Vonschlippe - Art School Journey

[Vonschlippe]

@dangras-almeida @HANDRO @Julia_J

Thanks for the encouraging words, they mean a lot to meeee <3

A little bit about my process. This is intended to be concept art set in the Fable game universe, it's a March challenge in Trent Kaniuga's discord server, Aquatic Moon. I have to make an exterior (and optionally, interior) environment piece, so something like a wizard's tower or a blacksmith shop, that would be useful for a hypothetical 3D artist to be able to work from.

From research, Fable architecture has very funky rooftops and very exaggerated proportions to buildings, including sloped walls and crazy insane masonry. The two approaches to this were doing a 3D greybox beforehand and drawing over a simple geometry setup to use as perspective, or free-hand a sketch and correct the perspective later. I chose the latter option.

If you scroll up, you can faintly see the sketch I worked with. That's free-hand. No guides, no structure, just working with boxes and appealing shapes. To finish the line-art, I overlaid it with a fitted perspective grid (using Perspective_tools_v2, for Photoshop). The grid is nearly isometric, but there is a slight convergence to very distant vanishing points. I was lucky that my original sketch had good perspective, because I did not have to correct too much - basically I used lasso + free transform to fix the problem areas into compliance.

Finally, I decided early on that I would have a rigid hierarchy to my line weights. The biggest line-weight is set to overlapping shapes, such as the outer line of a rooftop. Medium lines are for material changes, such between the timber and masonry of a wall. Finally, thin lines for textural stuff. To avoid having too many lines, I avoided lining the convex plane changes that face the viewer, such as corners of boxes and beams, unless there was a cut-out involved.

The result, painstaking as it was, is a line-art that reads fairly well and follows accurate perspective. I work as an engineer during the day, so it was done over the course of 4 evenings, so I'm probably a good 15 hours into this drawing already. It's really a monster.

Line-art, such a love-hate relationship...

The coloring has already started and it's going pretty fast - my sanity's intact!

[HANDRO]

Very insightful. I did see your previous post, wasn't sure if there was a step before that though. I've used the former approach with the 3D greyboxes but I haven't liked the overall result, I find architecture to be a pain to work on because my day job is architecture based. I'll have to give the Perspective tools v2 a try. didn't know that existed, seems like it involves less planning in the early stages compared to setting up volumes with greyboxes.

[Vonschlippe]

Here's the preliminary colors.

What remains to be done is pretty much some brain-dead cleaning-up, adding a few color pops, and trying to get some nice accurate color and light in there.

Hope you like it, the final version should be ready in a week or two!

[marco_blanco]

Trent was one of the first people I looked up to and thought, shit, I want to be able to do what this guys does
I don't think I'll end up on the concept art industry like him, but he is crazy talented, I relate to him more through his Twilight Monk comics, I think that more my jam.
Crazy how the sphere of online influential artists overlaps!

it's a March challenge in Trent Kaniuga's discord server, Aquatic Moon

This illustration you're doing looks like an absolute mammoth!
I was trying to think of potential feedback but nothing significant in terms of the artistic side

I worked in the bar industry and for the most part you got stuff right, for the size of the distilling vats you have their building would likely be 3 times bigger to accommodate the whole operation, but I think this gets the point across!

Now the question is.... what are we distilling here? I'm thirsty!

[Vonschlippe]

Marco, that was a delightful comment, thank you so much!

I wanted to do a distillery because, well, I'm a huge scotch nerd. This is an older photo of my modest collection on my wall, it's grown by 3 bottles already since :

My love for whisky, combined with the fact that copper pot stills look really cool, cemented my decision to do a Fable-universe distillery/brewery. It's clear from my research that the pot stills are usually not in such cramped quarters, but the idea was also to show this as a smaller, early industrial era production without the bells, whistles, and space afforded to modern distilleries. No gas heating, just coal. No pumps, only gravity and heat.

I liked the idea of having the thing almost built around the stills, with pipes coming and going through rooftops and walls, rather than carefully thought architecture - it goes hand in hand with the crazy rooftops and slanted walls of the Fable universe.

Glad you like where it's headed, I'm at the easier polish phase, so all I have to do is relax and render now. The hard work's done!

[marco_blanco]

Yeah! That's my kind of stuff! I go head over heels over Talisker! I spoted the box behind there!
I would recommend adding Jura, and maybe a Japanese whisky, they have done some very exciting stuff! Hibiki is the more well known around here!

I've been to a couple distilleries, the largest one was the old Jameson distillery in Cork, Ireland.

I shall raise a glass in your name once you finish this!

[Vonschlippe]

Haha I'm so happy to read this! That peppery Talisker touch definitely makes for a worthwhile dram.

I've owned a few japanese whiskies (Suntory Toki, Hibiki Harmony, Nikka Yoichi) and tasted quite a few when I was in Japan in 2016. As for the Jura, I have tasted, and found to be not exactly to my tastes - I'm more into the meaty peaty smoky bois you'll see on the shelf. Favorites are Octomore 9.3, Laphroaig 25 (2015), and Bruichladdich Black Art 6.1!

Distillery painting's going great - looking forward to finishing it sometime this week.

[Vonschlippe]

And done!

Hope you enjoy - I ended up finishing it in an evening instead of taking my time hahaha. I do think it's worth viewing enlarged!

[Julia_J]

Oh yeah! Could you tag the link again? I'd love to see it enlarged

[HANDRO]

Good stuff. I agree with @Julia_J, would love to see it enlarged.

[Vonschlippe]

Here you go lads!

For those on PC, you can right click --> open image in new tab to see anything here in full resolution.

[dangras-almeida]

Good Lord brow, this is just stunning! Congrats!

And please let us know how the results of the Art Challenge, too 😃👍

[Julia_J]

Damn! That's awesome

[Vonschlippe]

I did a quickie 2-hour painting tonight, I'm actually surprised I was able to get anything done.

This is an exploration drawing of some friends' original character, Clarissa. She's in the same fictional universe as the Viviane portrait above, but I was not as accurate in the rendition for this one - she's also in a bit of a different style due to the thicker line-art.

I might accidentally have made her too mature/attractive too - this is supposed to be a teenager. Oops.

[dangras-almeida]

I don't know man, I can totally see this character as a teenager. The hair and the big eyes help convey that impression. The rendering here is amazing, too. The attention to the detail in the eyes is impressive (as usual).

Why did you choose to go with thicker line art this time around? Just exploring?

[Julia_J]

Yeah totally agree with @dangras-almeida. She looks like a teenager to me, but an attractive one indeed

[Vonschlippe]

Thanks guys!!

The thicker line-art is just from my brush setup when I started doodling - it's the basic round brush set to constant diameter and pressure opacity, which I normally use for rendering. During the sketch phase, the lines just looked nice and fluid from the get go, so I kept using em.

I posted the line-art above if you're curious!

[Vonschlippe]

I'm doodling another sci-fi girl. Character design subject to change, I already have many fixes in mind!


Work in progress!

[HANDRO]

haven't done this drawing process in a while. but I like the clean lines from it. I think I might revisit it.

I always struggle with the mech (sci fi) aesthetic. the simplicity vs detail. any tips on that Von?

[Vonschlippe]

Hey Handro!

There's a lot to learn about hard surface / sci-fi design. Depending on how much you're used to consuming sci-fi and how comfortable you are at critiquing/improving those particular designs, your own aesthetic choices can come very naturally or, rather, be a huge struggle.

I recommend looking at this video. It is pretty much a bible-tier reference when it comes to good (and bad) design decisions in anything sci-fi. Armor, environments, weapons, whatever! it's all applicable, give it a go!

If you absorb some of the information in here, I'm sure you will be more critical of common sci-fi designs, and being able to sort out the good from the bad allows you to make better decisions yourself!