Illustration & Concept Art with Laurel Austin

okay so I was just talking to a few students out there they're really inspired about doing this kind of event here I think it's a big deal I know in class here that I spend a lot of time talking to students about getting out and having real-world experiences and their effect on your art for sure I think a good example of that sometimes it's not just referencing the animal and actually looking at the animal but being in animals of vironment itself I recently started scuba diving I only been diving about 17 times but there was a lot of interesting things about diving did I didn't expect to learn one was how slow and how relaxed you have to be you can't really just go out there and swim and go all out but I think the most interesting thing I learned was about the environment I had no clue that all those National Geographic videos and Discovery Channel videos I watched where they're showing fish under the ocean we're mostly only within the first 300 feet of the surface of the ocean and I don't think we get a depth sense of the depth of the scale of the ocean but when you go out there and you scuba dive you learned that there's a lot of different species they only exist within a limited range of depth so you have some species they may only live between 1,200 to 3,000 feet they don't even come to the surface or some deeper than that obviously I think we all know deep-sea fish can't handle it but when we say that a lot of the ocean hasn't been explored and a lot of species haven't been discovered even large species possibly it starts to make sense when you look at the scale of the ocean and consider that when you fly from Florida to California at the peak that you fly at 35,000 feet that's the depth of the ocean so imagine all those little layers and where different species can live within those layers and how they could hide and kind of disappear so thinking about the environment referencing being an artist in putting yourself out there and just having use experience I think just makes you just the same way writer would live an exciting life and be able to write about exciting times makes you an artist as better informed and it has more interesting topics up next we have one of my favorite artists Jesus really brilliant there's no other way to put that Laurel Austin I think the best compliment I can give her was came from this weekend actually Dylan Cole took a look over at some of the kind of prehistoric mammal concepts that Laurel had done that's a big interest of mine I love prehistoric mammals and he goes my god who is that ha ha ha and I looked at Dylan I've known Dylan for about 11 years I got Tesla Ross and how do you not know her and he goes I just I've never seen it and I go come my office I have some more show you then all right so let's give Laurel nice round of applause okay so I'm going to demo today about sort of how to use a creature reference an animal reference in your creature design to sort of get like novel and and cool effects my thought was that I would do sort of a cool a like creature eat horse in like deaths pale horse from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and I'll just launch right into it because you can see my artwork in the in the gallery if you want to and can intern Internet and all you know I draw I work for Blizzard Entertainment so most of what I do is illustrate inand concept design for their various properties but creatures are sort of near and dear to my heart and I'm an enormous animal geek I sort of my brain has a funny sticky quality when it comes to anything animal related I will tend to remember it so it helps a lot when when doing this kind of thing because it's sort of having a little bit more knowledge will help you Google the right things pretty much and find like the best reference possible for what you're doing so when considering an assignment like this it's sort of like well we're going to do a horse so it's kind of got to be a horse it's got to be sort of recognizable as something horse like at least this is what I would normally want to do and there's sort of the questions I ask myself when I'm thinking I want to design a character um how close to a real horse you could do like something vaguely four-legged that someone rides on and maybe it's got like some sort of crazy dragon neck or like a gigantic lizard tail or something like that today I think I kind of want it to have a silhouette that looks at a distance like a conventional horse at least mostly just personal preference you could go in number directions and and when thinking about these kinds of things it's like what impression do you want the viewer to be frightened of this thing do you want it probably shouldn't be cuddly but in some cases you know you never know and what sorts of reference you can pick in order to sort of get that kind of impression and first and foremost since it's a horse probably want to look up horse reference and trying to think of like there's actually quite a bit of diversity in horses like you get this guy who's sort of is frisian horse and knowing a bit about the breeds as well will also help you google because if you google horse you're not going to find stuff that's all that useful you'll find a ton of different stuff you'll probably find a lot of pictures of like little girls trying to like hugging their ponies and stuff which is fine but probably not what we need today or you get like this kind of thing which is a Gypsy Vanner horse which kind of looks like it out of being a shampoo commercial it's beautiful but you probably like it doesn't look it looks not like like a horse I think that the death would ride or this little guy you know so there's there's a lot even even when you're just starting off with horses there's a lot of choices you can make to get the right kind of impressions thoroughbred is another one which are the racing horses that have incredibly long legs and long bodies and it's kind of getting into a bit more of the of the territory I think I would tend to to want to go into with this type of assignment but one of my favorite horse breeds is this kind of weird I think Middle Eastern type called the occultic which is a very highly bred and it it has a bunch of kind of weird characteristics they're very skinny they're very long they actually don't have a whole lot of hair they often are born completely without any hair at all which probably isn't very good for them and suggest they're probably inbred but it makes a nifty look and also when thinking like the the I think of the description from revelations is that it's a pale horse not a white horse you'd think you see you can you're pale you think white but the one of the other horsemen actually rides a white horse which i think is either like conquest or pestilence so we're going to not do white so you know when you think what's what what is pale mean pale can mean a lot of things it can mean something you know kind of realistic like a like a Palomino or something but these are Celtx also they come in these like crazy metallic colors like you see that guy kind of looks metallic like that's not the photo that's kind of actually what they look like um I have some other photos like this guy you know this isn't white but it's it's like it's kind of weird and ghostly and I think it sort of provides a good sort of jumping-off point for this sort of assignment and so once we're sort of thinking okay we kind of want a skinny horse we're going to use our Celtic reference but when when thinking of it's sort of creature II it's supernatural it's going to have other things it's going to have other elements added to it so we so it has the associations of death and like what other things in the world are associated with death and so like Dizzy's and like rotting flesh and zombie stuff and bones and skulls and nasty spiky things we could go sort of ideas a bit of the obvious roots like a horse with a skull head like I think we've all seen that before so I'd tend to at least for today's purposes not do that and so you have like predators scavengers like vultures nocturnal animals yeah poisonous things deeps even like something as crazy as a deep-sea weird fish stuff like the ones with the big spiky teeth and things like maybe there's something there that we can that we can think we might want to to incorporate into the design personally at this stage I usually start with heads when I'm doing creatures and it's sort of a personal preference I find I find if I start with a head and I get head I like I'll be able to sort of add a body to it and and get a good sense of of what the rest of it should look like once I have a have a face and you know so start drawing and I'm thinking especially with a with a face to begin with I'm thinking adding in something like some elements kind of like a rat like something something little and sneaky and skittery would be sort of a good a good way to start and use thinking like horses and rats don't look very much like each other that's true but it's nice at least with animals generally they have a lot I mean like an animal body plant especially a mammal body plan you know we all have four legs pretty much we all have we all have necks wheeled heads we all the ears so adding in bits like shapes that echo one one thing versus another is not that hard and as far as as that kind of stuff goes you start on rats kind of have big kind of buggy eyes that are sort of kind on the sides if there has any of these these bowed convex faces I have a picture picture here is a little hairless rat or a little guy but that they like they have that they have the nasty teeth knee of these pointy faces and they're sort of incorporating those shapes will kind of start to give a kind of supernatural like creepy creepy quality and also if anybody has any questions throughout this at all like put up your hand and and I'll try to answer it as I go I usually find it's a little more fun if the audience kind of that kind of you'd think of something feel free to feel free to ask so if I've got this is sort of a regular horseface gonna start in this way yes sorry I yeah yes normally normally I do I think I'm a little weird in that regard I usually kind of do like a tiny bit in what in the way of line my line is not that pretty and I'll go straight into paint because I'm a bit better at that I don't have my regular brushes with me - I forgot them this morning but usually like people talk about brushes a lot and ask for brushes a lot and and that's cool like brushes can get you a lot of different awesome effects actually I'm going to turn snap off here yeah you can get a lot of great effects with different brushes like spatter brushes and kind of texture brushes and have your your work look a you know more textural more like a real painting sometimes but as far as a like I like drawing goes I don't find like I use the right of the basic hard round for like ever ages and ages before I ever picked up a like a anything more textured so really most of what you do you don't really need any any fancy brushes or they won't like the little help they'll be neat um but they're not going to really save you like they're not going to make your painting awesome when it wouldn't otherwise be I think that that Griffin painting in the in the in the gallery I did with just with just the hard and soft rounds so here's kind of you know is sort of a regular horse face as far as incorporating the rat stuff goes often liquify as a pretty good tool I use it quite a bit when I'm using Photoshop it's a bit cheaty but you know I don't mind kind of you've got your basic drawing and just push the state of the shapes around kind of trying to get a creepy this isn't sufficiently creepy for my tastes I'm going to start to put color in my history of you yeah I'm using just different brush modes brush painting modes so here's sort of starting to think about the color we're started getting a little bit more like tone into it go back to my reference and thinking about paleness these guys this is a brand of horse called the Norwegian Fjord and they're always a color called done or grello which is kind of weird weird words for a horse the kind of arcane horse breeder type things but if you know if you have certain background knowledge about where to find reference because this is sort of a like it's not a color you would necessarily expect it's kind of like got that those crazy Reds in it and got the sort of nice like creamy creamy white color and it's cool dark face in order to find this I think I had to Google Braille own Norwegian Fjord and I didn't even have the word horse in the in the search line so it's useful to to have like a little bit of background knowledge about that stuff so that you can find really cool reference and get get the best pictures it's better to go into the to the field to actually like see see horses too but when you're when you're good when you've got an assignment near lega I need to find a full horse then Google Google is your friend and also when you're thinking about death it's often fun to just kind of like dark out the eyes or at least right next to them so that it kind of it kind of looks like it's emo or something wearing guyliner something like that you know hopefully not too much but it's it's all these sort of shapes and codes that we're all socially kind of aware of like stuff that has big pale eyes kind of it it gives you the the feeling of like um phil was talking about with the with the the lizard like the lizard might not be thinking of eating you it probably isn't it probably has had it's probably had dinner and it's it's kind of like it doesn't actually want to eat you but you look at its face and you can't read it and you're like like I don't I don't know what you're thinking so it's it's a it's a creepy like when you look at the the face of something and you can't read its expression and you don't know anything about it it makes you feel really uneasy and that's kind of the the sorts of things you want to incorporate into a creepy design and you're just using lighten to get rid of my blacks which I find is a really really useful way to get rid of your blacks and have you know cuz you can kind of get muddy like colors can get money if you leave black in them too much so it's often good to get rid of them pretty early if you don't actually want them in the final design and here I'm using like reds around the muzzle to kind of get that bloody translucent feel and kind of greens in the rest of the skin partly so that it has a nice contrast but also because that sort of sickly deathly undertone of like gross translucent stuff is a usually a good way to go for something death like anyway so you see I'm sort of bowed out the head I thought I'd make the I kind of like creepy and like milky and stuff it's it's sort of evocative of the eyes of nocturnal animals really really like contrast II and bright there's this guy which is the eye eye which is you've probably seen this before in various nature documentaries but it is this really weird lamer than like Olly Murs it's native to Madagascar and they have the this enormous ly creepy middle finger that they used to to get stat like rubs out of vlogs and they're actually like really nice little animals apparently and and you know would know like could not possibly hurt a human if they were if well maybe they could if they were really trying but but generally we'll try to avoid people but they have this they have this horrible right yeah there he is getting the stuff out of the egg kind of weird but they have this reputation I think in in Madagascar among the natives that if you see one it's it's horribly bad luck if you see one you might die and I'm not sure of the exact the exact like legends but they have I mean they're creepy looking so they have this horrible reputation but they're really you know they're just doing their thing also like poor like really poisonous animals this is a black mamba and I just love the color of Black Mamba mouths because they're not black as snakes go they're actually kind of this sort of weird pale tan color which is probably why I've brought them today with the paleness but that contrast is like they opened this mouth at you and it is this like sickening black tari like like is that guy like you know that is not a good that is not going to be your friend he does not like you and it's a very unusual sort of color combination also when thinking about this stuff other animals sort of evocative of death would be like the vulture again also very nice animals but this guy is a lappet-faced vulture and yeah they have this like horrible skin texture and I think they they have the the head or they have no feathers on their head because they stick their heads into carcasses a whole lot and it doesn't do to have monkey feathers on your head all the time so they've just evolved to not have any so they're quite scary-looking but again they're just doing their thing but we can use those colors and those textures and those shapes to kind of help us along because these are all sort of human associations like animals don't really you know they're just they're just living their lives and they're doing their thing and they look how they look for their own reasons and then reasons that don't really have anything to do with us but we tend to project all this stuff on them which is useful to use and know in all design let alone just creature design so I'm thinking like so I've got I feel like I've got like a little bit of the rat and a little bit of the eye eye in the face and again we're not we're not talking about like like beating you over the head with this stuff I still want it to be a horse and I think you'd agree it's it's it's pretty much it's pretty much a horse but echoing those shapes just a little bit just that bowing of the head just the larger-than-average eyes that are way more open than horse eyes would ever get sort of how how I want to to do this stuff just kind of starting to get a little Anatomy or like little mottled skin in there so he looks very surprised I would too if death were riding on my back anybody have any other questions I wouldn't I would tend to say yeah and it's sort of as far as heads go they're sorted in a lot of creatures they're sort of the culmination of their where you look first basically and they're the first thing that'll give you the impression you want in the final creature and you know sometimes maybe you'll have an idea for something that is a bit more about the body or about something about the body but for me I sort of you know the windows are the the thighs of the window to the soul and that's sort of the if I can get that I feel like I can pretty much do the rest of it without too much too much problem sort of when you start to think about this kind of stuff like I'm trying to keep sort of this this sweep kind of like that that shape partly just to have like a because I'm sort of planning to have like a hunched sort of predatory stance later on so having that sort of continuous curve is something that will be pretty helpful and good looking at yes I do I use I use brush modes a fair bit I am especially when when thinking about color like at the moment I'm just using normal but a lot of the time like see how this this color here is sort of it's a pretty uniform kind of pinky gray at a slightly later stage I would tend to go into that and break it up with a little bit more saturation in some places and a little bit less in other places and and I would usually do that with either lighten or darken or multiply or or overlay lighten and darken are actually extremely useful just because they they help you like break up sort of difficult areas where you've painted in a bunch of stuff and I can show you now actually uh if I lock transparency which is usually a good thing to do when I go in to darken yeah darken so I'm feeling like this stuff is kind of too uniform so I'll pick the color and then I'll get like a slightly more saturated and maybe slightly more orange version of that weight a little bit lighter it's done multiply that size it's not this it's not working okay a little more saturated you can kind of see how that starts to because it only really picks it up in the areas where that the the picked color is lighter than the than the darker rather than the base color so it's not really affecting here much but it's affecting here which is nice see I'm just kind of starting to get the anatomy of the face and sort of when thinking about horse anatomy there's an artist that I always tend to go back to whose name is George Stubbs and Stubbs was working I think in the 19th century and he did this collection of incredibly involved horse anatomy drawings this isn't Stubbs this is someone else but um but really if you're here Stubbs so you can see he he knows he knows his stuff I think all he ever painted practically were horses and landscapes and well pretty much landscapes with horses in them and that's about that's about it so he was really really good at horses and yeah you can see he I'm pretty sure he did some crazy anatomical experiments with some some horses and you know they're beautiful engravings as well in addition to being like pretty accurate and really useful for us so you can kind of see with something like this the the neck and the the big big big jaw bone that were like an enormous masseter attaches to this crazy big chewing muscle and kind of nice pointy pointy face bring out the rest for the for the rest of the body later but yeah so when we're thinking about that masseter kind of get that there and you get the edge of the zygomatic arch I'm also an Anatomy geek right here that's the that's the cheekbone that's a little bit too yellow but yeah so I'm just sort of color picking and so this I kind of want him to feel a bit hollow in the way that that humans feel when you they get really really thin yeah so that here's sort of the edge you can see with the with the picture you kind of sort of this area right underneath the eye how that Ridge goes there because the masseter is a muscle that attaches along this edge and then then attaches here so it's that you know that big like round shape when you're drawing a horse that's pretty much what that is it's um some mega mega chewing power they have if they have to see I sorta start to think about what I want to do with the mane and tail I'm thinking like it's a it's a sort of sickly like gross not nice animal and so it probably wouldn't have like those big shampoo flowing Mane's and Tails and I kind of want it to feel really spiky and aggressive and and dangerous and a mane is sort of a nice way to do that or at least to start to give that impression and almost not like it has hair more like it has sort of quills even even slightly like you know those really sort of primitive feathers that are just sort of sticking like in the Black Swan that movie where you got those like creepy little little like feathers sticking out of her skin kind of kind of like that um sort of what I am looking for not exactly still looking like a mane like it definitely looks like a horse but it's it's got a little bit more a little bit more going on there go back and do a bit more on the chin right now right now I'm feeling like the mouth is a little goofy looking which is not what I want I want to want angry angry terrifying horse not goofy sort of I think what's what's making that slightly goofy impression is the sort of floppy quality to it so it's often nice when that starts to happen to kind of like angle it out a little bit more and kind of maybe has some sort of like creepy beard like creepy pointy quill beard or something like a horse might creepy is the operative word of today you'll hear me say it quite a lot hey works for me you so like even a little like a few quills sort of running into it that are sort of the same color as the skin just that it doesn't feel like really abrupt okay so I kind of I'm kind of pretty okay with where that is at the moment and so I'm going to go back and look at my reference and kind of what I might want to incorporate into the body again like I love the hunch of a vulture of that you know that that shoulder thing they get and that sort of low head and again like you get these sorts of like pointy pointy feathery parts and you know like I'm pretty sure the how the horsemen of the apocalypse can fly we could put wings on it if we wanted to I don't think they typically do from a they're usually just kind of magical flying horses that don't have wings so we'll try that first and then if we have time and feel like it we can we can add we can add more stuff later but I'm thinking as far as a general body shape goes something a little bit more predatory than a horse because versus like they have these sort of big tubular bodies and they sort of usually pretty elegant next but like this guy is a Spanish fighting bull and you know it's not it's not a predator by any means but it has this very front heavy very aggressive body shape that probably can't use one to one because I mean it's obviously it's obviously a ball it's not a horse but would be good to sort of get that sort of front heavy that's sort of like slightly angry stance to it so sort of what I'm thinking for that you get would see with these guys like they've got this big body they've got this sort of like thin elegant elegant head and I kinda you want a little bit of that but not not you want to mix it up full I have my other riff yeah same with a rhino kind of like a little bit a little bit of that like it's not it's still going to be like a skinny horse but I want to get a bit of that of that power and that aggression books it depends on what subject it depends on what subject its I would tend to pick kind of yeah which animals that just have have qualities of the thing that I'm trying to trying to get also big cats big cats and predators and wolves and all that kind of stuff will help so I would sort of knock it in like this at this point and sort of prey animals and this is a very general statement that is not true of all things but I think as far as what we think of when we think of a prey animal like a horse or like a deer is it'll tend to be sort of more it'll be more sort of middle heavy little be like a tube buddy on these kind of skinny legs and then head up front whereas with a predatory animal they'll be they'll have that front heavy they'll have like a thin back end if you think of like a cheetah the way the the way the lower body like sweeps up it has this very big chest and this very very thin waist and we can't go as extreme as a cheetah or like we could but I wouldn't usually go as extreme as a cheetah but adding in a little bit more of that of that impression will help a bit start up we're starting to kind of adding in adding in more and I know people think people get really confused with horse legs' a lot of the time needs to be a little smaller because they seem like they're so different from from most other animals and most certainly from us because you know they are basically running on their toenails which is not something humans do I hope and it's actually useful to note with the anatomy of these guys that their bones are all you know they're not exactly the same as us but they're pretty darn similar and they've pretty much got all of the same stuff that that we do basically like this is their scapula this is their shoulder blade and this is their humerus or their upper arm the this guy and this would be the radius and the ulna and this is basically the anatomical equivalent of our wrist so their whole lower leg is actually like a modified hand with only one finger except with those weird polydactyl horses that are born with more than one so as you can see all the wrist bones like when you look at a human scale and you see all the many wrist bones in there and and that you can see there's a bunch of them there and I'm not sure if all of them are there but it certainly certainly quite a bit and it's the same with the back end like this is their hip and that's their femur and tibia and fibula and then this is the equivalent of our ankle I found it much easier to understand once I realized that that was actually basically the same as what we had that the knee is actually the wrist so understanding how these things move makes a little more sense like if it actually like this is their elbow right there so it's different it's a different way of locomotion but it's not it's not like that different from us the ground line it's funny because horses are one of those animals that just come up again and again because there's so many things like westerns and you know fantasy games and stuff you all need them and you're just like I got to pull out the reference again what yeah eventually you internalize it so you remember if you draw enough of these things and I think I was like a lot of little kids like the last unicorn when I was six was like my favorite movie so it was sort of you learn when you're pretty when you're pretty young might be a girl thing and I know so again I'm in a normal horse like they have a little bit of this waist thing more than like a cow because the cow is it like a big room and an animal that needs a lot of guts space for for fermenting their food and a horse does not do the same thing so it doesn't need quite as big of a gut but they still have you know compared to other animals so you see I'm leaving like a little bit more weight in the front I don't think I've exaggerated as much as I want to so I'll probably pull out the liquify again in a minute once I have these back legs at least roughed in and it's a good thing I have Photoshop because drawing this and designing this stuff by like in pencil is only you couldn't do this stuff where you cut and paste and then warp as if you can it just takes a lot longer and today with deadlines you often have to be have to be speedy sort of want to leave the the tail kind of kind of spare again and kind of rat like usually or snails are only about like that long for real but I think I want it to be like longer and kind of again creepy looking any more questions all right so kind of the lighting in the painting certainly um usually at a slightly later stage that's more of a thing with with illustration than it is with concept art it's it's usually pretty useful to have a fairly neutral light this light is pretty diffused it's probably coming from the top but I'm just starting knocking in the drawing so I'll usually think of the of the the lighting like not that far into it but certainly just kind of getting the shapes in at the moment I also like the warp tool sort of lets you kind of push and pull a little bit move this guy again going to liquify and again I think I want to make the front end like a lot heavier kind of making the head a little bit smaller kind of working the lines so that they really flow and feel really heavy throughout it and kind of pulling up the thing so it sort of feels fast and kind of dangerous looking are we on time here and so yeah you want to make the head smaller because if you make the head smaller it'll be kind of a smaller heads usually equal kind of bigger bigger animals so I sort of have this start and I kind of want to start adding like thin a thinness to it because this guy looks pretty bulky he looks like it could take you out if you if you wanted to which which I guess is is one way to go you would think usually with sort of popular personifications of death there they're going to be kind of they're usually like in and they're kind of skeletal and they're kind of they're kind of well you know that the skeletal horse with the with the skull face and all that and you know that's cool that's cool and that's probably the kind that's something you want to use and something you want to consider definitely but if you're looking for something that isn't exactly like every other representation of this thing ever made sometimes it's nice to do something a bit different take a little longer to read maybe but that's that sometimes okay so I sort of want to start breaking the the silhouette a little bit more of like nasty kind of want to do that think I'll Oh is that work not really so you try a lot of things out and then be like no I'm a little weird in my concept art habits and that I sort of do as much in the in the middle of the concept I'll sort of maybe do fewer thumbnails but really really really noodle at them I don't think that works for everybody but it happened to make sense for me sort of thinking about ways to make it look a little bit less horse like and you guys know when you know like like when you have like a horse character that has like split hooves sometimes they'll get that sort of deer hoof where there's two that's actually I mean that's cool but there when you want to do something a little weird with a horse hoof often it's kind of hard to think of like a hoof is really different from a claw and I kind of want to don't want to do like regular horse hooves on this guy I'm just just because it's fun not to sometimes and I'm thinking of adding sort of like like claw like like multi toed things and the ancestors of modern horses had I think they were they were five-toed and they they lost all but their middle toe as they sort of their their feet changed into hooves so when thinking about how to do that because it's so it seems so weird to be like okay here's this like basically like tube leg where it's like you know like joint bone joint bones and think about how to incorporate other like pose into that it can be a little weird because they're such pillar-like structures um but it's useful actually to know what the like modern relatives of courses are that might have a sort of different foot arrangement rhinos are one actually although it's not the one I'm going to use today see like that he's got three toes and he's got three roughly similar shaped big toenails which is cool but what I find is most useful is the animal called the tapir where's my tapir so they're kind of cute is it a baby tapir but you can see they have these I guess four toes that like if you're looking you can kind of see the similarities elbows up here his scapula is right there his wrist is there and a horse would be much more elongated from here but the bones are really really similar so kind of thinking about how to incorporate that I think I don't know if I can do it from this angle to well but think about this stuff like something a little like that or like a bigger middle bigger middle toe something that still from a distance would read horse like but be a little bit be a little bit different maybe it's got like little dewclaws like rooster Spurs that come out the side rooster Spurs are like murder by the way feather there I don't know if you've ever seen a rooster but those things are like huge they beat each other up with them so like if I were to do it from here kind of like that sort of want to put sort of quill like feathering on the legs as well because it's fun actually these eyes are looking to goofy to kind of buggy buggy and not not in a scary way so I'm going to work on that a little bit kind of thinking about like maybe it's got some sort of weird gland or something that has gone all like seeping and grossed diseases usually like a nice way to to signal these sorts of otherworldly and and terrifying feelings in an audience a little bit smaller part of the goofiness is in the you can kind of do this stuff yeah it's a little better sort of want to accentuate that arch I kind of want to legs to be longer to his legs feel a little bit a little bit short movie none there yeah I guess not know what and sort of thinking about like you know gross Ness and terrifying Ness but also that sort of like beauty that you'll see in in animals that make them extra extra creepy kind of want to like bring the main down so that it sort of has it makes it look a bit less like a normal horse I'm not thinking about lighting too much in this stuff yet it just sort of a generic light source when you're trying to keep too many things in your mind at any one point it can be really difficult to deal with any one of them so it's good to sort of isolate your thing so when you're doing concept art usually you're like the most basic generic light source is usually going to be your best bet and then think about that lighting stuff later when you're doing illustrations and and other other drawings like color keys and stuff you can think about the lore that but color keys are when you're just thinking about lighting in color and and you can sort of pull away any any extraneous factors I'm thinking that's looking pretty good but I would like to I would like to add a little more of that sort of sickly green color back in because I think it was working nicely and at the moment we have that sort of with that dark and maybe not that either where's my history there it is there should be lightened yeah sort of putting putting a little bit more as soon as I can figure out where I am there it has to be later I guess yeah here we go that's sort of like you almost never want to see yellow in your skin from what I understand like get to signifies things like liver problems and all sorts of nasty stuff and you know maybe we don't know this stuff consciously all the time but just these colors and these shapes will just naturally signal to our animal during our animal brains that something is not quite right with this thing and that's usually enough to get the impression that you want to signal to your audience the kinds of things that you want them to feel because it's really what concept art and illustration and all the stuff is about is just to make your audience feel something that if you can elicit that emotional response in them that's where your your greatest success will be because when you make someone feel something they tend to remember it if they just you know if they gloss over and they're like oh that's nice whatever it is then then you know maybe it did did the job on the tin but but it won't really stay with people in order to stay with people whether it's making them laugh or whether it's making them you know feel scared they'll they'll remember it when you really genuinely connected with them like that okay so I'm pretty decently cool with where this is I guess it I could go skinny or it's sort of a decision point where he's sort of he's fairly powerfully-built he's kind of like a weird-looking like creepy horse you could go thinner or you could go um you could put maybe even more power into his front end actually why don't we do that because it's a little bit that's a little bit fun where you can really make that front end really thick and kind of bring down the shoulder a little bit kind of you pull even pull down the chest a little in not that yeah so you can see I try thing I try things out a lot but that's why Photoshop is nice because you have layers that you can you can you know turn them turn them off or go back in the history and undo and say for a final thing we wanted to add let's say our our directors come back to us being like cool horse but it's going to fly and we kind of wanted to have wings and use a wings that's that's awesome okay and kind of think what are the badasses of wings that you can find and for me vulture wings are just like the be-all and end-all of wings to use on large creatures because you know vultures are you know they're pretty big birds and they do this thing where they sit with our wings open a lot where I think they send themselves in there they have a nice time but they they get all these really cool postures and they have these amazing these amazing long feathers and these crazy like they do feel like they could hold up a lot of weight also found awesome picture just for curiosity's sake this is a stellar sea eagle fighting with a golden eagle probably over some food and again you get that you get this awesome sort of posture in the wing where he's really he's really like making himself really look big and you can feel that upward movement with it which i think is pretty awesome so when thinking about that in this sort of context you know we don't have a ton of room so I'll probably just pull up the canvas a little bit float the canvas a little bit just to make sure we have enough room and then add on like so wings are a funny structure where you know they're basically arms but they're covered in feathers but if you know those sort of underlying structures it's not that hard to sort of conceive them as as arms that have like big sleeves on them so you sort of start off they attach will pretend they attach somewhere to the shoulder blade and there's some sort of anatomy going on there that that will help them work and they've got skin but attaches there and sort of you have the shoulder you have the elbow you have the wrist you have the hand and then the feathers come off from there and vultures have these sort of amazing like very separate very kind of gnarly looking feathers and they are usually pretty easy to see where they've been separated and easy to see the basic clumps of them you'll get the primary flight feathers which are the ones that are kind of like fingers that look kind of like fingers that's a where is that here's some Egyptian vultures as well these are the primary flight feathers and then these are the secondary flight feathers so it's kind of like if you imagine fingers and then if you had like a big sleeve the secondaries are sort of like the sleeve and then the other ones are the fingers sticking out that's how I usually think of them anyway so here's here's the feathers and then the secondaries kind of coming out like that sort of thinking of like big dark nasty animals that like to stick their heads into corpses and stuff kind of if there were sort of little like feathers that kind of hid the quill feathers and sort of hid the transition yeah so here's my horse it's a it's a start I can show you guys as well beforehand I did a previous version at home to just kind of get the lay of the land and thinking in a slightly different direction with it and here's kind of a that was where I went at home when I had all my fancy brushes with me kind of like you can see with the rat where where you get the you can see where you get the like the the round eye and the sort of creepy like pointed face and some kind of almost scale like pattern and sort of gross stuff coming off of them and thinking about that predatory body shape where you kind of get a little bit more looseness in the shoulder which is sort of indicative of like a cat or just some big awful predatory thing and this thinking of like like disease and Malak mange that could really sort of sell the deathly deathly quality in sort of a musculature but like a thinness that still that still you know gives you that sort of hopefully instill some fear in you I would hope if you saw one of these guys in real life and that sort of green green undertone and that sort of color shifting sort of a translucent kind of corpse like quality to the skin and then wings if you feel like it kind of pointy pointy feathers but yeah that's the sort of where I'm going with it um any questions any more um I think I have tended like I've sort of naturally fallen into this style of like just kind of start off in black and white but really quickly go into color I sort of fell into that naturally I just I used to paint traditionally in school and it was sort of a sensible way to think about it for me I think even when I'm doing line and I don't do just line terribly often I tend to still think of it like shape because the shape of things is really where like the basic emotional content is like here you get that sort of like you get that sort of predatory like lean forward and that and that like shape here that really hopefully makes you think of something other than a horse even though you're seeing you look at it you're like okay that's a horse but you think it gives you notions of other things the I wouldn't describe my painting style to Blizzard I think a lot of people who work for who work there work in a lot of different ways but like the the lightness and the color is something that we certainly need to do you can think about that stuff um I I would tend to say there's no way that a horse is getting airborne without magic anyway so even if even if it's like even if it had the biggest wings ever because birds are so light there's so much lighter than then they look even and their whole bodies are just tuned to being as light as as birdly possible to do what they need to do and it takes a lot of energy to fly even then so as far as physics goes I think you want uh you want it to feel plausible so like you don't want you know little tiny stubby wings unless it's supposed to be cute or something on on an animal this size but but really like use there's some suspension of disbelief going on there one thing at least with like dragons that I is my personal preference is to not you know a lot of people design dragons with like the memory and ending them like the arm or just like really high up on the body for my taste I I prefer them with like a bigger a bigger membrane that attaches lower to their body even though it makes designing them sometimes a little bit more difficult to get nice shapes in there just because I feel like like that gap is pretty implausible so I do I do care about about structure and function definitely but it's it's a it's a pushing Pole because you you have to if you want perfect function you're going to have to compromise on look sometimes but it should never be all about the flare and the looks anyone else oh just revealed layers um it'll depend sometimes there are projects that require you to have very specific layer setups and those you kind of have to have extra thought to to be like okay this is my this is my horse layer and then here are my wings and then I'm gonna and I'm going to keep them all separate I'm really careful to not paint on on things when I'm just doing stuff for myself I tend to say hey you know if it's if the layers aren't important I'll just be like yeah well like I'll slap things on I use copy merged a lot where you just get a copy a copy section of of everything like every layer that's visible at the time and then take that and then warp it or move it or do whatever I need to do to get the impression I want but yeah there are certainly and it seems it seems to be more lately that a lot more projects require very specific layer setups and those you know they take extra work but they're not it's not it's not crazy difficult or anything anyone else I mm-hm um yes um the the color I guess it would depend because if you're talking about because I did a piece for for the announcement of hearthstone that was like that work with the card and then the gnome just lost and he's all sad that one was actually before I really started doing the the layered thing and that is like all on one layer and I do definitely use adjustments at the end and like I like to take advantage of all that Photoshop can do for me with while still hopefully achieving something that looks decently painterly but later on the the one I did more recently for the for one of the expansions with the gnome and the Goblin that one did was on a lot of different layers so that one was mostly like like it was the characters and there was a lot of like atmospheric mists in between the characters and at the end there were like a few adjustment layers and and that stuff I tend to tend to use layer comps to kind of organize everything so that I can turn things on and off pretty easily that's a I'd recommend layer comps there they're pretty good I can show you guys right now if you want just a way to organize your layers being on and off so like if I want that guy to be on it's one if I want that guy to be on it's another one and then it'll just switch automatically when I do that so it's it's pretty handy and that can help organize different layers a lot anyone else I actually can't see hands very easily so over there uh I've never really worked on Macs so I can't tell I've always worked on PCs they've always been pretty good I don't imagine things would be vastly different on a Mac except I know their monitors tend to be pretty good but I use a Cintiq at home and at work so that tends to be where I where I go with things I like having access to my 3d programs well and I don't know if you can you've as many of those are available on Macs but maybe they are these days I haven't been paying too much attention I'd say it's definitely a concern I mean when you work for it for such a like a like a company that has such an incredible presence in just popular culture it's it's good too you don't want to get too like too tied where all you're known is for doing that one thing because you know you want your own voice too and I do i do do work outside my sculptures are things that I've tended to actually I mean you may if you if you've looked at my work at all you may notice some similarities to the zombie unicorn I did sculpture it's about yay big and it's like sculpey and so I really like doing that stuff I think I would be really I would be really sad one day if I had never made my own my if I died without ever having made my own IP so I plan to do that at some point in my life hopefully make something of quality but it's actually really I mean like I'm not a writer I would never say I was a writer so it's it's hard to think about making anything of quality because there's this whole other you know universe of a profession that I don't know a whole lot about so it's a big undertaking but hopefully okay I'll I'll do something decent one day animal artists well I mean Terryl Whitlatch is certainly an enormous influence on me I've loved her work for for years and years and years and I mean people are the people here just crazy like I saw the lineup when when Travis suggested that I come and I was like oh wow Oh like alright yeah so so yeah the people here are amazing and um yeah I usually Maya sometimes sometimes zbrush but back when I was doing gun concepts for brink I managed to just like do like a tiny doodle and then do most of the design actually in 3d which for a first-person shooters is I would say the way to go for me at least yeah yeah you just do the you do like the design mostly in 3d and then you just you know do the renders and then paint over them in Photoshop it's one of those things I actually don't have those concepts anymore because I was silly when I when I moved away I didn't take them with me and I was thinking oh yeah I want to go back into the office lazy and like no years later

Channel: Gnomon

Views: 74,997

Rating: 4.9688869 out of 5

Keywords: Gnomon School Of Visual Effects (College/University), Concept Art (Visual Art Form), illustration, creature design

Id: 0xIz9I1dDv0

Length: 68min 47sec (4127 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2015