Zed's Art House

Well I think it's about time I through my hat into the ring here and show some of the work I have done. I'm not an amazing artist but I like the community here and want to join in on all the fun ;) I'll post some work from my college experience last year if an Design/Art kinda program, and as I make my way through the next 3 years of Graphic and Package Design I'll post some of that too. I do not consider myself to a good artist. Gouache...I had never used the stuff nor did I enjoyed painting in general. This was I think our 3 or 4 project using it; we had to create 4 panels using various color schemes. Below is just a drawing of a metallic chair base using black and white pencil crayons on butcher's paper. I really enjoyed and hated this. The chair base was probably the hardest thing I drew all year and only did so because my friends challenged me to do it. A Metal Kettle. I tried my next to capture the reflections and shine of it. I think it looks best in person and from a distance. Up close I find that it doesn't seem so hot and shiny. Worst Project! Draft a Victorian-esc house from your neighbourhood, then build it...I loathed this project with a passion. I left it until 3 days before it was due and just busted my butt to finish it in time. Building is not my strength.

The Victorian model is badass. I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s killer.

I know what you mean about gouache. It’s difficult to work with but if you can get a nice, even layer without pools, the dried color is awesome. Those aren’t bad color studies. I remember doing them by the dozen in art school. These days you can whip out 500 of them in about as many minutes digitally.

Nice work, overall.

Posting more stuff throughout the day.

I’ll put up some more recent drawings tonight probably.

Are those both chipboard?

Nope. The chair is made out of illustration board, and second image is made out of foam core

That chair looks like it was a pain in the ass to make. Nice work, though!

My first attempt at drawing a clear, plastic, reusable bottle I got from my college orientation. I was pretty happy with how the cap for it came out but I got too carried away with the light on the body of it.

The second attempt. Really happy with how this came out, the base is a bit wonky though. I tried to pay more attention to how the light was hitting and reflecting off the surface. I think this came out a lot better than the first attempt.

I’ve never drawn a skull before so this was a first for me. It still has some work left to be done on it; the skull I drew from had a lot of value changes so I tried to simplify them a bit more. I’m happy with most of it except the back of the skull around the top. It looks rather blotchy, so I’ll try and fix that when I go back to it.

While it is fairly late, I think I want to differentiate my topic a bit from the other Artists a tad, to give it it’s own personality, maybe get people more involved in the art forums. It looks, at least to me, that only a handful of people regularly post here. In order to liven things up I think I’ll post some art related-ish questions every once and a while. Maybe we can get some serious discussions going, or something.

So the Question of the week (?) will be…

What is your favorite colour? Why? It can be very specific or fairly general

Purple would be my favorite color. I enjoy the depth of it. To me it is very ominous yet pleasant. I find it soothing to look at over most colours and gives me a sort of calming experience. I feel like there is a lot more going on inside the colour then we may expect, almost like there is an inner battle going on inside, a psychological battle of different personas. Is it evil? Is it good? Is it straight, or is it gay? How was it raised from adolescents to adulthood? Was it beaten? Was it used?
Is it happy, or is it sad? I just find there are a lot of questions you can come up for it, but they can go unanswered or have multiple answers to different people. It’s a very mysterious and thoughtful colour.

I know that probably sounds weird to a lot of people, maybe even insane but that’s just the why I see it and that is my opinion on it

So if your brave enough, What is your favorite colour and why? It doesn’t have to be a deep thought provoking answer, but I think everyone has some sort of reason that a particular colour calls to them.

I sort of consider color contextual… I like green lights, white wine, blue skies, and golden showers.

The most spiritual color relationship, to me, is this:

Well college has been starting up slower than I had anticipated, or maybe I just am managing my time more wisely, but we will see I guess.

Anyways, I think it’s time for a new question:

What game has a more interesting art direction Bioshock, or Borderlands?

I got this question into my head due to a number of factors, but mainly because the Bioshock team is set to release a book of concept art from Bioshock Infinite along with the launch of Bioshock Infinite. I think both games have their own unique visual styles, but what game has that extra “oomph” that just grabs your attention more? With Borderlands 2 due this month (?) and Bioshock Infinite (Early 2013, February?) I think this is a relevant topic since most consumers will purchase games based their art/graphics. These two games came to mind for stand-out artwork, Borderland with its Cell Shading and Mad Max vibe and Bioshock with its dark, retro set pieces.

other games are welcome to the discussion, but please avoid games with realistic type graphics

Originally posted by petesahooligan:

The most spiritual color relationship, to me, is this:

You read my mind? That’s exactly what I consider the most spiritual color combination. The warm grey is absolutely the same as in my brain.

Weeeell I don’t think Borderlands 2 is much (if any) different than Borderlands 1, and while I found it interesting it became slightly annoying after a few hours. I like ink’n’paint styles very much but something about their lineweight bothers me. The textures are very well done, though. And the environments, the scenes, that was my favourite thing in the game.
And I’ve never played Bioshock, I will when I get the time, but I liked the visuals I’ve seen and the in-game posters look great. I’d totally buy an artbook.

Rage has been my latest favourite game far as graphics are considered.

I think the cell shading in Borderlands became a very distinguishing factor during it’s original release. When the game was in development they were planning on doing doing more realistic graphics from what I have heard, but for whatever the reason they decided to do cell shaded graphics. Considering it a very grey and brown game with hits of colours if it were to do realism it would probably just blend into the first person shooter crowd. I believe that the graphics were paramount to success of the game, it caught the eyes of gamers in a sea of grey, brown wastelands.

I have played Bioshock either; however, I plan to purchase a copy sometime soon. Still I really enjoy concept art, it’s very creepy.

So this was a project in our Digital Design class were we had to take a celebrity and turn them into an illustration using photoshop and using selections. I picked Robert Downey Jr. I don’t think anyone will see that though. I wanted to use negative space to kinda of bring out features without actually selecting them and colouring them. I wanted to be a bit more creative with it.

Update Being hit with a lot of projects in the past couple of weeks and Mid Terms are coming up. I’ll probably update with more work soon. Maybe try and draw some video game characters in my spare time….we’ll see.

Anyways, this is a WIP.

Basically, we had to trace an art piece that we pulled from a pile of assorted artists. Most people went for Group of Seven works. I felt like taking a risk. After we finished the trace we then have to convert the piece into a greyscale version using markers. Having little to almost no marker experience I think this will be very challenging, but so far I’m having a lot of fun with it.

I know my lines are shaky in parts of it but I’ll clean them up as I get to them.

EDIT: The original work is Still Life by Hendrick Andriessen

Originally posted by Zedzero2:

So this was a project in our Digital Design class were we had to take a celebrity and turn them into an illustration using photoshop and using selections. I picked Robert Downey Jr. I don’t think anyone will see that though. I wanted to use negative space to kinda of bring out features without actually selecting them and colouring them. I wanted to be a bit more creative with it.

shuold be made into a painting.
id buy that ;)

The only problem I see with the digital illustration is the cigar butt. I can see a bit of eraser tip and when it comes to illustrations aspects of raster editing shouldn’t be shown, perhaps it’s just something you missed but I just noticed it right off the bat, and it draws quite a bit of attention from everything else. My only qualm with it, everything else is nice though! Good work I love your art.

Yea, I noticed that weird bit too, but I don’t think I even touched the eraser too while doing that. I only used the pen tool.

My teacher defiantly hated it, pretty much made all of us put it up in front of the class, then organized them into shit, mediocre and well done, so that was embarrassing. However, seeing everyone else’s I felt pretty bad about my work, so thank you guys for the positives. :)

This is an update to my pervious WIP. This is as far as I could get last night as my marker blender died in the process, and it was due today. XD I managed to get new blenders and finished about 97% of the project. I’ll update version once I get it back. Overall, I’m pretty happy with piece some area’s I don’t particularly like and some area’s of grey are too dark.

Are you using a gray set of markers? It’s pretty good, and it’s a difficult assignment. Your range of values seems reasonable, (though I probably would have just blended out the gray background rather than carry the ink all the way to the edge of the frame). I think the boldest decision here is to use object models that aren’t easy to identify, so the rendering has to work extra hard to convey the character. The book under the skull near the rope turned out exceptionally well, I think.

Thank you, I really appreciate the feedback guys. :) Yea, we had set of 12 cool grey markers. It was a challenging piece, I’ve never have really used markers all that much beforehand so it was quite the learning experience, and pretty enjoyable.

this is qwerber and I approve of his art.

I want to echo Pete’s praise of how you handled the book. Getting the highlights on the page edges like you did with markers while having to effectively use negative space to achieve that effect is just awesome. The texture you were able to give the wood panel on the near-side of the table was like-wise well done. Overall extremely impressive.

I’d like to see what you can do with digital art in the future, given the diversity of physical media you’ve been able to do awesome things with.

Thank you! I really didn’t even know how big that book was until I was about 75% finished and doing another part of it. I stepped back and literally “Whoa, that’s a big book.” Hahaha. Doing the textures was defiantly the stressful part of doing Hendrick Andriessen’s piece, a bad texture or different texture altogether would have ruined the piece and I started so late that I had to make sure I didn’t screw anything up too bad.

As for digital art, I have very little experience using computers that way. I find that, so far, it feels like completely different techniques need to be learned. I also find physical pieces more relaxing and almost stress relieving.

Well I got swamped with projects this week. I don’t feel like I have anything to worthwhile to post up at the moment, expect maybe one project, another illustration I had to do for class, but other than that I don’t feel anything is good enough for public viewing. So stayed tuned.