Environment Thumbs

Trying to plan out the next environment piece I'd like to move onto. Heck, maybe I'll just do all of them.

Update!

A freelance piece I finally got around to wrapping up.

And a mech piece I’ve been sitting on for the past few months. It’s still early, but I wanted to share a WIP. Hopefully I’ll be able to find some time to finish this one up. <3 Mechs!

Looking For Trouble 2

I went back and re-tooled the image a bit more. It’s a bit cleaner and more colorful. *shrug*

Work in Progress “RUN”

Here’s a tightly cropped snippet of what I’m working on at home. Nothing’s really lit, yet. I’ve just been working on the expressions and gestures (I’m sure I’ll still be tweaking these sorts of things until the end). Oh, and character next to the guy won’t be gaussian blur’d once the image is done (haha)

Weekend Arting

Some thing I’ve been toying around with over the weekend! Hoping to get more done throughout the week!

Thumbnails for images I want to work on. The theme is “Destination”. Same character(s), different parts of a singular environment, different palletes.



Here’s the WIP for the first image. The colors are partially inspired by “Enslaved”. I really like some of the color choices they used in some of the stages.

First time messing around with Sculptris. Pretty fun stuff, so far!

“Sunshine” Screencap Study

I’m going to start doing some screencap studies from now on. I think it’s an excellent way to brush up on just about every skillset an illustrator needs. For me, I’m trying to improve or expand my color palette and mood. I recorded my process for this one (it was a very clumsy process, to be honest), but I ended up spending a bit more time with it afterwards.

Here’s the recording with some Daft Punk playing in the background:

Sunshine Sketch from Robin Chyo on Vimeo.

 

Here’s the reference picture:

And here’s my sketch:

Obviously, there’s quite a few differences. There’s some minor issues with the composition. Chris Evans head is smaller in my sketch, and I’m sure there’s all sorts of color issues, too. Regardless, I’m fairly happy with how this one came out. But there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement.

Flyer Type-A

Something I’m still working on. Just got a few more things to tweak. Creatures are fun!

Begin Guy

Finished him up. Now on to fleshing out his weapon design..and perhaps an epic gory battle after that :D

Begin Guy (wip)

Here's my first pass on the character I used in the Begin piece. I need to make him look less grungy, though! :p

Mech WIP

I was recently inspired by my pal, Josh Kao, to do a mech design. I spent a lot of time playing around trying to get a nice shape composition on this one and did my best to do something that's not based on the human anatomy. I'm not 100% happy with it and I'm sure I'll be tweaking some things around (legs, perspective, head, etc), but I think it's at the point where I feel like I can now render it up.

+Aramaki (part 2)

Been a bit busy, but I'll be wrapping up the GitS stuff this weekend, I think. Here's a bit of an update.

+Chief Aramaki

Here's a bit of an update. Could've posted this last night, but I spent most of the day playing Modern Warfare 2, so I was kind of pooped! :p

I decided on going with Chief Aramaki, simply because his skin is pretty different from Motoko and Batou's. Motoko's all about beauty and youth, Batou's skin represents hard edges and a bit more dullness (though I'm still trying to strikes a balance between this and the idea of artificial skin), and Chief Aramaki's skin represents a much more matte like quality and less vibrant colors. If Batou wasn't my favorite character in GitS, I'd probably have chosen someone who had actual eyes, so that I could show the same sort of range of age degradation as I'm trying to do with human flesh. But I'm still having a lot of fun with this! :D

Still a WIP. Hoping to finish it all up tonight.

+Batou

Here's an update (slight update to Motoko). Batou's my favorite character, hands down. He's just plain cool. He doesn't need to be handsome or in his mid-20's to be a badass. He just needs to be a badass! I loved how ruthless he was in the GitS movies. I really liked how callous and emotionless he was during most of Innocence. He's just plain cool. :D

But anyways, I wanted Batou's skin to obviously not be as smooth as the younger Motoko, but a bit more worn and less resilient to represent his age. But I also wanted to give it a bit of an artificial/slightly plastic feel to it. Just to show how artificial his body is (I'm assuming his flesh is artificial, since he's supposed to be heavily cyborg'd :p )

Motoko

There's three things that I've been wanting to do lately. 1. I've been trying to practice rendering flesh. 2. I've been wanting to paint a female character again, since I don't do that often enough. And 3. I've been meaning to do a tribute/fanart piece for Ghost in the Shell (I'm a huge fan!). So I'm in the process of remedying these 3 things by doing portrait pieces of the 3 characters from the series- Motoko/Major, Batou, and either Chief Aramaki/Ishikawa/Togusa. Still undecided on the last one, since I like all their characters.

Here's Motoko (still got some clean up I'd like to do)

The Melt (thumbs)

I forgot to post these along with the final. Just some variations/ideation sketches for finding the composition and color scheme. I mostly went for 7, but obviously some things changed along the way. I widened the image out and I tried to make the image more colorful (mostly because of the fact that the palette in most of the thumbnails were very similar to my "Dear Friends" piece).

GORE - Split + Step-By-Step

Hopefully none of you will think any less of me when I say this, but I've always been a fan of violent action-y stuff. Like a lot of people around my age, I grew up playing games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, Quake, and other games that I was probably too young to play. They were entertaining in ways I never thought I should be entertained by. But regardless, it'd be impossible for me to deny that those kinds of games inspired me a lot. With games like God of War 3, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, and Dante's Inferno on the horizon, I felt it was about time I made a piece that would serve as a tribute to hardcore action games.



And here's a quick "step-by-step" tutorial.

Arena Process- Final

Alright. I think I'm pretty much done with this one. I'll be moving onto designing the astronaut starting tomorrow or sometime after that.

For this final step, I basically just added in some photographic elements into the image in order to apply texture and also some subtle lights. I also changed some architecture so that it wasn't too Roman-esque. I've attached my reference sheet as well and I think it's also worth mentioning that I was looking at Khang Le and Jaime Jones' work.



Reference Collage:

Arena Process- WIP 4

I honestly haven't had a chance spend much time on this image this past weekend.  Been feeling a bit under the weather. :( Anways, onto the blahblah's and haha's!

The biggest change I did this time was I opened up the arena some more. It really helps the image breathe. Probably the fix that I'm the most satisfied with!

I'm trying to make sure that the arena feels a bit more sci-fi. I guess I was going for a hybrid fantasy/sci-fi sort of setting. This image should be completed by tomorrow night.



PS- Color and value tweaking will be done after I'm done with the image. Last night's post was just a little test. ;-)

Arena Process- WIP 3

I'm tired. I'll edit this with some more comments later.

Arena Process- WIP 2

So, I definitely didn't get to spend as much time as I wanted to on this piece today. I ended up spending most of the day fighting off a stomach ache and finishing up the cover challenge image. But I did get a chance to start working on the colors and changing around a few things that were bugging me.

Changes:

1. Moved the mech.
-He was covering up way too much space and he seemed to be too much of a focal point. If I left him there, this image would serve as more of an illustration than a concept piece.

2. Changed the arena.
-I felt like the arena was looking very un-arena like. It seemed more like a science facility more than anything. So I added in some more textural surfaces and tried to add in some more box seats for the audience to sit in. I'm sure I'll still be changing things around, but I'm starting to like where things are now.

3. The astronaut's got a new buddy!
-And I gave them a bit more form and an idea of what they might look like later on. Once again, I'm doing my best to make sure that the astronauts aren't obstructing the environment, as this is intended to be more of an environment than anything else.

One thing I'm really striving for for this particular painting is the sense of being in the shadow and being in the light. I've always been fascinated by people like John Watkiss who can pull this off with ease.  I'll be adding some more photos into my reference sheet (which I'll post up tomorrow).

Stay tuned for more updates!