Leoptiofis Seer

Evolving my blind seer character.
First I came up with a sketch for the type of environment she might inhabit - something along the lines of a classic Greek temple. Having decided on that direction, I did some thumbnails, looking for interesting shapes.


I then jumped to her cane, exploring ideas for it.
Liking the lion, I thought it would be fun to come up with a mythological creature to serve as her deity or totem, thus the idea for the Leoptiofis, the lion cobra with the eyeball pattern on its hood, spitting poison into eyes to blind.



Speed paints:



Animation for fun:

Blind Seer

This idea, of a blind person who can see into the future, is kind of cliche, but I wanted to try my own take on it for awhile.

Even though I'm doing my speed paints regularly, improving my technical skills and learning about myself (I seems to levitate towards sci-fi more than fantasy for instance) I felt that that none of them have really been portfolio material, and I was in a certain creative rut.
It was one of these speed paints that helped pull me out though: when I painted the succubus portrait I felt like I the way I paint faces from imagination took a huge step towards how I paint faces from reference. I wanted to repeat the experience to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and I got this.



I thought I did pretty well, and that I could try to expand the idea, and come up with some concepts for her costume. Coming back with fresh eyes, I found a few more things that needed fixing on her portrait, especially the nose.
Although I did have an idea of where I wanted to take her, I did some blue sky concepting, going all over the map with ideas, just in case something else stuck.



A day later, with more thought put into it, I realized the ear piece would be best left out, the big scar was a cheap trick, but while I was working on removing it I had a happy accident with it and it looked good. Also changed her eyes, expression and forehead symbol.
Came up with more concepts exploring the direction I decided to go with, and reworked some of the anatomy issues while I was at it, to come up with this.



I may get back to her, finalizing the concept, doing turn-arounds and/or beauty shots, but for now I'm thinking about shifting attention elsewhere, maybe some prop design.

Hooray for quick update, not as many speed paints to sort through. :)

Lemons from Life

Still looking for a job, still stuck in Israel, still living with my parents. Things haven't been too hot. Gotta keep working despite that and hope for good news.

I though I would update with 3D work, but that has been going super slow. I blame the book I am trying to follow along with, but the instructions aren't clear enough for my liking.
Working on unwrapping the floor buffer I modeled:



 Still doing the occasional study:

 



Some concepts for Europa: First Probe a game I hope to make someday.
I don't remember if I mentioned it before, but it's an idea I had while brainstorming ideas for a game jam with some friends in the bay area. Simple enough concept iterating on an old game idea: fall down a tunnel and avoid the walls for as long as possible. Fingers control a light, tilt controls the angle of descent.



No reason to stop doing daily speed paints, but now I have 3 pages on deviant art to pick from and post here.

My First Global Gamer Jam

Last Friday at 8:45 am I showed up at the Electra building in Tel-Aviv, ready for my first legit game jam. I was the first art guy there, and found myself a team soon enough, coincidentally including people from my hometown, Haifa. We watched some keynote videos giving us advice, urging us to create games for changes and giving us the theme, familiar perhaps to those who have been to earlier GGJs. 6:00 pm Saturday was the goal time to finish (Sunday is a work day here in the holy land,) though most teams continued compiling and what not. I had been working hard until a couple of hours before then, sleeping for maybe an hour and eating nothing more than a couple of granola bars and snacks. Then we saw what everyone else had worked on and I finally saw what I had been working as a whole, which took almost 3 hours, and while it was cool to see, everyone was exhausted and wanted to go home. Here's some of the work I did on our game, from concept art to background and foreground elements to character and UI animation.

: HELP

Seems like a good time to update

I really should keep this blog updated, you never know. Start with the speed paints:

Decided I liked the Cloud Dancer one, so I put in a few more hours of polish. I think this was a big stride in my anatomy from imagination skills. I'm not sure how much more work I'll put into this, if any.

Inspired by a Scott Robertson video, by the lack of any concept art for too long, too many ideas that I needed to get out and the slow progress I've been having with 3Ds Max (it's kind of a pain to follow the book when I want to do my own thing, but I don't want to miss any insights,) I've done the following:

Outside of my own personal projects, I've had a job interview with a laser cutting and engraving service last Sunday, but haven't received an answer yet. I don't have much confidence I got it, but that's ok, I think I can do better.