League of Legends : The Breakdown

A breakdown of many of the major themes, items and buildings in League of Legends
(General gameplay, not character specific)

TURRET DATA

Turrets do more damage with each successful hit on each single target, increasing by +22.5% each hit after the first with a cap of +135%

Damage to turrets with your basic attacks is worked out at basic damage + either 100% of your bonus damage or 40% of your bonus ability power, whichever is highest

If there are no enemy minions in range, a turret gains approx. 49% physical damage reduction and 29% magic damage reduction

Inner turrets are invulnerable till the outer turrets are destroyed

Turrets do more damage as the game progresses

• Outer turrets take 8 minutes to reach a maximum damage, with a minimum of 152 AD and a maximum of 200 AD
• Inner turrets take 11 minutes to reach a maximum damage, with a minimum of 197 AD and a maximum of 263 AD
• Inhibitor turrets take 20 minutes to reach a maximum damage, with a minimum of 201 AD  and a maximum of 330 AD
• Nexus turrets take 38 minutes to reach a maximum damage, with a minimum of 115 AD and a maximum of 343 AD

As a rule of thumb, a warrior minion takes 2.5 hits to die, while caster minions take 1.5 hits

If you have around +25 bonus damage you can happily steal the last hit

Turret priorities go in the order of: Enemy champion who's attacked allied champion -> Pets -> Minions -> Enemy champion

The turret will only change targets once it's current target is killed UNLESS it sees an enemy champion attack an allied champion.


TELEPORTING

You can teleport to:

• Friendly turrets
• Friendly minions
• Friendly pets
• Sight Ward and Vision Ward, though this will reveal the ward to enemies (unless in fog of war)
• Flags (Rally / Demacian Standard)
• Teemo's Noxious Mushrooms
• Shaco's Jack in the Box

You might think you can, but cannot teleport to:

• Friendly copies (Shaco's Hallucinate, Mordekaiser's Child of the Grave)
• Non-destructable traps (Caitlyn's Yordle Snap Trap, Nidalee's Bushwhack)
• Friendly inhibitors

Teleport can be cancelled, however it goes on a brief cooldown (180s rather than 300s)

If a minion is being teleported to, it becomes invulnerable (and won't move/attack) during the duration

Teleporting to a turret does NOT make it invulnerable, and if it is destroyed you will still teleport there

Teleporting particles can be seen through brush


MINIONS

Begin spawning 1min 30s into the game, and then spawn every 30s

Grow stronger every 3mins

Deal 50% more damage to turrets than to champions and other minions

There are currently 5 minions types: Melee, Caster, Siege, Super and Anti-Turret

Melee and Caster are the basic types of minion, the amount they give on death grows by +1g after the first wave and +1g every 5 minutes after that

On the Twisted Treeline, they give 29g (melee) and 22g (caster) each initially, while on Summoner's Rift they give 22g (melee) and 16g (caster)

The siege minion gives 36g initially on Twister Treeline, and 27g initially on Summoner's Rift, growing by +1g every 2-3 minutes

Siege minions will also spawn once per 3 waves for the first 20 minutes, then once per 2 waves afterwards

Melee, Caster and Anti-Turret minions take 100% tower damage, while Siege and Super minions only take 50%

If all inhibitors are destroyed, 2 super minions will spawn in each lane per wave

Minions have the unique ability of Call For Help, this is a behaviour based ability which bucks the trend of their otherwise simple follow-route, kill routine

Minion priorities based on Call For Help are as follows:

1. Allied champion attacked by enemy champion
2. Allied champion attacked by enemy minion
3. Allied minion attacked by enemy minion
4. Allied minion attacked by enemy turret
5. Allied minion attacked by Enemy champion
6. Closest enemy minion
7. Closest enemy champion

Minions, unlike turrets, will not keep attacking till their current target is dead, if a higher priority situation arises.

E.g. If it's simply attacking the closest enemy minion, and an allied champion is attacked by an enemy champion, all near-by allied minions will begin attacking the enemy champion. However, minions only re-evaluate their situations every few seconds, unless their current target dies or becomes unavailable (walks into brush)


BUFFS

(Unfortunately I'll be ignoring Dominion for this section)
Summoner's Rift buffs include:

• Blessing of the Lizard Elder (Red Buff)
• Crest of the Ancient Golem (Blue Buff)
• Exalted with Baron Nashor

Twisted Treeline buffs include:

• Blessing of the Lizard Elder (Red Buff)
• Crest of Crushing Wrath (Brown)
• Crest of Flowing Water (Grey)
• Crest of Nature's Fury (Green)

The crests of Flowing Water and Nature's Fury last 1min each, while Crushing Wrath lasts 2mins
Crushing Wrath and Exalted with Baron Nasher are of interest in that they are both non-transferable. If it's owner is killed, the buff is lost

Crest of Crushing Wrath: This unit deals % increased damage

Crest of Flowing Water: Increases movement speed by 30%

Crest of Nature's Fury: Increases attack speed by 20% and reduces cooldowns by 10%

Blessing of the Lizard Elder: The unit's physical attacks slow the target's movement speed by (10/20/30)% (at levels 1/6/11) and deal (7.7 + Level * 2.35) true damage. This buff's monster spawns at 2:10 and respawns every 4mins. It lasts 2mins 30s

Crest of the Ancient Golem: This unit regens 1.5% mana (or energy) per second and has (16 + Level * 0.5)% cooldown reduction on their abilities. This buff's monster spawns at 1:55 and respawns every 5mins. It lasts 2mins 30s

Exalted with Baron Nashor: This unit gains 40 ability power, 40 attack damage, 3% of max health regen per 5s, 1% of max mana regen per 5s. This buff's monster spawns at 15:00 and respawns every 7mins. It lasts 4mins

Exalted with Baron Nashor is unique in that the buff is given to every living player on the team, regardless of participation in killing Baron Nashor. It is also the only buff not affected by Utility Mastery


ITEMS

Items are split into 5 categories: Consumable / Basic Tier / Advanced Tier / Legendary Tier and Removed.

Boots of Speed is the only basic item which grants a unique passive

Only 1 pair of boots will increase your movement speed. If 2 pairs are in your inventory, the highest movement speed will be used. Other affects on boots, including unique passives, still take affect

Ninja Tabi is the only item that grants dodge chance

There are 19 primary effects and 3 categories of secondary effects.

Primary effects:
Ability Power, Armor, Armor Penetration, Attack Speed, Cooldown Reduction, Critical Strike, Dodge, Health, Health Regeneration, Life Steal, Magic Penetration, Magic Resistance, Mana, Mana Regeneration, Movement Speed, On-Hit Effects, Spell Vamp and Tenacity.

Secondary effect categories are Active, Aura and Passive.


That's all for today! I hope you find this of some use to you - Krillatron

Fabric Practice

Nothing  too spectacular for today I'm afraid, I just wanted to get some fabric practice done, and what better than a faux-fur hooded robe with gold seams, as worn my the summoners in League of Legends?

On the League of Legends note, I've now put quite a lot of time into Singed, Anivia, Teemo and Sivir, and have to say, I'm liking Teemo the most! Being able to out-Teemo other Teemo's is damnable fun, as well as littering Dominion with mushroom to slow the speed ups and negate the health points.

Hint for tomorrow: More fur of a different variety!

Teal Waters

Feels like I havn't done a fantasy landscape in a while, so decided to churn out a mini fantasy scene.

I've been really enjoying drawing water recently, though am aware I need to work a bit more on the lighting and currents of it, particularly in a scene like this!

I'm pleased with the general shape of this piece, with the water-surrounded path leading to the sudden drop, however feel the perspective of the shot and lack of a height-comparable object, the sizes all feel a little odd. The stones making up the path are meant to be rather large, with the water on both sides of the path being close to a stream, however they feel as if they should be pebbles, making the trees feel miniature.

I really should of just used smaller stones in general to keep the sizes feeling correct, but hey, art's all a learning process!

Another sketch dump!

I don't like the last one. :<

The first piece is the original, while the others are all manipulations using the Photoshop in-built tools to give different atmospheres. In particular, inside a volcano, under water, and ghoooost wooooorld.

A quick sprite of Akali from League of Legends based on the Pokemon sprites, went with a simple background but I think it all works well! The angles of the scythes are too (exactly) parallel though, resulting in a weird balance.

The year clock.
This would not work, so hard.

So long to the daily updates, onwards to a new era of art dumps!

As well as adding 3 more designs to my shop (UK: http://www.cafepress.co.uk/krillatron USA: http://www.cafepress.com/krillatron) I've been busy on my Cintiq!

Designs from the past few days:

Half an hour of animal speed sketches, there are so many horses on the site!

My first attempt at drawing a car (notice how the door couldn't open?), shortly followed by:

Less clean but more accurate!

Next, we get onto some T-Shirt designs:

A speedy piece of fan-art of Sivir (my current favorite champion over at League of Legends)

We're almost at the end now! Next up though is some Pink meets Pink Floyd~

And FINALLY, back to some realistic facial practice, this time with some emotion, as here we have Avril Lavigne crying:

And we're done! Still slowly making improvements with the work I know, on top of trying out some new things, I think everything's going pretty well!

Cafepress has 1 more store

http://www.cafepress.co.uk/krillatron

I finally got around to opening my Cafepress store today! There's only 3 designs available at the moment (the above being one of them) but I'm happy it's open at least, and should be easy to add additional designs in the future.

I generally aimed for cutesy fantasy designs with these, featuring 2 dragons and a griffon, all of which are mildly adorable~

I'll likely be adding quite a few more designs to the shop this week, so keep checking back! I won't post updates on here though unless I open a large new section~

Also, looks like I'll be drawing up a more solid contract with my volunteering work at the CAB tomorrow, so I'll have 2 definite week days put aside for art work!

The largest piece I've ever worked on

And here we have, today's piece:

A fantasy landscape that couples as being both the new wallpaper for my 2560x1440 resolution monitor, and a Christmas present for my grandparents!

I think the fading colours work well in this piece to emphasize the layers of the landscape, along with the mist along the floor of the mountains to raise the floating mountains.

I'm slightly worried about the saturation of the furthest bridge, however at the moment feel the solid triangular shape created by the linking bridges adds a lot to the image that the loss of colour to the latter bridge would take away.

Glut of images!

 I got a Cintiq 12ux yesterday, and as such here are the last few images I made on my sturdy old Bamboo! I can't guarantee all images posted from today onwards are 100% Cintiq work, however the majority should be, particularly as I'm finding it hard to tear myself away from my awesome new computer set up, all thanks to my lovely grandparents.

And finally, my first Cintiq play-around!

Kim Ha Neul

Would appear I've gone back to trying out realism!

I'm still not quite trying hyper-realism (pores and all that up-close good stuff!) but I'll attempt it soon.

This is Kim Ha-Neul, an actress who, according to The Boy, looks like one of the characters in Lost. Having unfortunately missed that entire series, I can't be much of a judge of that, I'm afraid.

With this piece I chose to leave her hair, for the most part, blank. It made sense to show the general shape and structure of it, but I'm rather confident about my hair textures and, as it wasn't the point of this exercise, chose to give it a miss.

I think the skin tone came out rather well though, and I'm slowly learning what makes a face, well, a recognizable face. It's, I feel, a rather decent challenge for me as I've had trouble recognizing faces my whole life, to the point where it takes me about 2-3 times of meeting someone to even recognize that I've met them before, and far longer to put a name to a face.

A lot of it seems to be in the eye segment of the face. I say segment as I mean the entire horizontal region around the eyes, e.g. to cover up both below and above the eye area with paper. Personally, I get a much stronger idea of who a person is from this than from only viewing the nose or mouth segments.

For anyone interested, here was the image when it was halfway complete:

That's all for today!

Girls best friend?

I've always been interested in gems.

Particularly diamonds.

No, not in the 'pretty pretty shiny things, oh male being won't you buy me one?', more in the.. well, the physics of them.

There's a long history involved with diamond cutting, before the late middle ages, the natural octahedral shape of diamonds was the best you could get, and there was simply no way to improve upon it. Not due to it being a brilliant cut, far from it, but because diamond is the strongest naturally occurring substance of earth, and there was no way to shape it.

The first step in diamond cutting wasn't even cutting, per say. The jewelers would simply polish the gems to create even, flat faces. This first octahedral shape is now called the 'point cut' and isn't created for commercial use anymore, as it makes no use of the gems refractive index.

Refractive index is a term used to show how much light is refracted when it passes through a material, the more light refracted, the more light gets back to the eye and the 'shinier' the object appears. In order to make a diamond with good fire (dispersion of light), the angles had to be figured out!

The aim of the game in diamond cutting is try attempt to reflect ALL the light taken in back into the eye of the viewer. Lights hitting the gem through the entire 1080' of it's being must be attempted to be reflected back to the viewer, to make the gem appear brighter than apparently possible.

The first cut created to work towards this was the table cut, in which you take a standard point cut gem and saw the top off, creating a flat-top gem. The idea being the flat-top is on the top of the ring / bracelet and all internal light of the diamond is reflected back out of this facet. This idea holds true today and all commercial diamonds and gems will have the exit facet on top.

New cuts with more faces to the diamonds and gems were created over the years, spanning the single cut to the rose to the peruzzi. These pre-Tolkowsky cuts were created through trial and error originally, created for the 16th century idea of a symmetrical radiating pattern, allowing the light to travel within the gem and, for the most part, be reflected back till it all reached the exit facet.

This idea held true till around 1900 when the development of diamond saws and jewelry lathes enabled the more modern gem cuts to be born. Taken from Wikipedia:

Because every facet has the potential to change a light ray's plane of travel, every facet must be considered in any complete calculation of light paths. Just as a two-dimensional slice of a diamond provides incomplete information about the three-dimensional nature of light behavior inside a diamond, this two-dimensional slice also provides incomplete information about light behavior outside the diamond. A diamond's panorama is three-dimensional. Although diamonds are highly symmetrical, light can enter a diamond from many directions and many angles. This factor further highlights the need to reevaluate Tolkowsky's results, and to recalculate the effects of a diamond's proportions on its appearance aspects. ...

Another important point to consider is that Tolkowsky did not follow the path of a ray that was reflected more than twice in the diamond. However, we now know that a diamond's appearance is composed of many light paths that reflect considerably more than two times within that diamond. Once again, we can see that Tolkowsky's predictions are helpful in explaining optimal diamond performance, but they are incomplete by today's technological standards.

Not a definitive solution and the problem of creating the optimum proportions for losing no light still exists. In the 1970's a complete mathematical model was developed for gem design, which has since been the subject of computer modelling. As such, within our lifetimes we may discover the ideal cut of a diamond with higher purity of light retention than the round brilliant cut used today!

More Speed Drawing

The bane of the blogger in the following line:

My apologies for the slow update!





I've returned from Florida, and begun my search for employment!

I'm still volunteering at the Citizens Advice Bureau while I apply, and am at a pace of applying for around 5 companies a day at the moment. Thankfully, it turns out more companies than I thought are hiring at the moment, particularly concept artists / illustrators!

I'm also coming down with a bit of a cold though, swings and roundabouts I suppose.

Small holiday report: We went to Busch Gardens, Seaworld and Universal, The Boy took me for an amazing meal at The Latin Quarter at the Universal City Walk for my birthday, and my family (and The Boy, and The Sister's Roommate) all organized a surprise party for me with light-up balloons, LED straws and a VERY tasty cake!

Also, I'm particularly proud of The Best Friend at the moment as she's started her first year of university, studying Game Design!

Back to the art, this piece is around 3/4 of an hour of speed drawing practice, created, as per usual, with the help of http://www.pixelovely.com/gesture/figuredrawing.php, a tool I use frequently and can't recommend enough!

Singed : Witch Doctor Skin

Been playing around with this idea for days now, and I highly doubt this will be the last I post of it!

Basically, the idea began with changing the shield to be a tiki, witch-doctor mask, something I played around with but decided it took too much attention away for something that's always felt like more of a thrown-on item, with the large potion bottle always being the main focus. That in mind, I still loved the wooden feel of the tiki mask to developed it into something less attention-grabbing but still, in my opinion, pretty cool.

Next was trying to bring the theme through the image, so I decided the tribal patterns were the best way to do that. Continuing the pattern through on the shoulder pads and loincloth seemed to be enough to begin with, but I later felt only putting the bandage wrapping on one leg and tribal designs on the other helped the image flow more. Particularly when coupled with the spilled poison from the hand-held bottle.

Little features were added with the help of witch doctor references, like the shrunken skulls adorning the hair, feathers coming up from the neck and top of the chest covered with multiple necklaces rather than bandages (easier to see when coloured).

Finishing it off with a little throw back to another champion (the skull topping the bottle is based of Nunu's brother) and I feel quite happy with this skin design overall! I'm still not 100% happy with the legs/loincloth, and will likely be removing the ram's horns in the next prototype, but I'm liking how the whole idea is coming together. :)

Beware the Jibbon Swarm

The idea of a swarm of nom-happy creatures is hardly new, but it's always fun to work on your own version of a classic!

I've been thinking a lot more about the physics of creatures recently (a fairly strong physics and maths background always helps!) and I tried to portrait some of this with the 'hinge' mouth. The base of the mouth has very few, thin muscles capable of opening the mouth, while the upper 'teeth' actually work as a small series of electro-magnets with the power being drawn from the 'fan' tail. The teeth can be activated (forcing the mouth to close) by a pressure-plate-esque entity on the roof of the Jibbon's mouth.

This all works together to ensure the mouth generally hangs open while the creature is happily flying aorund, can be forced open if needs be, however if generally forced shut if the Jibbon's mouth becomes too full. This is necessary as, since the creature is so small, the mouth acts as both the entry to, and the main body of, the digestive system. Basically, the mouth is also the stomach.

Also, the basic composition of this piece is the basis of it's almost RPG element, 'You find a nearly ruined scrap of paper on the floor of the jungle, shortly followed by an increasingly loud buzzing sound..'

Fox Hunting

I'm a bit of a fan of dragons taking the shape (partially) of other creatures, lion dragons, unicorn dragons and the like, and with such a similar skull structure I thought a dog-esque dragon would be a nice way to go.

Of course, a regular 'dog' would be very hard to pull off, how to you specify it's meant to be a dog? Furred dragons aren't uncommon, though while I suppose an incredibly mutt-like face, floppy ears or a dog's tail might well work, I decided to go the easily-noticeable route of the fox.

This creature does indeed split at the top of the spine, almost being 2 creatures sharing a single skull. It flies by spinning it's 2 tails in a propeller-like motion, using it's head 'fin' to keep the skull upright.

The idea here, of course, is the 'fox hunter', bearing the traditional (if broken) hunter's horn.

While cruel, it's deemed necessary to keep the creatures away from the Chincharrows!

I'm OLD

Created for this month's Dragon Challenge on DeviantArt, which I've linked every month so far so I'm sure you all know where to go for it!

This month was all about colour, so I chose the blue and purple stock to work from and used it as the basis of this piece.

Now, I was very fortunate in that, when I was creating the line art base of this piece, I had on hand some photographs I'd taken earlier in the bird sanctuary area of Gator Land! The parrots in particular had been throwing themselves into some very interesting poses (preening, outstretched wings, etc.) and one was doing a pose similar to this one, though it's head was looking out from under the wing.

Using the parrot photo as a pose idea, I set to work with the blue and purple in mind for the colour set of the dragon itself. Finding a way to incorporate the parrot feeling into a dragon piece was a great challenge, and I believe the wings were an obvious choice, as were the legs, however throwing in a feathered tail end helped bring the whole piece together.

The bright autumn leaves are something I've attempted before : http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2011/131/a/0/one_of_50_faces_by_krillatron-d3g3mzq.png However I feel I was able to get them to look more realistic and interesting this time around.

Plus I'm rather proud of how the tree trunk itself looks! I'm always happy to see myself able to take on challenges and succeed where before it seemed insurmountable.

That's all for today! Wish me good luck in the contest!

Oh, and I'm now 22. :)

Long Post Is Long

Looks like yesterday was my first double day without posting!

Though I think I deserved a day off, mainly due to an 'event' that occurred yesterday evening.

As you may know, I'm on holiday in Florida at the moment, and we decided to have an outing to Apple-by's as we'd all heard about it but never been.

For the readers from the USA, I won't go too in-depth with an explanation or anything, but to the British readers back home: It's a MUCH better value-for-money Frankie & Bennie's.

Now, at Apple-by's, we didn't realize but they have a free double-up on pretty much any alcoholic drink. As we didn't think this was on EVERY drink when we ordered, we ended up with the equivalent of 8 alcoholic drinks between 6 people. (My dad and The Sister's housemate shared 2 beers and I 'doubled up' my mango mojito (not as good as the original) into 1 MASSIVE one).

You can probably see where this is going.

Basically, one MASSIVE jug-sized cup of mojito, half one of my sister's Daiquiri's and half a regular mojito later, I come home and realize I have around an hour before I want to head to bed.

I think, 30 mins playing League of Legends (3v3) and 30 mins for the blog post should be fine.

Only, well, we all get to level 18 on pretty even footing, with them having taken 3 of our turrets while we've taken 4 of theirs, and we reach a deadlock.

We own the lanes and grind the mobs, but due to their team being better balanced and refusing the push, we all just grind up items for AN HOUR.

Oh my WORD it was the SLOWEST GAME IN THE WORLD.

Especially in my inebriated state, I just wasn't in the mood. I was very close to just falling asleep on the sofa.

Eventually, they split to cover the lanes, I kill ones side and manage to get their final turret while they're fighting off the other side. They kill me before I get their Nexus down, but it's Gg from there~

I'm sure you all found this epic yarn of my evening last night incredible, however back to the art:

[art]

This is the new 'title' image of my portfolio.

[/art]

Molten : Speed Paint

2 'molten' speed painted images based on the same concept, the initial being the smaller thumbnail image with the latter being the base of a future 1080p wallpaper.

I love finding nice palettes to work with! I'm such a fan of this one at the moment, but think I need to increase the yellow to orange contrast on the latter image a LOT before I release the final version.

I may also get rid of the upper lava pool on the latter image due to it rather stealing attention away from the focal point of the image, and making it hard for the eye to be lead around the scene.

It's also a struggle deciding between the overall feeling of the 2 pieces. The first image has a more lazy, rolling hills feel to the piece with the lack of contrast and the stronger light source drowning out some of the features. It's a nice, painted landscape that just so happens to have a lava stream running through it. This feels in start contrast to the much more malicious feel of the second image, with it's dimmer sky creating darker mountains. 

Also, for anyone wondering: I'm STILL working on the pixel brush pack. I've got to the additional items now and am slowly adding more and more pieces to it, however I may release it soon with what there is in it and then release updated versions later with user recommendations.

Flow Rider

I'm in Florida! It's hot and humid and  I'll be updating MUCH less frequently, but still aiming for once every 2-3 days.

Animals are a LOT easier to draw than people...


I've completed a lot of figure drawing sessions recently,but these are the 2 sets while I feel are most presentable, with the first image showing some 30 second figure drawings and the latter showing 60 second animal drawings.

With only 30 seconds to capture a whole drawing, you really force yourself to learn what's important about a pose. Going in the classic Western style of top left to bottom right along the rows, you can probably see that, even in this 10 minute study, I made quite a bit of improvement. Most noticeable in the fact that some of the earlier pieces are grossly out of proportion or missing limbs all together...

I learned near the end that one of the best ways to ensure your figure has the right look and proportions is to draw the curve of the back, and if needed, line out the shoulders and hips.

Drawing directional lines on the face in the later images of the human figures also helped give a better sense of mood.

The animal drawings were another 10 minute study, though the order of these is more mixed up. Technically, it went Butterfly -> Colt -> Dog -> Bird -> Monkey -> Elephant -> Crab -> Horse -> Parrot -> Fish.

The parrot looks by far the best and that's 100% due to it being the most simple shape. 2 lines power over the entire piece and, after those 2 lines are drawn, the rest of the image was blocking in the detail, to the point where I had time to do the eyes and patterns, which are what I always leave till last.

Also, that IS a crab, not a spider. I'm afraid I'm terribly arachnophobic, and I was unlucky enough to encounter an image of a spider while doing this exercise. As such, I just skipped over it to the next piece which happened to be the crab, thank god!

I do most of my figure drawing from free, online sites these days. I still hope to go to more figure drawing classes in the future, but these are still a great way to practice from the comfort of your own home. And better yet, they're free!

Human Only: http://www.posemaniacs.com/thirtysecond

Creature or Human: http://www.pixelovely.com/gesture/animalanatomy.php

End of an era

For another contest over at http://www.sketchoholic.com/contests.php , if you're interested in improving your artwork and love the idea of winning prizes or, at least, getting some more people to view your work, this is a brilliant website! The multitude of contests also really helps break through artists block.

The subject of this contest was to draw 3 images in 105 minutes, 15 minutes on an image of a flower, 30 minutes on an image of a lazy bird, and 1 hour on an image of a robot with an unusual friend.

While I'm happy with the idea of the flower I produced, the second image annoys me a little as I'm pleased with how the bird, tree, background, box, etc. all came out but the image itself is very dull. :<

The third image...was a fail. I learned about some Photoshop lighting effects I may use again in the future but shouldn't of used here, the 'friendship' seems bland, if deemed to exist at all, and there's no real reason the robot should be in the cave in the first place...

Though I HAVE found the practicalities of images is stopping me from creating some fantasy pieces. I tend to shy away from the type of work Genzoman does at the moment, as while he produces powerful, wonderful images of strong characters in a battle stance, there's never an enemy. There's never a reason WHY the person is summoning a fireball while shouting into the air. I find it very hard to draw things I can't reason, and I can't help but think my logical programming background may be holding me back a little here.

Heh, I guess I should just go do it! Jump over the hurdle and see what's on the other side...

Also, I'm afraid to say that this is the beginning of the end!

I go on holiday tomorrow and I'll be trying to update this blog once every 2-3 days while on holiday.
However, immediately after the holiday I'll be applying for concept artist jobs. Having seen many new positions opening up, I'm keeping my hopes high! And, of course, once I get a concept art job, the reason I was keeping this blog will be over.

Who knows, I may re-name it to 'Broke into the industry my own way' and keep posting, but we'll have to see!

Cool shading bro.

Here's a design that's actually been playing around in my head for a little while now. I've always been a fan of intricate designs like this and thought it'd be interesting to have them as part of a fantasy, almost Japanese style dress.

The main thing I wanted to keep in mind was the shape being portrayed, I wanted to capture the feeling of curves and an hourglass figure while not being over sexualized and, of course, keeping everything covered. This is most obvious in the 'tails', the twin pieces of patterned fabric which are attached at the top at the sides of her hips, was are pulled inwards at the back by gold beads to create a soft curve.

It's also prominent in the shape of the waistcoat (not technically a waistcoat as it's a single bodice at the front (not shown) but that's the best way of describing the cut at the back).

Overall, it's a VERY simple image with no real shading but I love the illusion of depth, shadow and of the material I'm using in the very easy 'shading' I did on the patterned parts of the coat.

I've also realized I'm not too keen on the hairpieces. I love the idea of them, particularly in that they match the beading lower down the dress, however I tried to get a 3D effect by having one of the pieces coming out towards the viewer, but with no other real sense of depth in the piece is just goes to make the rest of the image look flatter.

At least I learned!

Metablog

Not a particularly long or impressive post today, but here's the new signature work I'll be using to promote my blog whenever I'm scooting around forums. It seems to get the message across and, I believe, it's a fairly good representation of some of the art you'll see on my blog!

It's been such a slow day today. :< I'm going on holiday on Tuesday and have been looking forward to it for so long now, it feels like I should be there already, as such it's rather hard to get motivated to DO anything these days!

It feels as if the most productive thing I did today was get a new book for my Kindle...

That's all for today, tomorrow: FASHION or something vaguely resembling it!

Super Steen

As you may know, I pride myself on being able to work in a wide variety of styles. I think it's a great way of proving I have a strong artistic basis is I can study and pick up any style in less than one day, usually on my first attempt, and I also believe it helps my employ-ability, as I will be able to adapt to a company's style as fast as possible.

As such, I found myself at an odds as I realized I hadn't even attempted one of my favorite styles. Bold and dynamic by design with some of the most interesting shading techniques I've ever seen, I'd never tried a traditional superhero comic style!

I decided to opt for the older DC style for this piece, as the newer work is too similar to work I've done before and a lot of their interesting shading has vanished. The posing is as strong as ever, but it's the style itself I wanted to try.

One of the things I had seen, but never really ~noticed@ before, was how the highlights are achieved. A flat, varying thickness white line is used to denote highlights, and to, well, to highlight these highlights, they're surrounded by black lines. This helps really show off the white lights while not being too obtrusive to the rest of the piece, and flows well in the image by being the same type of black shading used elsewhere on the image.

Of course, I made a few mistakes with this piece. The hair isn't in the right style, I couldn't find a good reference picture for glasses on a DC hero, and the cape seems detached from the shoulder at the left side.

Aah well :)

It's HUGE

Click for full size, warning though, it's... it's pretty massive.

Right! This piece has a bit of a story behind it. The point of the creation of this art originates in a contest over at sketchaholics, a site I keep plugging to you lot.

Sketchaholics, as mentioned, is a great art based website which runs user-made competitions. Contests sometimes have prizes, though are usually run to give you ideas to combat artists block, improve other skills (draw 100 faces, draw 20 emotions, etc.), and to give everyone a little bit more exposure!

This particular competition was to create a piece based on an ink blot. You could rotate and resize the blob, but it had to be used as inspiration. Some people took liberties, and just incorporated the ink blot into a different piece (one case of it used as a cow's markings) but most people took the shapes and tried to make something out of them.

The original ink blot:

My interpretation, overlayed:

And I've got to say, it was HARD.

This has probably been one of the most trialing, awkward pieces I've ever had to do! First, interpreting the shape, I began with the little girl, though my initial idea was a bunny... Yeah. Then, the elephant just made sense with that short 'trunk' coming out, but I had to do something with all the bumps. With this, I decided to turn it into a jeweled, sequined toy elephant for the, now decided, girl!

The last shape was the worst, as initially I ignored the back leg which, of-course, made it look far too cartoon-y and silly (the 5-year-olds-profile interpretation of animals, where the forefront leg completely obscured the back leg). Adding the back leg was very awkward though, and left me a little out of the bounds of the ink blot.

The overall character ideas and creature concept are in styles I've never tried before and ended up looking like a child's book cover, which I'm surprisingly happy with!

Oh! And the COLOURS. My LORD colour theory bit me in the ass with this piece.

I originally wanted the girl to have orange hair, and green clothes. A purple elephant. And a yellow monster.

It clashes SO HARD.

Deciding on a gradiented effect has to be one of the better ideas on this piece, and I think it's subtle enough yet pulls the whole image together.

That's all for today!

Though, if anyone cares, the 'official' story of this piece: Not really based on Red Riding Hood in any way, here we have a girl who made her way into the middle of the hot jungle with her giant stuffed elephant. However, the heat got the better of them, and that's when a Golden Jungler (such an original name!) came to their rescue. Red Riding Hood even managed to attach a mini sun-blocking shade to the Jungler's tail for her sweet toy's health.

It's getting late

And I'm afraid I'm still working on the piece I was hoping to post today :< It'll be up tomorrow! But for now, you get:

It's just SO DAMN GRUMPY!

Henyway, I (officially) had my last day of volunteering today! I'm still going in on the bank holiday Monday to sort out some extra work before my holiday on the Tuesday, but today was the last day I was in to see everyone and get the main bulk of work finished. Being (likely) the last time I would see my supervisor, I got her a cake to thank her for looking after me over the summer and generally making it all an enjoyable experience, and as an added bonus she's agreed to act as a future reference for me!

As such, all is well in the world at the moment, minus grumpy llama taking the place of any real art today...

Enjoy!

Dawww

Created for The Monthly Dragon Challenge on DeviantArt, one of the stocks this time around was a Lupin plant. As such, here we have a small, chubby yet VERY badly camouflaged dragon.

I really enjoy the colours in this one and particularly had fun creating the semi-transparent buds on the ears! They're meant to harden into horns as the dragon grows, same process as the claws and bud on the end of the tail~

I also did quite a lot of image enhancing with this piece. I try to stay away from messing with the hue/saturation/shading/contrast in the options menus too much as I like learning how to do it myself, however playing around with it on this piece on the background layer gave the interesting look to the flowers we see, which I'm rather happy with. :)

On that note, I'm reminded of when, in university, we had it hammered into us that we shouldn't have meaningless preferences and act fan-boyish to things. If you know VB and C, and feel you're not a 'real' programmer if you don't work in C for everything, then that incredibly-simple-to-program-windows-form is always going to take you far too long because you can't let go of your pride. Because of this, I'm happy to go out of the bounds of 'this doesn't feel like learning...' and just do the option that looks right. I learnt a lot in this piece regardless and I can't improve if I don't accept knowing what a better picture looks like, right?

Drogo Reimagined?

I can't be the only one who thought this?

I've never read the books, so the series on Sky Atlantic was the first I'd seen of Game of Thrones.

Now, when Kahl Drogo is first talked about, he's referred to (in layman's terms!) the 'Ruler of the Horse People', or something along those lines.

Then, when he first meets to future Kahlissi and brother blondey-gold-face, we get the first sight of Drogo. The way it was filmed was to show a very dark shot of them in the distance, then the horses hooves, then Drogo's face. Seeing these aspects together made me go 'OMG CENTAUR YAY' in my head for a good 10 seconds until we finally saw the shot to prove he wasn't actually a part of the horse...lame.

In too deep

I play FAR too much League of Legends. Currently, I'm mainly playing as Singed while The Boy tends to play as Ashe. This lead onto a 'DAT ASHE' joke which became a mini comic far too late at night, which was later deleted due to it just being atrocious. However, this image survived and I'm rather happy with it!

I feel the proportions are cute without being chibi, the S-curve through the piece (predominantly through the head, chest and down her right leg, being where the weight is distributed) gives it a nice shape and I think the EXTREMELY simple shading nicely adds a bit of depth to the piece.

The background also turned out as I'd hoped, being an incredibly simple idea but giving a strong sense of there being a full structure there, and showing where the 'wall' stops and floor begins by simply ~not~ drawing anything has come off well!

That's all for today, join me tomorrow for some Game of Thrones art!

Octopus Maiden Part 3

The latest version! As you can see, I've reshaped and re-sized the piece a bit, changed the hands since the initial piece and, most noticeably, changed the structure of the legs. As you can see, she's got a more balanced weight-distribution now, being over 2 legs and 2 tentacles, though I'm still not 100% happy with how it looks and, as such, havn't begun shading this area yet.

While I play around with it though, I've been colouring in the inner areas of the tentacles, defining more shading and highlighting, done some darker, higher contrast shading since yesterday, and started work on the eyes and mouth.

The next time I post this WIP will be in a few days, till then I'm finishing off the chibi sprites commission and working on a few other small pieces, including another piece of Mousehunt fan-art.

Octopus Maiden Part 2

Still working on this piece!

Finally made some progress with it, as such I've started shading and highlighting, refining some of the details and I've completely re-structured the piece from the ribs down. I've made her stomach more protruded to give her an increasingly grotesque figure, and she's now balancing on 2 legs and 2 tentacles.

I've also worked a bit more on the commission from yesterday and should have that finished in an hour, may post it up tomorrow unless I make a large amount of progress on this lass, in which case you can expect to see a lot more of her!

Just a bunch of dots

The objects in my pixel brush pack so far!

There's still about 2 rooms left to go, plus a 'misc' tab which will cover everything from windows to radiators.

I've also been taking some commission work over at gaiaonline.com, and at the moment have been working on some sprites:

So looks like I'm fully stuck in the world of pixel artwork for a little bit longer! I'm hoping to make some real progression on the octopus maiden piece and a double-wallpaper in the next week, before I jet off on holiday.

Oh, on that note! While in Florida I'll still be trying to keep up with this blog, however it'll become once every 3-4 days with likely more text and only 1 picture a time I'm afraid, but at least it'll still keep going. :)

Mousehunt revisited!

I did some Mousehunt fan-art a while ago: Here, when I posted the original I included a post about what Mousehunt is and the like, so I won't be repeating myself here! Overall though, I'm still part of the MH community and have always enjoyed the art styles used by Hitgrab, particularly the work of Jacob Johnson.

As such, with these 2 fan-art pieces I've been attempting to emulate his style and I think I'm getting close. Though compared to my first image, done a few months ago now, I have to say my composition has definitely improved! The shadows feel like they exist for a reason and help to create the depth of the piece, while the lighting in general I feel has gotten better. You can also tell where the mouses eyes are easier in this piece...

Also, I've almost finished my pixel brush pack now, I would say it'd be done by this weekend but I'm going to see The Sister tomorrow so won't be functional till Saturday. As such, it'll be an early post tomorrow with the pixel work completed so far!

Octopus WIP

My current WIP, this is the very early stages with the basic anatomy sketch plus some additions to define the character design. I'll be removing the fin-skirt and smaller tentacles in the hair, as I don't think they quite fit the feel, and I'm still unsure about the suction-pad-milia around the eyes, but we'll see on that point.

I'm also considering re-jigging the legs into a different pose. I'll be adding 3 more tentacles, being a matching arm tentacle on her left arm and 2 leg tentacles, so she has 8 limbs in total. As such, instead of the floating-around-underwater pose we see here, I'm thinking having the human legs either far forward or far back and the body also resting on the 2 leg-tentacles, leaving a 4-limbed weight support structure. This way, I'll be able to play around more with weight distribution, and place the character on a beach rather than under water itself, as I've been doing a lot of pieces recently that have been situated under the ocean and very few featuring sand. This seems like a good time to rectify this!

I'm still unsure as to her finned hands and feet, but I love the flipper feeling of her feet so may well stick to this.

I'm still looking at underwater creatures though and considering placing the eyes at the side of the face rather than the front...But of course that would imply a herbivore, the victims of the system. On that note, I can't decide if she should be part of a terrifying monster set or a more benevolent being...

More to come!