

08: Composite the illustration with the photograph by adding shadows where the characters come in contact with the objects in the photo and adding the same grimy textures to the characters. 

09: Add natural light to the illustration and colour correct the entire image. I went for a slight sepia tone to give the image an aged look.

10: The complete image. Finer details have been incorporated into the image and typography used for the iconic title. 

This is Kitten

Another character illustration for my sticker project. For Kitten I wanted to push the detailing of my characters further than I have previously and aimed for a sexy, stylish hottie with plenty of attitude. I used to try and keep the simplicity of my characters down to quirky shapes and vibrant colours. This year I'm going to refine my colour palettes and spend more time on the finer details. I'm not really sure what a good amount of time is to complete a character like this. But, Kitten took me a day and a half to complete. 

Hopefully, once printed, she's going to *pop* from the urban environments she'll be stuck in :)

..and the process shots.

The Warrior Stance

I'm currently working on a series of characters for a sticker project. It's all about pushing my Photoshop style and getting back in the character illustration game. There's a lot of great graffiti and street art around east London. This year I'm aiming to carve my place in the scene!

..and a set of progress images.

Some Kawaii love

Hello All! Man, have I had a bizarre year! So, this year started with me getting made redundant, my lung collapsing and REALLY living the starving artist lifestyle. Since then I have started a brilliant new job that I love and relocated to London. My whole life has flip-turned upside-down. My day job is now as an Augmented Reality designer for a company called Blippar (you can see what we do here). It feels great to finally have a job that is not only using the art skills I have learned, but also pushing them daily.

Anyway..

Now I've moved city and job, and settled into both, I decided it was time to get back on to the digital art scene. So, yesterday I did a 10 hour marathon in Photoshop. I wanted to push my style, as always, and produce something a bit sexy for y'all. I exported process images at each stage. Hope you like her :)

Much love (and I'll try uploading more often now) x

Collaboration time..

While browsing Facebook I found a mobile phone upload. It was a beautiful sketch of a girl with large flowing hair. I contacted the artist and asked if I could go digital with it. She replied with a friendly "yes." and off I went..

*note: I found the tattoo design on google images. If it is your's then please get in touch and I will credit you :)

Raziel - Soul Reaver

Due to an un-announced collapsed lung, I have had some free time these past few days. I saw this as a good opportunity to get my head in Photoshop and practise my digital arts. 


As a lot of you know, I'm a video game nerd. I have been since I was a tiddler. My all-time favourite video game character being Raziel from the Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver series. I decided, now my skills are good enough to do him justice, that I would create some fan art with the aim of creating a well-known character and injecting it with my own style of art. 


Raziel: The Soul Reaver..

I started with a simple sketch. I used a reference image from the net.
I tried to keep my sketch loose so that I could re-shape the design in this next step. This is the stage that allows me to form Raziel in my own style. I wanted to keep the big low-poly look hair from the game, but make it more trendy. I also wanted to emphasise the claws on his hands and feet. I gave it a sprinkle of artistic licence.

Now that the block colours and base image were in place I was able to zoom in on the design and start adding the details and shadows. This is a painstakingly long process, but really makes the image pop from the page. This stage pulls the image from flat, to giving the impression of form and weight. 

The image was coming along nicely. But, I still felt that it was a bit too flat and I had some detail elements missing. In my mind the light was coming from the front/right. So, to accompany the shadows, I added some highlights to Raziel. Again reinforcing the suggestion of light. I finally finished drawing the spear-thing.

I thought I was done. Then, realised that I had completely forgotten Raziels wings. Here I changed his original design. Raziel has very torn wings, which look like large flaps of skin. But, I didn't want the wings to take any attention away from the figure. Again I used artistic license and changed his wings for a split cape. I decided to add the Reaver energy to his arm as well to give him the more iconic look. The textures were added in this stage to make him more stylish.  

Raziel was complete. But, a character on white would have been a bit boring. When adding a background I wanted to keep it minimal enough that Raziel was the focus and I wanted to keep it eerie like the game was. I went for a damp, foggy day and incorporated the tentacles in the background to suggest dark creatures in the wild. I used a tentacle as a nod to the strange creature (can't remember its name) that Raziel first met in the underworld. It was placed far right to keep the picture nicely weighted.

Terrors of the deep..

Please find my new work at
www.concretesoldiers.com
instagram.com/munkeekid

I was sat at home today after a photoshoot got cancelled. The last thing I wanted to do was waste the day. After all, I had booked it off from work. So, I took a little walk with my camera and got quite a nice shot down by the harbour. On returning home got the graphics tablet out and got busy on some digital art. I've always enjoyed drawing on photos. So, here's todays offering..

'The terrors of the deep'

Edit:
Second day off.. Second image..

Street Art

Digital Street Art. Urban angles. Composite structural integrity. Pin point perspectives. Pixel perfect graphics. Type/form. Fresh for two thousand twelve.. Progression.. evolution.. Forwards..

Pigeon Street

As I was looking through some older work I decided to redraw some and give them a twenty eleven gloss..

2010

2011

GAME Group plc.

UK Videogame retailer GAME have introduced student discount. No customers seemed to know about this, so I stepped in and suggested that eye catching artwork would make people aware of the discount. There's a possibility that you could find this artwork in a store near you very soon ;)


ps. The dude in the poster is Deputy Manager of the local store. 

Enter the disco..

Been a bit slow on the uploads lately as I'm working on some pretty cool ideas which I'm not ready to disclose.. Until then..