Lara vs. Oni

A digital doodle of the final boss fight in the latest Tomb Raider game. If you haven't played it, you should pick it up. I didn't like the trailers but picked it up second hand, and it is really good. As in really, really good. Probably one of the best games I ever played.

Checkers Character Design

In between freelance assignments I'm usually working on one or two personal projects. Most of those never get finished, they more like exercises and when something more serious comes along I abandon them. Right now I'm working on a little story exercise, who knows I might even finish it...

These are some designs of one of the two characters, a NYC-based, 30-something head-hunter named Checkers.

Digital sketches with Photoshop.

Divine Wind

Sketch based on a picture of a WW2 Kamikaze pilot. I did some more but this is the only one I think turned out nice.

I'm prety amazed by some of the videos of Kamikaze you can find. Weird to see these guys preparing for certain death. As they say in Ghostdog: The Way of the Samurai: "Ancient Japan was a pretty strange place."

Marker and ink on paper, and some digital textures. 

Smoking Chef - Doodle

A quick digital sketch done from memory. Outside the building of my studio we have an old bus where you can get something to eat. This sketch was inspired by one of the guys working there. The atmosphere is real laid back and the food is nice, and reasonably priced.

In any other place I probably wouldn't have been too pleased with people smoking in the kitchen but here it just made me smile.

Done completely with Photoshop.

Homework - Boarding from Films

Things have been busy, recently. But in a good way! In the spare time that I have, I'm now doing this awesome story exercise introduced by Emma Coats: storyboarding from films. (Yeah, Emma Coats is the same person that inspired me to do those Next 5 exercises. I'm a fan.)

In the past I did storyboard a sequence from a film every now and then but Emma isn't into half work. In her outline of the exercise she recommends to board out an entire feature film (!) drawing one panel for every shot, if there's a camera move you draw one panel for the first, and another panel for the last frame of the shot. 

Emma's advice to choose a film you already know well, preferably one directed by Speilberg. Since I always want to do things in my own stupid way I of course decided not to go for Spieberg. But, to be fair, I did go for someone who is clearly very much influenced by Spielberg: I chose Robert Zemeckis' What Lies Beneath (2000).

A great film that I think doesn't have the status it deserves. During the late '90s /early 00's there was this Hitchcock revival going on. There were remakes of Rear Window, Dial M for Murder (A Perfect Murder) and of course Psycho. What Lies Beneath isn't a remake, it's a film made with the idea that this might be what a modern Hitchcock film might be like. The film is packed with visual effects (no surprise, it's by Zemeckis) but you probably won't be noticing most of 'em, (that's the way I believe visual effects should be used) the camera is constantly moving into impossible places: through walls, the floor etc.

Anyway, I've always felt that this film is terrifyng and extremely well made. It's a great example of filmmaking tradecraft. Zemeckis is a skilled craftsman and he is using all the tricks in the box with this one! I'm aready learning heaps!

Although the first thing I actually noticed was that this film is pretty hard to board using Emma Coats' instructions: so far it's filled with these ridiculous long shots, packed with camera moves. There's a lot of editing going on without there being any cuts at all. (There's an entire sequence of Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer talking at diner than walking into the kitchen while talking through some needed exposition, that is only one shot!)

So I've changed the rules a little and am now drawing every shot within a shot. Makes sense? No, I didn't think so. Well, for example, if the camera moves from a medium shot to a close-up, I'll draw one panel with the medium and one with the c-u, if the camera's then moving back to a total I'll draw another panel for that. The longest shot I did (that exposition sequence in the kitchen) was 10 panels for just one shot. I do expect that the cutting will get faster as the story moves on.

Jeez, look at me blabberin'! You probably don't get half the stuff I'm talking about! So sorry but, hey, I guess it shows the exercise is working. I'm posting the pages I did so far, they're not much to look at but I wanted to show you that I'm not just sitting here playing XBox all day!

Ink on paper (mostly a Pentell Sign and Pocket Brush Pen) I'm at page 6 now (I continued after I did the photos, they stop at page 5) and I'm currently 25 minutes into the movie. I expect that at the end this will be at least 30 pages.

Heist - Another Next 5 Board

I did another Next 5 story exercise. Based on this photo.

As you might noticed I cheated slightly, panel 4 and 5 are actually the same shot. I'm having a lot of fun with these things, more to come!

Drawn digtial with SketchBook Pro and Photoshop.

Sketch Dump

A random collection of some of my more recent sketches, done in different sketchbooks. When I'm drawing the human figure I keep noticing how my thinking about poses and gestures has changed since I did that Schoolism gesture course. To a neutral observer there might not be much spectacular about these poses but I see a lot of improvement, my drawings are becoming a lot more dynamic.

The sketches above are done from a magazine. The gentleman on the left was based on a pic of Henry Hill, the real life gangster of Goodfellas fame. The other guy is some actor who actually isn't Andrew Garfield but for some reason this sketch looks a bit like him. (At least that is what I think.) 

Below are two more gesture sketches as well as two drawings I did in the Dutch town Maastricht, when I visited there back in February. As you can see I'm trying to focus a bit more on buildings and props when I'm sketching. That Virgin Mary sketch is based on a 15th Century wooden sculpture I saw in a Museum there. 

All sketches: Ink (Pentell Sign, Pentell Pocket Brush Pen, Staedtler Pigment Liner) on paper.

Siren - Next Five

 

The Next Five story exercise was created by Emma Coats, former story artist at Pixar. (You might know her from her awesome list of 22 story basics.) In this exercise you take a random photo (usually from flickr) that you draw as your first shot. The challenge is to draw the next five shots, creating a miniature storyboard.

Every now and then Emma will post a picture on her blog that you can use for this exercise and every time I save it with the intention of doing one of those next fives myself. For some reason they never got finshed, until now!

It took me some time to get to it (Emma posted this picture about a month ago) but here it is. Drawn digital with Sketcbook Pro, this was one great training. Even though I have been drawing digital for quite some time now, I still struggle to get to a level of control that is similar to working on paper (I work on a Wacom Intuos, I wish I had the money to buy a Cintiq) Of course there are always things you wish you'd done different when you finish something like this, but I had fun and learned something so there's that...