Personal work

 Here is some of my personal work from over this year using techniques learnt in class-

Date completed - 27/10/2024

This is a piece of one of my characters that I used the referencing tip for, I have found that finding that curvature of the legs really helps me draw the shapes more accurately. I did neaten up some of my sketch but I only used the image on the left hand side as reference. I also used contrapposto  on the shoulders and hips to infer the movement of him looking over his shoulder. I do think I could have pushed the tilt of the head forward more to better match the reference however.

This is the piece finished, I am really happy with this piece and I found the referencing tip very helpful. I have stepped away from my usual style in some respects for this drawing, it has been something I have been working on in my own time to vary my shading art general art style techniques. I didnt use the airbrush tool [except for the blush on his face] and opted for a cell shading style, I like the harsher shadows and lighting in this and I think in some places it almost gives it a hazy and somewhat foggy atmosphere. This fits well with the setting as he is sitting inside of a cavern made of flesh. Background wise I think i should try to work with more organic shapes for this setting, which will help me practice different and varied shapes in perspective.

Date completed - 02/11/2024

This drawing is a lineless piece of one of my friend's pony characters, I like to make artwork for all of my dnd campaigns as a way to show some of the locations that my game visits, this location being the in universe version of the hoover dam. I also try to give each of my campaign artworks a different art style, for example the previous piece on this blow has a cell shaded and line art style and this one is solely lineless. I was very inspired by an artist called AstroEden who did the artwork for one of my favourite bands called Vylet pony, they have a somewhat lineless and very colourful art style.

Here is the final piece, i used the gradient tool for the water as well as flipping some of the background pieces to create reflections in the water, which i was very happy with. I think to improve this piece i could have moved the subject further right into the canvas just to frame them a little better and make the composition more pleasing to look at.

Date completed - 02/11/2024

Using the same method i was able to make two more drawings , i find this art style is very quick to make drawings with, the most time consuming part is mostly just the sketch layer. 

Date completed - 02/11/2024

Of the three drawings i made, this one is my favourite. I really like the lighting and background in this and i think the colours work well with the subjects in the foreground. To improve on this i might go in and neaten up some more of my shading just to help some of the shapes read a little better especially around the yellow horses back hooves.

Date completed - 08/11/2024

This is a drawing based on a screenshot i took from the opening for the anime Dan Da Dan, I really liked the composition and colours of this frame and i thought i would have a go at replicating it in my own style. I first made the sketch which was quite difficult to get the woman's [subject on the right] head to look right at this angle so that it looked like she is resting it on the mans shoulder so i did have to retry this several times. Once i was happy with the sketch and line art i coloured in my drawing in just the normal colours for these two characters.

Then i used three layers of red shading on the multiply blending mode for the shadows, then went in and coloured the non shadow areas in a green colour blending mode. Between the green on the skin and the red shadows i also added a transitional red colour just on the normal blending mode but low opacity, this adds a bit more vibrancy to the piece and was a detail i picked up on in the reference image. Then i just added a few lighter green highlights, the highlights in the eyes and then shifted my colours slightly using a gradient map. My final detail was to add the monitor like overlay which was just something i wanted to add due to the setting these characters belong to. Overall i think this drawing turned out quite well, i do think the woman's face is still a little off so i might have to have another look at how to draw characters from this angle.

Date completed - 27/11/2024

For this drawing I tried to use some of the tips we covered in the values lesson, throughout this piece i frequently switched between my colour view and a greyscale view to check how my values looked, and considered my light sources. The main light source in this piece is the big window behind the subjects, with the atmospheric lighting being the lamp and perhaps the small light from the incense on top of the cabinet. I also tried out a new rendering method for this piece, i tried to give it a more painterly feel by using the marker brush to make more textures and a smoother gradient between the colours. 

I haven't really tried this technique before so i think it is something i definitely need to work on, especially in the shadows and my overall colour pallet as something looks off to me but i can't quite tell what it is. I think the dark shadows make this piece look muddy in places, so perhaps choosing a different shading colour could help lessen this effect. But overall i am quite happy with this piece and i think i will try this method again.
 

Date completed - 24/12/2024

This drawing originally just started out as a sketch i did for fun, without really any direction or inspiration on how i wanted it to go, but in the end i actually ended up with a sketch that looked somewhat interesting and i thought would look cool as a finished product. I used some of my knowledge from the hand drawing exercises from earlier in the year and tried to play around with perspective and foreshortening to get a more interesting and dynamic composition, it took a bit of jigging around to get it to how i wanted it to look, but i did try to limit my overall use of the -

transform tool as i feel i do rely on it quite a bit. Something i did try out with this drawing was splitting the hand, head, body and back hand into separate layers and apply gaussian blurs to the foreground and background elements to draw the viewers attention more to the druid's face. As for the background i just re-used an old drawing i did from like a year ago and used the shading colour as my multiply layer colour on the druid so that it would blend better into the scene. I'm really happy with how this came out, i think it is quite visually interesting and the perspective isnt bad. Something thing i would change is maybe spending more time on the anatomy to make it more believable.

Date completed - 01/01/2025

Similar to what i did in the previous piece, this was more of an exercise to see how my knowledge of anatomy is with minimal reference. I tried to work somewhat gesturally at first to get the pose to look dynamic and figure out roughly where the limbs should go, i then blocked out the muscle groups and spent a bit of time refining the overall shape and pose details until i was happy with it. i wanted the character to be holding a gun on his back, this gun is the Pit multitool by Trevor Roberts, i just cropped the picture so that i would be able to draw on top of it. I do intend on making a 3D model of this in the future as i draw this character a lot and using my own 3D model would make it much easier to draw this prop from a range of different angles. After i was happy, i then drew in my lineart and coloured it in. Also like the previous piece, the background is a drawing i had done previously that i didn't really like by itself, i did the background around about two days prior and i generally just didn't like the style i had drawn it in, so i thought using it as a backdrop would mean i hadn't wasted my time.

Here is the final product, to say this was a relatively quick drawing [around 3-4 hours] i think it turned out quite well, I'm happy my background art got to be used for something and i think that the pose turned out quite well too. The shoes are a little large, though this is somewhat intentional as the uniform he is wearing has larger shoes in the canon of the universe so that the rangers do not slip on the fleshscape. Without this explanation this does look a little off, so i think in future i either need to really push this so it looks like an intentional design choice, or stick with a smaller look so that it doesnt look so out of place. I am also really happy with the hands, and as stated before i really feel like i have improved my understanding of hands as i have been practicing them more frequently. To improve this piece for next time, i would probably spend a little longer on the shading as it was quite rushed as i wanted to get the piece finished, but overall i am quite pleased with the outcome. I will include the background image uncropped and unedited below, however i must state that i do not feel this is a strong drawing, but i will include it nevertheless because i think it is important to remind myself not every piece has to be perfect.

It is ok to make mistakes, that is how you learn.

Date completed - 29/12/2024

Here is the original image, this is a redraw of a piece i did roughly two years ago as i feel i have a better understanding of perspective and composition compared to when i first drew this. Sadly i just really didnt like the colours and texture on this piece and ended up not seeing it through to completion, i also feel the falls look much smaller than they looked in the original piece, this is just something that didnt work out and that's ok, i will learn from my mistakes and maybe try this piece again in the future.

Here is the original piece from 2022.

Date completed - 05/01/2025

This is also a redesign of one of my characters i made in the discovery project of confetti FE, i was looking back into this project and wanting to expand on the content i had already created for it and i felt my art style has changed quite a bit in the one and a half years i have been in university. I gave this character more accurate anatomy and gave her more of an alien looking snout as opposed to just being a small anthropomorphic raccoon. I also made her tail thinner so that it would be more practical as a prehensile appendage, as well as this, i aged her up quite a bit to make her fall more into the elderly age bracket. As this character is a archeologist, i wanted to give her a more professional yet practical outfit to fit her role.

I did this by giving her a wrap skirt and a poncho instead of just a long poncho so that she is better protected from the sun and has a more formal silhouette with the usage of smooth and flat lines. Some details remained the same from the original design, those being her iconic glasses, colour pallet, and animal inspiration. Since i have been developing the setting as a whole, i feel her design is more in keeping with the main themes of her universe, and she fits in much better than before. I intend to redesign a lot of the characters i made in the discovery project, i feel it is a great starting point and has a lot of themes i want to develop further into a more fully fledged universe, using the skills and techniques i have learnt so far i hope to kind of level-up the designs i made a few years ago to make them more visually interesting.

I have also been trying out some map making for both the Building alliances project and for my own personal DND projects, i have been enjoying making these and i weirdly find it therapeutic to draw in all the little land details and biomes and cities, i have found that making these maps makes it easier to plan out where a story might go, what locations the characters may visit, what events might happen, what creatures live in different biomes, and how might the player's actions influence the world around them. Its something i have found especially fun to do for my various dnd campaigns, and i was inspired by some of these maps to add this into the sahara project.

This map is more zoomed in and focuses more on the places of interest like the clubs, dam, statue and the hotels that the players might enter. this is just one area of a larger map and serves to be useful for developing ideas for lore in just a small area of the map.

And here is the map i made for the Sahara project.

 

Date completed - 11/01/2025

Here is a spaceship i drew based on a thumbnail sketch one of my friend's made, I was thinking about what areas i struggle a lot in and thought i should do some artwork in those areas to get my confidence up a little bit. A tool i used to help me in this piece is first making a model of my subject in Maya, then drawing over it so that my perspective and proportion is correct, i found this method was both much less stressful but also twice as useful as now i have a 3D reference for my subject meaning i can draw it from any angle much easier, and also texture it for 3D practice.

Here is the original sketch my friend provided, and the model i made based on it, this is also what i used to draw over for the image above. The thing i am drawing is supposed to be a very blocky spaceship used to ship archeological goods from a planet onto a large space station, which i decided to draw after i had finished the main transport ship, i used the exact same technique as before and made a 3D model for the freighter ship, also using the original transport ship as a size reference guide for the larger freighter ship.

Date completed - 11/01/2025

Here is the freighter ship with the smaller transport ship for size reference.

And here is the 3D model along with my friend's sketch of what the shop might look like.

 Date completed - 27/01/2025

 Click for turntable

To practice some 3D modelling skills i decided to make two of my Dnd characters as models in the style of the characters in the game Mouthwashing. I used the character Anya as a reference and was able to find an orthographic of her model to help me replicate the style with my own characters. For the most part the bodies are consisted of cylinders and the hair being extruded cubes. I used the mirror tool quite a bit to make sure elements stayed symmetrical across the body. I still really struggled with the UV mapping and i think you can tell this with some of the obvious seams going down the character's torso and under the eyes, but other than that i am very proud of these models. I have been trying to figure out rigging and weight painting with these characters for a few weeks now, i still don't fully understand what i'm doing so i might return to this when i have a little more time. Something i am very proud of with these models is the hair and how i constructed it.

I think especially on imogen the hair looks quite good especially the fringe and side pieces, the back could use some work but for a first attempt it isnt too bad, and i think they fit in with the games style very well. I have found i really enjoy low poly modelling and i much prefer the overall style to more polished models. I would like to try to make some different body types and more intricate details next before having another go at rigging and weight painting, i would eventually like to turn these into Garys mod playermodels, and i have been looking into some tutorials on how to do that.

Here is the character i was inspired by :)

ttps://mouthwashing.fandom.com/wiki/Anya/Gallery?file=Anyamodel.png

 Date completed - 26/02/2025

Similar to my drawing of the spaceships i created a few months ago, i utilized the 3D blockout technique again for this piece. I created the 3D model of the vehicle based on an orthographic image of the VEEV on the mystery flesh pit website, this allowed me to have a better understanding of how this unique vehicle would look from this angle. I used the rule of thirds to frame both of the subject in the scene though i feel i could have made this effect stronger by altering the size of the monster in comparison the the figure in the foreground. 

I also used the beam of the headlights to highlight the character in the foreground, and leading lines from the vehicle and weapon to really help lead the viewer's eye. There are a lot of things i really like about this piece, especially how i have developed the monster design from the design i created a year ago, however i think i could improve on this piece in the future by improving my texturing skills. The deer head on the creature feels quite flat and i think with a little bit of extra rendering it could really improve this piece.

 Date completed - 18/04/2025

I decided to do another piece to practice drawing in grayscale as well as working with backgrounds, the line art that you can see is the sketch layer that i roughly drew on top of using my values, I also used some atmospheric perspective for the trees in the far distance as well as used fog and contrast to separate the darker subjects in the foreground from the lighter background. I was aiming to go for a very moody piece so kept the lighting quite dark, with the main light source behind the subject, the slight light that does illuminate them comes from the reflections in the water. 

 Date completed - 21/04/2025

For this piece I had the idea of creating a character for my science fiction project where his muscles are exposed due to a sort of genetic mutation. Aside from this being a cool lore note, I thought this would be a good opportunity to practice the muscular structures as this is something i struggle with quite a bit. It is to note that the hands and head being left as usual is a stylistic choice due to the backstory of the character. With the pose i tried to look at both the builds of bodybuilders as well as viewing musculature structure references, this was necessary as i wanted my character to have accurate muscle structures whilst retaining an interesting pose that you might see a bodybuilder holding. I then blocked out the muscle groups and put in slight indicators to where the muscle fibers will be running. From here i drew in the details as usual in my marker brush. I then decided to colour the portions of the line art that cover the muscles in red to really define the shift between skin and meat, i don't usually do this in my art but decided to give it a go to try something new.

I then used a purple multiply layer to place in the shadows. I also used a lighter red with the marker brush to better define the fascia in the centre chest region, where the pectorals connect under the deltoids, near the elbow, and along the obliques and patella region. I had a bit of trouble figuring out the muscles in the feet, though i tried to get it as close as i could to being accurate. For the face i was given some advice to darken the area around his nose and under eyes to give a more sunken in and gaunt expression which fits with the nature of this character, he has been through a lot of physical trauma with his muscles bursting through his skin, and so he shows a lot of his pain through his expression. I think i could definitely improve this drawing especially with the muscles in the arms and lower legs, but overall i am really happy with this drawing and honestly this was a really cool idea to draw out.