Sporegorger Thallid's baby pictures and ageing - Process

I wanted to share some process shots of this piece for anyone who's into that sort of thing. At each step I'll go into what major changes I made as well as why I decided to do so.

Initial Sketch

1. I started with a rough sketch of what I want my composition to look like and the overall shape of my creature. The idea behind the piece was to show a fungal creature that was spreading it's spores on other fungus, much like the idea behind Sporesower Thallid.

Color study

 2. I then set the initial sketch layer options to Multiply, and create another layer underneath where I start to figure out my color scheme. I knew I wanted the creature to have a reddish tone to it so in order to make it pop I decided to make the background green. I also had the idea to make it look like the spores were revitalizing the fungus, so I made sure to make the main fungus red while keeping all of the other fungus green to blend into the background. I also knew from the start I wanted to have a nice purple tone to the spore cloud.

Painting

 3.  Here's where I dive in and really start getting to the meat of the painting. I wasn't entirely pleased with the head shape of the creature so I made it a bit more pointed. I also start emphasizing my lighting setup here with the highlights around the shoulder area. Added a vine overlapping the tail to add some depth. Added some patches of dirt to the ground to break up all the green.

 4. I add a mouth to the creature in order to give it some dimension. I felt like before it was looking directly off into the left, but with a mouth it looks like the head is in profile-view. I thought it would be interesting to show the underside to the red mushroom. I also start hinting more at the shadow on the creature's rear. Got the idea to cover the background trees in fungus as well.

5. Decided that based on my lighting setup, the far-side of the creature's back probably wouldnt be getting hit with as much light so I put it in shadow. I added some color variation in the green tendril areas of the creature and defined their shape. Started working on the spore cloud.

 6. Lots of background work, added more fungus to trees, added some grass to the foreground fungus silhouettes, added some tail spikes (ideally made of fungus) to the creatures tail based on a stegosaurus. Added some more color variation to the spore cloud using different layer options (Color, Overlay, etc.). Added mushrooms to the foreground to make the creature look surrounded by them.

 7. Start painting in the spores one by one. I wanted to give a bright glow to the spores in order to emphasize the idea that they are beneficial to other fungus. I was thinking of Donato's Mechanic painting from his Massive Black tutorial video, and trying to apply my spores in the same way he did with the bright stars in his star-field. Even more color build-up on the spore cloud.

 8. More spores! Spores everywhere, adding more glow to some, letting others remain in the background. I also started thinking that the creature looked a little bland, so I added some more fungal elements to his body. Added a glow effect to the hood of the red mushroom to even further emphasizing that spores=good.

 9. Adding more details and texture, adding some more foreground grass refining some shapes/silhouettes.

 10. The only change between steps 9 and 10 are 2 adjustment layers, Curves and Levels. This really helps up the contrast in the image and gives it a lot more presence. You have to be careful not to overdo it with the adjustment layers though, which is why I adjust the opacity of each adjustment layer to my liking. This is about where I first called the painting "finished".

 11. After posting the image up on Facebook and getting feedback from some of my artist friends like Stephen Najarian and Dennis Darmody, I made the greens in the background more deep to help make the bright creature pop, saturated the green parts of the creature, and added a blue hue to the creature's rear side so there's a nice transition from warm into cool / highlight into shadow. This step really made the mood much more dramatic and made the image pop a lot more. I also went in a added some more transparent areas to the spore cloud so it didn't read as a solid object.

Final Finished Painting

12. Added some final details/rendering, most notably added texture to the creature's body and some mucus going across the opening on the back.

I hope you've enjoyed this process post, thanks for reading!

Sporegorger Thallid - My REAL Inspiration Challenge Entry

I was originally going to submit THIS piece for the Art Order Inspiration Challenge, but I missed a very important detail in the rules for the challenge so I couldn't submit it. The image has to be 100% your copyright, and since I was painting a monster right out of Final Fantasy IX, it didn't qualify. I was pretty bummed about it because I was pretty happy with the piece, and also because there wasn't much time left to do another piece, and I was really busy at the time. The deadline had passed and I was really upset because I missed out on a huge challenge that had a window of around 4 months to do something for. Then miraculously (for me at least) the deadline of the competition was extended another week due to Jon's cross-country move and suddenly I had another chance to get in on the action. It was pretty daunting, from conception to finish I had to create a brand-new painting from scratch, and I only had a few days to get it done. After considering a few options I remembered the piece I did for the Nymph Art Order Challenge which I did THIS piece for. I had originally meant to give the nymph a fungal companion in a full-scene painting, but I wasn't liking what I came up with and wound up scratching the idea for a full-scene and just painted a standalone figure. I had done sketches of the companion creature before, but I hadn't quite nailed down the design of it yet so I decided to explore that creature some more for the Inspiration Challenge. Below is the painting I came up with...

Sporegorger Thallid - Art Order Inspiration Challenge

This piece came together more quickly than any other painting I've ever done. I don't know if it was my fear or missing the deadline a second time, or my excitement for getting another chance, but I knocked out a sketch I was really happy with and proceeded to keep right on painting. Over the course of 2 days I completed this painting, while spending a 3rd day on revising it based on feedback. I managed to submit the piece a mere 4 hours before the submissions page closed. It's probably one of the strongest paintings I've ever made based on some of the reactions I've been getting to it, and I'm really happy with how it turned out as well. This was a huge landmark piece for me even without it being for a contest. Below you can see the paragraph write-up I made for the piece as part of the challenge requirements, as well as a pic of some of the pieces I got my inspiration from...

Cards that have spent time in my fungus deck - my Inspiration

I’ve become a big fan of the card game Magic: the Gathering and I still have the first deck I ever owned; a fungus deck that I bought off the shelf that I’m always tweaking. It’s an item that has become very close to me. I’ve fallen in love with how the deck works and I’ve spent hours staring at these cards and their awesome art and I’ve always wanted to design my own fungus creature and design a Magic card around that creature. Drawing inspiration from those fungus cards in the deck, I’ve created my Art Order entry.

What the illustration would look like applied to a Magic card

Learning from Crits, Part 2: Painting with new information.

A couple days ago I posted my Art Order "Inspiration Challenge" entry. I'm really happy with how the piece turned out, and a lot of that has to do with some of the decision making I dealt with while creating the piece. The crits from Illuxcon offered me some great insight of angles I wasn't considering when making a painting. In this post I'm going to use my latest piece as an example of some ideas I tried to incorporate based on the feedback I received on my portfolio. Here's the piece again as a refresher...

Antlion - Finished Painting

One of the things that Robh Ruppel talked about during my review with him was that I should be organizing me values in order to best serve the focus of my painting. I've stripped out the color of this piece to make it easier to see the values, and I've added some notes to the painting. The main thing to note with this image is that I made the areas of focus have the highest contrast (look at and around the face and mouth). Now compare the face of the creature to the values of the trees in the background, and the objects in the foreground...you'll notice that there's a much more narrow value range in these areas, they almost blend into the other non-focus elements. This was a conscious decision I made to ensure that the viewer would keep their attention right where I want it...the face.

Greyscale image with notes

Now let's take this one step further by using a threshold layer to turn the image into 2 values, pure black and white. In this image you can see that composition for this image is really just a dark object on a light background. The creature is the focus, thus I want him to pop out from the background.

B&W Threshold layer

In the next image I want to point out all the elements that help move the eye around the painting. All of the arrows indicate different elements that direct the viewer's eye around the image. Almost all the elements in the piece are helping direct the eye around and back towards the focus of the piece (the creature).

Lastly, I wanted to talk about the importance of color arrangement. In this next image you can see I've stripped out all the values of the piece leaving just the colors. You can see the creature's shape still holds up, based solely on color you can still tell what the focus is. I pretty much placed a colorful monster on a blue backdrop, so anything that isn't blue is the creature, thus it stands out from the background and pops more. You can also see that in the appendages and body fur, the colors are more muted than they are in the face, saturation control does a great job of helping enforce the focal point of your image as well.

I'm no expert, and I know a lot of this might sound long winded and repetitive in some places, but I thought it would be fun to share some of what I've been thinking about in my work lately and maybe you can start thinking about it in your own work, or use this as a refresher if you already know all about this stuff. Either way, writing this all up helped drill the ideas into my head even further so I'm excited to bring these lessons with me into my next piece.

Antlion

I've been itching to submit something for the latest ArtOrder Challenge for a while now*. Being that the theme of this challenge is "inspiration" it seemed like it offered a great opportunity for me to crank out some fan art. I spent a lot of time considering what I wanted to paint for this, and after a while I realized that I had never done any Final Fantasy IX art, FFIX being one of my all time favorite games. This also gave me the perfect chance to do a nice monster-illustration for Jon Schindehette (something he requested I do for him during my review with him at Illuxcon). So I thought, why not kill two birds with one painting and have some fun while I'm at it.

My Antlion

After sifting through all of the monsters in FFIX I picked one of my favorites, the Antlion. This creature is a common enemy in the game, but the way it is first introduced really made an impact on me when I first played the game years and years ago. When you climb to the top of this massive, hollowed out tree in the desert, you'll reach a settlement in the sky called Cleyra. There is a fork in the road, one path leads up into the town, and the other leads to an ominous sandy pit with not much else around...hmm interesting. Later a significant character is attached by the pit's inhabitant, the Antlion.

In-game graphics fighting the Antlion - FFIX

I love the design to this guy as well as his colors and I thought the setting would be fun to paint him in as well (I'm trying to steer away from monsters just chilling on a plain white background), so I decided to give him a go and I'm really happy with the results! I'm excited to enter the latest challenge and I'm hoping to have some more time to come up with another piece before the due date.

Not a real Magic card, created for promotional purposes only

Oh yeah, I also decided to make a Magic: the Gathering Antlion card using my illustration, I hope you get a kick out of it. I'm going to make another post on how I painted this piece using what I've learned from my recent critiques so stay tuned for that!

*Note: After reading over the competition guidelines again I realized that my entry is unacceptable due the creature being owned by SquareEnix. Oops.

Art Order Submission: Nymph Challenge

 

The Art Order challenges are back and I'm ready to bring everything I've got! In past Art Order challenges I usually start off with a lot of steam, then midway through my piece I look at the other submissions in progress and get a bit intimidated and then I slow down a bit. If I notice someone doing something similar to what I'm doing I feel like I have to scrap what I have so I don't come off as copying. For this challenge I decided to hold off looking at the other entries until I was completely finished with my own, and I'm really glad I did so. I think I was able to come up with an original concept that I'm really proud of. Below are some progress shots and the full and final image..

Original concept sketch and color study

Above is the original rough sketch I came up with for my nymph. I decided to take my time considering what I wanted to do with my nymph so to avoid just jumping into something for the sake of starting. I wanted to be happy with my idea before I started drawing. I decided to go with a fungus theme as I wanted to have a big hulking fungus creature to accompany her in my illustration. I wound up getting pretty busy and also hit a rut with my concept that kept me from completing a full illustration. I got as far as a full finished drawing for the illustration, but I wasn't happy with it so I scraped it. More on that later though.

More color options and figuring out portrait

During my rut I decided to try and focus on the portrait a little bit  more so I could get into the piece again. I played around with some color ideas but decided to stick to the original colors.

Progress shots: preliminary drawing to final product

Above is an overview of the painting process where you can see how the concept changed a bit from the original sketch. I started out painting underneath my drawing in order to keep it intact for a while, painting over areas here and there to slowly get rid of the line-work. Unsure about what to do with the lips I started out painting them purple to go with her eyeshadow, but it wasn't looking too cute so I scraped it. The most drastic change for the character over the course of the painting would have to be the tone. I also originally intended on keeping the colors muted and dead looking along with giving her eyes with no pupils, just plain white. I wanted to make it feel like the fungus was taking over her body and almost possessing her. But it wasn't working for me and it wound up slowing me down. Once I decided to brighten the colors, adjust her pose and expression a bit and then add in some pupils, I really started enjoying the painting process a lot more.

After a month of hard work I finally have a finished Nymph piece that I'm proud to be submitting to Art Order. I spent a lot of time researching for this piece and gathering reference, and I really think it paid off. I may not have been able to complete a full illustration like I had originally hoped, but I have a character I'm extremely proud of and there's nothing stopping me from completing a full illustration, and I'm actually really looking forward to doing so.

Thanks to all the people who took the time to give me feedback on this piece and to everyone who showed support. I look forward to seeing the final Art Oder Nymph Challenge lineup!

Art Order Challenge: D&D Art Test - Orc Chef

I'm participating in the new and very exciting Art Order Challenge based on the D&D Art Test going on over at Wizards' website. Here's my take on an Orc Chef.

Art Order Evolution Challenge

I've been piling on the work lately but I really wanted to participate in the Art Order Evolution Challenge. It seemed pretty simple enough that I'd be able to squeeze a little something into my work schedule. The challenge required an illustration of a character called Lyssa who can be described as "a young female human wizard with black hair who always wears white trimmed in gold". I was really excited about this because for a while I've been trying to find the perfect piece to use my girlfriend as the model, and for this challenge she fit the description perfectly!

Above is my final piece submitted for the challenge (plus shameless self-promotion) featuring the extremely lovely, and amazingly awesome Amabel.

Thanks again sweetie, I had such a blast making this piece and I hope I get to use you as my model again! <3

Illustrating the Art Order Dragon

Jon Schindehette asked the Art Order community to take a swing at illustrating the beloved Art Order Dragon to use on business cards and T-shirts. I saw his post about it only minutes after posting it and I was really interested in giving it a try myself. Here's a walk-through of how I created my piece...

I had just recently gotten my hands on a base to use for my Sculpey maquettes so I was raring to give it a try. I quickly sketched my idea and made a sculpt and lit it.

I then started blocking in the shadows with ease due to having my Sculpey reference.

Next I carved out the silhouette and added some fun design elements to the image.

Here I start rendering the dragon, and it looks to be coming together nicely.

More detail...

Final detailing and added a bunch more dots and inserted the Art Order text.

I did another version where I edited out the background for Jon's use, but this was the final piece I came to for myself and I'm really happy with how it turned out. The Sculpey is turning out to be very useful and just as much fun. I hope you've enjoyed this step-by-step. I want to try and post more in the future.

Art Order: Anonymous Challenge

Yesterday was the deadline for entries for the new Art Order challenge: Anonymous / Trying Something Out of the Ordinary. Out of the 4 options of characters you could illustrate, I went with the red, tentacle, dragon-ish monster due to my lack of interest in the reference material, funny enough. I decided I would try and make something interesting out of an uninteresting source of reference, and I did a satisfying job I think.

Here's the original image to use as reference:

..and here's my take on it:

The line-up for this challenge has been posted, check out all the entries HERE!

Art Order: Brother's Grimm Challenge

Tomorrow is the deadline for the new Art Order challenge: Brother's Grimm. I went with the story 'Little Red Hood'. My take on the scene where riding hood sees her "grandmother". Lineup should be coming in the next few days.


Right now I'm working on a project I should be finishing up in the next month or so. Hint, hint, it's a children's book ;) After that project is over I'll be building up my portfolio some more. There's a lot of fun stuff to look forward to!

Art Order: Ultimate Fighter Challenge

The lineup for the Ultimate Fighter Challenge was just posted on Art Order. My entry is below. I feel really good about this piece. I think I really raised the bar on my character designing, pose and rendering. This was a really exciting piece for me to work on and it was a very rewarding finish.

Art Order: Segmentation Challenge Entry

Art Order just posted the judging results for the latest challenge "Segmentation" up on the blog today so I thought I would post my entry here. Find out about the details of the challenge here, see the full line-up of entries here, and read the judges comments here. My target group was Under 2 year-olds.

The deadline for the next Art Order challenge "The Ultimate Fighter" is coming up soon and I really feel like I raised the bar on my entry for that challenge so I'm excited for the reveal, so stay tuned!

Christmas Treefolk

The latest challenge over at Art Order just wrapped up and here's my entry. This one was the Holiday challenge where you had to take an elements from the holidays and put your own spin on it so I did a treefolk all dressed up like a Christmas Tree. I'm still going to touch up some areas on this, but I figured I should post what I submitted for now and I'll post the revised one later. Happy Holidays everyone!

Art Order: Dungeon Delve Challenge

Today's the deadline for the latest challenge over at Art Order and here's my final entry. There's 121 entries for this one so there's some pretty steep competition. There's a lot of great work to be seen so make sure to check out all of the other final entries over at the forums!

Art Order Dungeon Delve Drawing / Golden Surprise Drawing

Here's a couple of drawings I finished up recently. The first one is for the Dungeon Delve Art Challenge going on over at Art Order right now. Check out some of the other sketches/WIPs that have been uploaded, there's a ton of awesome work up there right.

The second one is for "Million Things Everywhere" assignment. The main point of the assignment is to have information everywhere in the image. The empty spaces behind the character will have more gold and treasure painted in.

Both of these are currently being painted and the finishes should be up in the next week or 2 along with my pieces for the Aesop's Fables.

"Gotta Have a Hook" Art Order Challenge - Final Illustration

Today is the deadline for the "Gotta Have a Hook" challenge on Art Order and this is my entry. I'm very happy with my final and it's been a lot of fun participating in my first Art Order challenge. I look forward to participating in future challenges!

Here's a link to see the rest of the final entries for the challenge.

Gotta Have a Hook Challenge: Detailed Drawing

This was done for Jon Schidehette's latest Art Order challenge "Gotta Have a Hook". The winner will have their piece published by Wizards as if it were commissioned from them right from the start.

It's been a lot of fun watching the progression of all of the other entries and it's put me in a competitive mode that I think has really helped push me to do the best I can. Keep an Eye out for the finished painting.