MyWorld; Sab's Portfolio thread

Sab

Hey, I've lurked for a bit and have seen some great art on this forum. Most interesting to me is all the comic stuff which may be unsurprising considering what forum this is. But since I'm not an animator, a storyboarder, or the like it's fun to see something other than fully realized illustrations (not to say comics aren't in their own way fully realized.)

Anyway, my work is just a bit more traditional. I've been going to school for illustration for 4 years and am on my last year. I wanted to get into character design for games but I discovered I'm having fun doing environments so I may go that route. Really though I want to do illustrations for just about anything and everything, book covers, movies, whatever.

But enough about me, I'll let my work get a word in;

Environments

Obsidian Tundra


Proto Cave


Flier's Bane Canyon


Faux Book cover


Magma Beast



Tell me what you think, where you think I could improve or if you like what you see. I'm still experimenting a lot so any critique is helpful.

Aumni

Wow I really like the magma creature. Just need to creep that orange into the light. Your environments are really enjoyable.

I think that bookcover could use a kick of contrast, and then it would be friggin' nice.

Mustang

Nice, some of your perspectives feel a little wonky though.
Have you tried working with overlayed perspective lines? Might help shore them up a bit.

I think we need more enviro artists on here, so please keep posting.

Sab

Thanks! Perspective has always been tough for me, but I try to maintain believable perspective (even if it's not entirely accurate) as much as possible.

Though I do enjoy them immensely, I don't just do environments. Here's some character concepts






(Oh, I'm aware I misspelled marauder and there's a few proportion inconsistencies with the turn around. I actually fixed a bunch of things but I never uploaded the modified image >.<)

Kendeathwalker

your color is extremely chalky.

By chalky I mean dead- Muted- Dull- Lacking in saturation and vibrancy. It is compartmentalized and does not relate to the rest of the picture.

This is mainly due to your overuse of black in the shadows and tinting for your lights.

There is not much of a feeling of warm light vs cool shadow or vice versa. You have loose themes of warm and cool but then parts of the paintings are isolated and do not reflect those themes.

Because of this your pieces lack quite a lot in the mood department.

These are just my observations. I do not intend them to be offensive or demeaning. I feel the rest of your skill set is quite strong but your color is holding you back.

Your edge sensitivity is a bit weak as well.- (In terms of more traditional painting conventions where you are not using hard edge because it is a style choice. )

The last one with the magma creature and the knight .. There are quite a lot of hard edges in areas that draw attention and there is nothing going on. Specifically the areas on the top and side surrounding the creatures head. The peice is all about this creature opening its mouth and being intimidating.. so key down all of those edges and just activate the surrounding space with temperature shift and pattern arrangments be it value patterns or actual pattern.

Speaking of value -- some of your peices have nice overall groupings of lights and dark shapes while others are very broken up and haphazard. Are you doing value studies before executing?

Sab

Thanks, I appreciate it. Really just means I need to work ever harder. I've been focusing on rendering techniques for a while and just sort of hap-hazardly approached color based on what I know of color theory. But for some reason it's really hard for me to figure out which colors are warm and cool and etc in photoshop. I don't tend to have that problem when I'm using pastels or watercolor, something about the HSB slider just confuses the crap out of me even though it seems so simple.

Right now I'm working on doing 1hr long environment concepts just to practice composition, value, and color all at once. I think I'll start focusing on color a lot more though since it seems to be my weakest area.

I will say that my values are usually exactly how I want them but that doesn't mean I can't try something different.

I think I need to come up with a system for dealing with the HSB in PS that makes sense to me otherwise I'm just going to keep mistranslating traditional methods into digital.