Meet the Medic and then hide your wounds.

I could write a book about how busily busy I’ve been lately, which would contain an inhumane amount of grammatical errors, captions, which, when read backwards would destroy the very fabric of existence, and the secret ingredient in my recipe for homemade tiffin (and it’s not yeti blood this time!). But I won’t do that, because nobody would read it, which is why I’m writing this blog post, so nobody can read that, too.

Here’s the medic. He needs a name, so for all intents and purposes, he’s called Glob. Glob likes long bike rides on a Sunday morning so he can feel a cool breeze whoosh through his ventilation fans. He also likes to feed geese and to hack the limbs and flesh off live humans so he can figure out what components they keep inside their shells. So far he’s discovered that his oil tank cannot be filled with human blood, saliva or feces, but when all mixed together with corrosive acid they make a disgustingly powerful cocktail he likes to call Liquid Life. Death is almost imminent upon consumption.

Here are my initial bodily sketches for him, which, if you look carefully, don’t look carefully. He has a very similar body type to the ranger, but I don’t need to tell you that because you’re not even reading this, and if you are, the sensation of feeling slightly less smart and reading this blog post are completely uncorrelated. Maybe. Probably not. There’s a slight chance that… I’m sorry.

Glob did try to synergise some his body parts with human parts, which is how he acquired this brain. Long story short, it turns out brains need something called oxygen to function. Who’d have thought, eh? Not Glob. He died within fourteen minutes of making the connection, to be found seven minutes later by the Fembot who smashed his body onto the face of the nearest robot. Glob was grateful. I won’t detail how robots express that emotion (there’s a corkscrew, a whisk and seven wooden spoons involved).

Glob liked the body the Fembot patched him up with so much that he decided to keep it and get a paint job. He thought green looked good. He thought green looked good.

Heading over to the Outfitters and Glob knows style if it punched him in the face. Because it did. Repeatedly. The Fembot wasn’t there to repair his face this time so Glob has to hide his scars with this mask. Stylish, right? The mask also punched him in the face.

Being £176.98 lighter and 176.98lbs heavier, Glob ventured into the world a free, careless and foolish robot. For there is no freedom out there, only death. Oh, and also his companions: the ranger, the dembot and the fembot, who would fight cog and bolt beside him, until every last enemy lay broken and written-off in the wasteland before them. And for that, Glob was grateful. We’re going to need more wooden spoons.

Prototype Class : The Robot Sheriff

Things are moving fast. Light speed! Not that fast. Not even close. In fact, in comparison it’s all moving rather slow. Gods how slow it’s going! But the sheriff is designed now. So there that is. Come, let me walk you through his production.

Here’s the initial sketch, made with a spritz of 0.2 fine line, a dash of Copic markers and a pinch of integrity. Of course, we can’t forget about all the capital punishment that’s going to be a repercussion of this. Oh how we can not! Forget that is.

You guessed I used the Iron Giant as a reference, eh? Ten points to Ravenclaw! What, Ravenclaw isn’t your house? Well, they’ll have your points anyway because I don’t like your attitude. Or your tie. In fact, just move into Ravenclaw, everything else is inferior by comparison. So pack your bags and I guess you can take your tie. The password for the dorm is beetlejuice, which means we’re only letting two people in, now one, since I just said it.  

 

The initial drawing was so wonky. It’s like if you asked a Badass Psycho to do a handstand but instead he just kept doing cartwheels. So I took him into Photoshop and fixed him. The robot that is, not the Badass Psycho, you can’t fix what isn’t broken. Or docile. For our more keen eyed viewers, you’ll notice his face also changed. He now looks like he could stare through my underpants and discover that I have in fact fouled myself.

 

We want to keep the game relatively PG, so we can’t have robots running round willy-nilly with their exhaust ports and their shiny metal arses mooning whatever soul decides to play our game; which will most likely be the team, my classmates, or my five-year-old nephew. Ergo, no one. Hereby, the wardrobe was consulted. There were mostly capes in there and my old Super Soaker. But no one asked for MORE WATER so I left it where it was.

Things went a bit robo-erotic when I started clothing 01. So we’ll move on and try to forget I ever drew it. Tell your eyes I’m sorry. 02 is a ringer of the Merchant from Resident Evil 4. He’s got the stuff. You name the price. He won’t like that, so just let him tell you the price. Don’t be fooled by 03’s arsenal; he only has bullets, he doesn’t even have holsters on his sash! What a dork. We like 04, lets not say a bad word about him. Or he will find you and kill you. Seriously. I once knew a guy. Now I don’t know him. He’s dead. 05 looks like a child playing dress-up with his bed sheets draped round his shoulders. Grow up, 05! You don’t even sleep, why do you even have bed sheets?

 

Next, we took all those clothing options, mixed them up in a bag and randomly selected which would be a part of our final design. No we didn’t. We essentially took 04 and made him look like a robot version of The Joker in some 1920’s Chicago gun fight. Still no holsters.

 

And that concludes the story of how I lost my first tooth.

Tutorial: The Making of The Outlaw Robot

So I thought I’d share my painting process in the hope that my viewers (if I say it enough times people will start to believe it) will learn something. Talk about the blind leading the blind. This is an outlawish character I designed last night. What’s outlawish about him, you ask? If I had an answer for that you’d certainly be the first to know. Maybe it’s his cape. The wind’s actually blowing eastbound.

01 DOWNLOAD YOUR IMAGE

I started out by sketching the basic shapes and portions for my character (using Derwent Graphic B on a very poor Ryman’s-own sketchpad), and refining the lines until I’d found a character I was happy with. Using a heavy weight paper I had to use a ball-point pen for the line work (a novelty syringe pen from Nemesis – Alton Towers to be precise). As the paper was so rough the line work became sloppy in some places, which is why I decided to then draw the image digitally, using the original as a template.

02 REPAIR YOUR IMAGE

Painting digitally allows you to repair any disproportions, angles or blemishes within your image. The first course of action is to mirror the image along the y-axis (horizontal). This allows you to instantly recognise aspects that are out of proportion or tilted unrealistically. Surprise, surprise, mine was a bloody mess. Using Photoshop and the Polygonal Lasso Tool, I adjusted the image as so that every component was correctly aligned. At this point it doesn’t matter that the line work is disjointed and broken, we are about to draw it again digitally.

03 VECTOR DRAWING

To give the image a clean cut finish I then took it into Illustrator and traced the image using the Pen Tool. Make sure to export the image as a .png so that the background is invisible and we can paint behind it. The file below is the original vector drawing for those who wish to practice on it. Simmer down, don’t all jump up at once.

04 GREYSCALE VALUES

Next step we take the image back into Photoshop and begin painting. Using Masking, the Fill Tool and the Magic Wand, we gradually build up a representation of where our light sources are. Here it is globally illuminated from somewhere in the top-right corner. Colour in around the #787575 value. This is the first shadow pass, as you can see, he is still extremely flat at the moment. He’s a robot, he’s suppose to be grey so we could leave him like this. But let’s not and say we didn’t either.

05 COLOUR

Now I quickly lay down some colour on top of the greyscale image. One method is to use Adjustments > Hue and Saturation, check Colourise, which will retain the shading while adding colour to image. Useful. I haven’t used it in this instance as the colour frequency is too fragmented. Instead, on a new layer, I’ve painted over the greyscale and set my layers to Soft Light. This burns the colour through the layer and onto the grey.

O6 TEXTURES

The beauty of digital images is how we can burn textures into our work. This way, I can quickly and simply create a rust appearance on my character. Using this rust texture pack by Kxhara and this cloth texture by Napoleon-Stock I am able to add realism to my character while defining its materials.

07 SHADING

The image is still lacking pop, so we begin to add more shadows to the character. To do so, I pick two grey values, paint on a new layer and set the layer so Soft Light, and alternate between the shades until I reach a depth I’m happy with. I am only using the default Hard Round and Soft Round Brush to shade. The Hard for achieving a firm edge for the sharper shadows, and the Soft for adding a gradient.

08 REFINEMENT

A close attention to detail is what makes a character. During the refinement stage a touch up on any shading, add any final touches and check that there is no stray paint in my work.

10 BACKGROUND

With the character in a state I’m pleased with, I add a background and a name in order to finalise my work. Admittedly, the colours may be a bit vivid but I’m pleased with the final result. That’s all folks, stay tuned for more Tales of Interest!

Robot Cowboys vs Robot Indians

With the second year of university well and truly behind me, the journey into third year commences. I like to call it 2.5 year, but it doesn’t seem to be catching on. The task for us now is to get a hefty start on our third year game. And boy are we started! By which I mean yes. We are. Started that is.

There have been a tonne of ideas floating around, and some great ones to boot. We finally settled on an idea, which, in the simplest way possible, is Cowboys vs Indians. But not just any cowboys, oh no sir, it’s a coalition of robots and cowboys. Cowbots. Roboys. I don’t know, sleep on it.

As Lead Artist and Character/Prop Artist for the team (Studio 42) I’ve been scribbling away at some character designs this week and I’m pretty happy with where this is going. But there is a massive tear in my heart as to whether I want to get serious with this or adorable. Here are a few designs to tease your wanting eyes.

The guy below, he’s a Sheriff. But I don’t need to tell you that. You noticed his badge, right? I love the idea of having a very top heavy character with a skinny waist and legs. So that’s what this is. I guess, if anything, this guy looks like a ranger. He’d be right at home gracefully wielding a sniper rifle, casually knocking your block off while you obliviously think that that slight whistling in the wind was natures song, when in actuality it was a .50 caliber bullet racing towards you at 2,200fps with your death certificate. Now you’re dead. At least you won’t be making that mistake again.

You don’t want to mess with this guy. I mean, seirously, I messed with this guy once and now I’m bound for eternity to sing Carly Rae Jepson’s Call Me Maybe until people’s heads explode. And you’ll be surprised to find how easy the transition from intact to brains-on-the-wall is. But you don’t have to ever worry about that anymore. I trapped this guy on paper. Here he is. Laugh at him. Go on, he deserves it. It would be ridiculous to think that his production number ‘1337’ has anything to do with any sort of lame gaming reference, and it couldn’t be that in some crazy, upside-down world, it is completely a coincidence. Nope, I didn’t think you’d buy that either.

As precious and as innocent as this little deviant looks, don’t be fooled by her appearance. Or do. That is what she wants after all. And she’s going to kill me if I knock her reputation. She may not be the sharpest bot in the assembly line, but who needs smarts when you’ve got a body like that? Though you may not think it, there’s a whole plethora of weapons stashed under that skimpy little shirt and behind those slick pleather chaps. Unthinkable, unimaginable, unspeakable weapons. Mainly repeaters I think.

This little lady doesn’t like to leave anything to the imagination. Well, not your imagination. She left it all to my imagination. Look at her, bursting with creativity and tattybojangles.

Whatever could one do with four arms, you ask? I’ll tell you. You could peel two bananas at once.  You could point in four different directions. Or even the same direction. You could crawl on all sixes. The possibilities are endless. This guy doesn’t use his arms to their full potential. Their purpose is nothing exciting, like those stated above, in fact, it’s actually kind of boring and sensible. He uses the lower two to control his robot horse while he upper set man the crossbow. What a waste of a perfectly good appendix.

Character Design : The Miner

Taking a little break from the weekly challenge contest, I created a character, whom, for all intense and purposes, we shall dub ‘The Miner’. He is a miner after all.

I started out by sketching my character with a 4B Derwent Sketching Pencil. The sketchbook I used was a really nasty Ryman’s own one. I really need a higher quality pad for doodling.

I then brought the guy into Photoshop to colour him in. I painted over realistic textures to make him pop out a bit more (the full texture list/credit can be found here). I’m really terrible at drawing in Photoshop, but I can manage with the painting. I think it’s time to upgrade to a bigger tablet.

Week 01: Motionless Knight

University Level 2 is now 100% complete, which means I have ~four months off to prepare myself for my third and final year. I’m going to use this time to fully learn ZBrush/Sculptris, Maya, Mudbox, digital painting, cat rig and various other software/techniques which will be useful for my third year project.

To do so, myself an a few friends from university (Ali Malik, Ryan Bradley and Thomas Turner) have decided to set ourselves weekly design challenges where we must fully design, model and texture a character (rigging and animating is optional). The challenge started yesterday where we used a random theme generator (http://www.3dfantasyart.co.uk/arttheme.html) which concluded with the theme Motionless Knight . 

For the idea I had it was inspired by The Witcher 2 cinematic trailer, where the crewmen on the ship are frozen. I was then reminded of The Snow Queen, and I merged the two styles together and came up with a Snow Queen’s knight who had been frozen in ice for thousands of years.

Here’s a quick concept for the character. I’m extremely worried about modelling it as I haven’t touched the female anatomy in modelling before and I can see the breasts being a bugger to get right.

The helm was inspired by this awesome drawing by Ryan Toroni.