Mikernaut's digital sketchbook

[mikernaut]

Hello & Welcome,

I am an character texture artist working in the videogame industry for the last 6 years. I have become very comfortable drawing and doodling in Photoshop ( with a wacom tablet) and probably havent picked up a pencil in years.

Here are some sketchs and whatnot. Most have been done at work while waiting for the next character texture to paint. I pretty much just go for it and start drawing something, very spontaneous. As you can see I like to just start with heads and faces. Sometimes if I like what comes out enough I will continue and turn it into a finished piece.

well enough blabber, now some arty stuffs. Thanks for peeking.

[Envisor]

Awesome work, I just hope that I will be at a level like you when I get out into the job world after I go to college. Awesome pieces tho and nice start to a sketchbook. The face profiles turned out great. Cant wait for more.

[Loolarge]

Wow thats looking great :) Far ahead of me!

[Rudeone]

Awesomeness! good to have you here, post more please! :)

[_andreas_]

very nice!

looking forward to seeing some pencilwork and more updates =)

[mikernaut]

Thanks for looking and the kind words, I'm gonna try to keep updating with stuff. It can get hard doing stuff afterwork as I pretty much paint in Photoshop all day so when I get home I feel more like doing something different, heh.

As far as actual pencils I think I have stuff from 2 years ago in a real sketchbook but otherwise I'm pretty much all digital. I could look and see if theres anything in there worth posting but it is kinda old.

[RyanW]

Dude, hurry up and post that chick from this morning. I really dig it. This stuff is great and I've seen some of the stuff that you can't post yet. Top notch work.

[undergroundsean]

Good stuff dude ! good sense of color and light ! It's a good start ~~

[mikernaut]

heres a practice piece I was doing from some ref. I was working in Photoshop 5.5 at home with my crazy bright and contrasty LCD. Went and opened it up and viewed it in Adobe CS and ACDSee and other programs and realized it looked totally dark and muddy. DOH! Guess it's time to calibrate the old 5.5

So I spent this morning trying to color correct it as best as possible but it still lost alot of it's original vibrance.

Also threw together a quick progression. I basically start off and do sorta a charcoal technique on a color background. Alot of the time this color choice sets the scheme/mood of the painting (bright cheery , gloomy etc). Chunk down some shadows then some mid tones and highlights. Drop in a color overlay layer for a base skin tone then just keep refining and tightening as I go. I had around 40 layers when I was down. I tend to keep adding and doing little adjustments and experimentation as I go. Mainly I use overlay, multiply, soft light and a touch of color dodge over normal base layers.

Always been fascinated with alot of shadow forms and how light intereacts with the face and its features.

[DARAF]

Nice skills man. Love the colors.

[Whitevillage]

Very cool, the faces and there expressions are very believable.

[mikernaut]

Here's another somewhat quickie practice portrait from a black and white picture or Aria Giovanni. Not as many layers this time and felt it was working with just some subdued colors and a cooler overall color scheme.

It started out looking alot like Angelina Jolie. heh

[RyanW]

Very nice work mike. She's beautiful. Now, we need to see the rest of her :) Aria Giovanni...so hot.

[Dreamworker]

Wow wonderful stuff! You are a great talent man.
The Angelina Jolie process is very interesting!
>:D

[Bojee]

Great stuff, love the progress shots. :)

[MichaelMotion]

Well, what is there to say? Some excellent faces in this thread!
Lovin' everyone of these..

Voted for ya!

[Call0ps]

woah !!! beautiful, thx for sharing the process shots. plz show more :D

[Niva.]

Very good work, I also appreciate the WIP shots. 5 stars from me.

[mikernaut]

As always thanks everyone for taking the time to peek in and for voting. It's nice to be encouraged to keep posting rather then my usual tendencies to be lazy and just play videogames, heh.

Okay here are some variations on a creature head I was putzing around with the last few days. I find alot of inspiration from looking at different animal skulls for structure when doing creatures. Bird skulls are really crazy and interesting and probably show thru on these abit.

[Ashrumm]

My first time here good stuff mate I really like what i am seeing here thanks for sharing your process as well! One thing to note you could probably add some more color saturation just a little and i think those beauties would pop even more!! Good work keep it up!!

[mikernaut]

Yeah Ashrumm I've been fighting with the colors abit. They look alot more alive and vivid on my home lcd which has a intense brightness and contrast ratio. Then I open them and look at them on different monitors (lcd and crt) and the colors are different and the contrast is really dark. So then I have to try and color correct them and try to get it closer to what I had .So alot of times while I get the color and tones close , the saturation dulls on me.

I have 4 monitors if you count my work system which some of these are done on. 3 Lcds and 1 crt and they all look different. Also theres also the difference of painting in Photoshop CS vs CS2 vs 5.5 ( love the feel of the airbrush in this version)

So I'll have to be alittle more conscious and maybe paint brighter to begin with.

[DanielC]

Hi !
Your colours are looking great. And thanks for posting the steps.
And yes, it would be interesting to see you going on stronger colours and values.
In any case, keep posting, i'll definatly come back here.

[mikernaut]

Here's another practice piece I was working on. Was sorta doing my own color and lighting scheme and not following the reference exactly. It turned into digital mud after/around step 8 in the progression pic. I shoulda kept it with the softer warmer look. I tried to go to contrasty and it just fell apart.

[mikernaut]

Here we have a study of the lovely Evangeline Lilly (Freckles).
The detail pic shows the size I paint at which is usually zoomed in at 200%
After I was done I decided to overlay the reference pic and see how close I was as far as the details and likeness. I was pretty close but there were a few thing that were off, I adjusted them but you know what?, the overall piece looked worse. So sometimes stylization actually looks cooler. Even in doing portraits. Although she looks alittle more mean in my version versus worried. haha oops.

[Sealegs]

Horay, freckles from LOST! :) Man you have some really nice studies goin on here! I love that you post the different stages! Keep it up! post more!

[mikernaut]

Here are some creature concepts I had done alittle while back.
Theres a rough head sketch for the Piranhamen piece in my vary 1st post.
Also a buddy at work showed me the "liquify" Photoshop function (never bothered to try it before) when I was doing this piece so that is what I used for the 3 head variations.

Some of these are tighter then others I was just trying to get the ideas across.

[Arn J.]

Great stuff!

[Aslev]

nice sketchbook you've got here, well rendered stuff. i'm also interested in different kinds of craniums.. especially birds are interesting!

keep going, would love to see some crazy experimenting as well