Creative camaraderie

One of the things I miss most about working in an office was the camaraderie that acomes from being around a group of like-minded people.  It’s one of the few advantages that working in a single location has over remote working, which I’ve been doing for the past 2 years or so.  Online forums are a great way of recapturing that energy, and I’ve come to love one forum in particular for my artistic learning and output: gameartisans.  This particular forum hits the sweet spot between effing useless (ie deviantart) and overwhelming (conceptart.org and cgsociety).  It’s a happy balance where I can meet people with a mostly similar (mostly better, some worse) skill level as me, and we can help each other get better by doing honest critiques of our work.

I’d forgotten how much fun that can be, having been dragged down by a lot of work /financial related issues and being too frightened to participate in the recently concluded Dominance War.  But I logged onto gameartisans again recently and noticed they had a new comic con contest up.  It’s just a little less daunting than the Dominance War and there’s a only a little over a month to get my entry in, but it’s the camaraderie and learning process that I’m craving for so I’ll give it a shot. As “real” (aka not the movie version) transformers fans might recognize, Rodimus Prime.  The same Rodimus Prime that my girlfriend gave me a Revoltech action figure of.  More updates on this as I finalize it, but for now I’m just enjoying drawing the random bits and pieces and familiarizing myself with robot anatomy.

Town building

Thought it might be interesting to show a background in the making.  I’d gotten tired of doing interiors and more close up esteriors so to make things interesting I chose a really long view for this town scene.  It’ll take a lot more effort, but it’s a lot more fun to work with, especially if I convince myself that I’m a real Victorian town planner (note to self: possible game idea? ).  Based on some reference material I decided on having the farmland in the background, the town in the middle, and the path leading to the town in the extreme foreground.

I was initially overwhelmed by how to lay out the town since I’m no good at the “drawing stuff randomly till something comes of it” school of art.  My mind’s scatterbrained enough already, so I need discipline, a guideline, to steer my art in the right direction.  I took a look at some layouts for old medieval towns for inspiration and found that it made more sense to me when towns were divided up into blocks.  Once I decided on breaking up the town into separate blocks everything started falling into place.  The chapel was at the center, and I laid out plans for parks here and there, and sections for shops as well (though they’re not labeled here you can see them next to the park in the center).

Granted, if I were a real Victorian town planner I’d probably have been fired because I laid out the blocks willy-nilly, but I guess the moral of the story is when you have a seemingly insurmountable problem, just break the problem up into sections and you’ll have a much easier time.

Robot Renaissance

Busted out another quick piece today to jar me out of my creative stupor.  You can only draw so many Victorian parlours and tea sets and countrysides I suppose.  Continuing the robotic streak I began last week, another humanoid robot, this stime sporting some strange Renaissance gear.  I think this was based on my reading up on the life and times of Nostradamus, who lived during that time period.  I’ve always found it interesting to think about what future technology would look like if you applied the design philosophies of the past to them,and this is a quick way to scratch that itch.  Fancied it up with some graphic designy stuff just to make it a little more presentable.

15 minute robot sketch

Got inspired by this dude to do a quick sketch.  Too much victorian housing lately, so it’s fun to bust out on a robot that’s quite obviously got some anatomical issues.