DefiledVisions Sketchbook 2.0 | Back to the basics | apr15

[Stuart DeViva]

I'm so freakin' JELLY! You put me to shame sir.

[DefiledVisions]

Ricardo Robles - Thanks Ricardo! everything is fine, thanks hope all is well with you too!

Aryeh - Thanks man, so are you! I need to get my ass on vent more often, it was fun talking!

Metal Fingers - Thanks bro!

Baconstrap - hahah du är för vänlig hoppas du har det fint uppe i UMEEEE!

Moonrage - Thanks! will do

Sevarenge - Patrik man! will do

Ixallus - Thank you for the kind words! I sent you a PM regarding your questions

Jasper_ - Cheers man! you've been doing killer work lately. I feel obliged to do some pokemons after checking out your work!!

Odayga - Thanks Ashley! take care

Insane Lemur - Thank you!

UmpaArt - hey bro! oh noeeees, don't put that pressure on me man I'll have to start posting again

Theodora romania - Thanks dora! you have to show me some work! lately you've been doing really good hope you had a nice holiday in romania

kikindaface - Thanks man!

Liffey - Hey Liffey, yeah I got your PM, thanks for asking me. Turns out I won't have time to do the CA challenge anyway so.. good luck to you man!

Feil Magnus - Glad you think so!

cuptow555 - Hahah you gotta be kidding, I'm lazy as hell.. Thanks for giving me a kick!

himart - Glad you like it!

Oren90 - Thank you! yeah I like it too

Ranunkel - Thanks

Sevarenge - Tack för din feedback man! Det var stor hjälp ha det fint! jag ringer dig snart

Ludic - Tackar för din feedback Ludic, uppskattar det mycket!

Si_Swe - Thanks for your feedback man! really appreciate it! it helped me finish those pieces

Aryeh - Thanks man! apreciate your feedback worked the spatial distance and perspective some with overlaps and stuff. Hope it works better!

Lancer idenoure - Thanks for the feedback lancer, really appreciate it man! hope the pieces are better now

Metal Fingers - Thanks Alex man! yeah I know you've mentioned the sillhouette before, I was at a point though where it would be too time consuming to re-work the sillhouette. I agree with you though. Thanks for helping me finish it!

NickyBeats - Thanks for some really great crits Nicky! really appreciate it! I rendered the feet more and tried to ground the creature into its environment with snow covering the claws and so on. Also, I got rid of the "fluff" around the head and added spikes again - you were right, some hard edges made the creature stand out more. Thanks! also worked the ground

As for the dragon, yeah, background really is my weakest spot in illustration. It's something I have to work a lot more. Regarding your thoughts about the head, I made it bigger and had it overlap parts of the body to give it more depth - as you suggested. So thanks again for the help!

Flashback - Thanks man!

Yor - Thanks!

Providenc - Thank you for your kind words! keep on doing what you love man! if you love creature design then that is what you should do!

Nickybeats - Not without your help

Partisan - Haha!! thanks man

IronFistGood - Thanks! don't be scared of experimenting with colour. There any layer settings you can play around with to get very rich colour! I use a lot of soft light and multiply with my work.. especially soft light gives wonderful effects once you find a way to use it experiment and have fun!

Metal Fingers - You da panda!

UmpaArt - hahaha! nooo don't be jelly.. you might get eaten thanks umpa!


Thanks you for all the overwhelming feedback regarding the pieces. Without your crits I wouldn't be able to leave them behind. Thank you!
I've started doing some freelance work and slowly getting back into art again, lately I've been going through some up's and downs and haven't been able to focus on art as much as I want. (nothing new under the sun eh? haha) I feel better now and need to get into routine again with studies and small funny speedpaints and whatnot hope to start updating again soon!

for now, some work on this week's cow. ooh and I have 666 thanks, thats pretty cool

p.s I'm looking for freelance work so if you know someone that need some cool fantasy art, I'm right here!




take care!

[alexson]

Awesome work as always, man! Keeep it uuup!

[Lang Oulk]

i always love viewing this sketchbook! that armored owl beast you did on the last page literally made me hard...just awesome! keep up the fantastic work man

[DefiledVisions]

Alexson - Thanks man! wil doooo

Lang Oulk - Hardness is goodness thanks for the compliments! glad you feel aroused! wait wha.. I didn't say anything..




wip wip on the cow, shapes are a mess. Much work left to do.. it's fun to start painting again, though.. all my weaknesses become so obvious. Argh.. as usual, no ref, linework sketch and then blocking in values. Previous steps can be seen in my earlier post.

- - - -

I've started to really think of my process and when I should enter next step. I know being completely strict when it comes to process can kill the intuitive part of painting, but having guidelines is something I really need to learn.

This is what I scribbled down, and I'll try to hammer it in by doing a small piece every day;

1. sketch

(depending on how sure I am of the concept already, these are optional. If I feel doing thumbs is a waste of time and all I want to do is lay down the final lines, then I do it!!)

a) thumbs
b) choose thumb, explore design
c) choose design, lay down final sketch

2. single colour

As it sounds, laying down one flat colour underneath the linework. No real value changes besides what the sketch offers.

3. Dark values

Going over the piece with a multiply layer. Blocking in the shadows. Usually this is where I start to mess things up because I know too little about light and shadow so I'm limited with the flaws I already have when working from mind. Gotta study that more

a) decide upon a light-source
b) go with that lightsource

4. Lighter value - again keep light-source in mind!

Either going over the piece with a soft light, overlay or normal layer. Depending on which kind of "mistakes" you're looking for, all of them are a good choice. It's not yet time for hues in the process so I limit the impact of color from softlight and overlay.

At this point the sketch should be solid, with values that read well enough for you to interpret the piece as having depth and form.

5. Render

ohh, rendering, the most fun and most boring part of the piece many artists say that if you don't have a solid piece when you reach this level you're screwed.. no matter how much you polish and render it out with textures a flawed foundation will still bring it down. I think I'll have to agree.. too many times I've worked something for a couple of hours only to have to re-work something fundamental and go over it again.

The render level is also divided into guidelines, I haven't really thought up those yet but this is what I got so far -

a) shapes
a sketch is messy, this is where you render out the shapes of the piece and bind it all together without going ninjastyle on the rendering and texturing and detailing

b) texture,
once you have established nice shapes and there are no loose ends, start going over the piece with texture brushes - good layer settings to use when texturing are multiply, overlay and softlight (I love soft light!)

c) hues
This can be combined with the texture level, using a textured brush for example. Again, I think soft light is the best layer setting for adding hue variations to a piece, experiment with the grayer tones of a colour and see how how softlight carefully brings out that colour.

d) Refine value (b?)
With a newly established mess of textures and hues it's time to make it look painted and not just like something you overlayed the piece. This is done by working the values, adding bouncelight into the shadows and working in the colours from other lightsources you established at the hue step.

I'm not quite sure of where to put refine value yet as it is one of the most important steps for a well rendered piece. Maybe it should come after the "shapes" part of the process, anyhow - I have only been using this for 2 days so can't say I know what I'm talking about yet in theory it all sounds good!

as for the COW piece, I used this process on it but lost track at some point, which is good, because now I know where I lost track! so now I know where to be extra careful in a piece, not moving on to other steps too quickly. I think this can save me hours of unnecessary "clean-up" work.

[Ludic]

Neat process, i usually skip 3,4 and try to work them in while rendering, which is probably stupid. Gillar highlightsen på hans scale saker, kom ihåg att inte bara ha djupa shadows and starka highlights bara . Ser fram emot resultatet

[Lang Oulk]

Really nice piece youre working on man. i really appreciate those steps you took the time to write down. and the process shots are nice since i'm planning on starting to venture into digital myself soon, and honestly i'm completely lost as to where to even start D:...anyways, keep it up man!

[DefiledVisions]

Ludic - Yeah I used to do that too, trying a different approach now to see if it's more effective. Cheers!

Lang Oulk - Hey man, so you're just starting digital? it's really fun! can be difficult in the beginning.. I remember when I started out.. 3 years ago, I was so clueless haha. Drop by when ever you need tips and I'll do my best to help! if there's anything you wanna discuss regarding digi painting, just send me a pm



Finished the COW! I'm kinda proud.. this went faster than my other pieces.. took 9 hours all in all. With a decent result too given the time spent on it!

[Metal Fingers]

fucking radical! my only thing is the cast shadow, he doesn't feel all that grounded, the creature concept and rendering is top notch though.

[MightCrawler]

Really super mega awesome!!

[Lang Oulk]

Dude I really appreciate the offer of help man, i might just take you up on that sometime ...that piece is looking wicked badass!..i wish i knew more about digital so i could try and give some suggestive feedback, but for now only praise man...keep it UP

[kingkostas]

beautiful as usual mate!!! Thnx for sharing your workflow thoughts.
You have a particular style going on and the best thing is that you are improving it more and more already. I dont have any critique, if i have something is that i may would like to see more human characters here

keep up the great work!!!

[JakehC]

i like the colors you chose in the last one.

[jbrown67]

awesome awesome! some more rendering in the ground and smoke would have been cool, but the creature looks fantastic.

[Baconstrap]

Åh din cow va ju värsta mys dvs super duper (Y)
Jag ska börja försöka följa dina tipz eller "work step saken" ^^

[Fetsch]

heyho defiled, the creature looks cool. Maybe you can try to add something in future pictures to determine the scale of the creature in its environment. Keep it up man.

[DefiledVisions]

Metal Fingers - Thanks man, yea have to agree with you on that. Also I forgot to add some bouncelight from the warm lava, the shadow areas should be much warmer on the creature due to hot sand etc.

MightCrawler - !

Lang Oulk - Hehe sure! thanks for the kind words

Kingkostas - Thanks bro! yeah I should start doing more humans.. arh! you keep it up too!

Aryeh - Glad you like it!

jbrown67 - Thank you! yeah I think so too, I think I'll work it a bit more in the near future and really hammer in some details

Baconstrap - Bacon! hehe thanks! mm testa det, att ha koll på sin process är viktigt, sen hur den processen ser ut är inte lika viktigt. Bara du alltid vet vad som ska göras så du inte "blir lost" medans du målar

Fetsch - Thanks Fetsch! I'll definitely start doing that! I think I need to work the enviros more in general.


Here are some matte surface studies, following a gnomon workshop dvd.. just fooling around with values. Damn I have no idea how to make cubes in PS. You would think making geometric shapes digitally is the easiest thing in the world but I'm clueless haha so yeah.. these hand-drawn cubes are all wobbly.. tried some line-tool but that sucked.

The dvd takes you trough some very logic concepts about how value changes in shadow, with a method called "halfway to black" i.e if the lit area has a value "2" (20% darkness) the shadow area will have the value "6" (60%)

this is because from 2 to 9 halfway is 6. Doesn't get mor logic than that
0-1-2-| 3-4-5-|6|-7-8-9 |

I still don't really understand what it means or what I'm doing but I'm really trying to take it in and make sense of what he's talking about.

Anyhow, I think it's a great way of practicing values! I need to get my hands on some real cubes that I can do life studies of and study how light bounces etc. it's gonna be fun.

Here's the link to the Scott Robertson dvd I'm following. It's a 3-part series! check it out! - HERE -


I think I should start doing these with pencils instead, it's much easier to draw straight lines.

Also, cool news people - ImagineFX just announced their Rising Stars 2011 search! anyone under 25 is eligible to submit their work.. I'm gonna work my ass off during summer so I have some really kickass work to send them. See you among the stars
Check it out here! - CLICK -

[Ludic]

Den första saken skrämmer mig lite, annars så ser kuberna riktigt bra ut, dem ser ganska "shiny" ut eller hur man ska beskriva det. Tack för linken också, kanske man kan lära sig något .

[raminafshari]

continue studies of values and try to get your 123 read stronger as you already at it .

[Lang Oulk]

radical value studies man, good luck with the imagine FX things, you definitely deserve to be featured, your work is mint....ill have to check out those dvds sometime, keep up the killer work dude. later!

[Moonrage]

Really like your perspective/value studies. This dvd seems a blast. I went to your DA and really liked your creatures, really nice sense of detail and color

[xinranliu]

looking good!
more creaturesss

[DefiledVisions]

Ludic - Hehe. Den första är ett monster min flickvän gjorde i sån där modellera awesome sak. np.

Raminafshari - Thanks man, yeah wll keep it in mind! didn't push them as much as I could

Lang Oulk - Thanks! yeah I think the dvd's are really good. a bit expensive though.

Moonrage - Thanks!

Xinranliu - Hehe thanks! more creatures coming !




some thumb sketches for a Creature Planets challenge over at CGHub .. "Greek mythology". I can't decide which monster to do.. I've been wanting to do all of them for years.. definitely gonna do a series of badass mythological creatures in the future. So far, which one do you like? I think I like cyclops and chimera the most.

Also adding another value study and a creature I started a while ago but abandoned. Gonna get back to work on it soon.

I already feel more secure with values after doing these studies, it's most noticable in the darker values. Like the thighs of the cyclops. Arh.. it feels good to paint a bit again

[RaphaelLuebke]

just voted for you at actual cow - hell ofa timeyou finally get yourfirst cow-*

these value-cube-studies are great and the last thumbnails are outstanding!!

[Yor]

awesome update man, loving those B/W creatures nice strokes.

keep it dancing!

[Ludic]

Tycker definitivt att du ska ta den i top-right hörnet eller den i top left. Ser skitcoolt ut!

[Pixie Trick]

Awesome studies and the beasties are looking pretty slick as well.

[Flame_Unquenchable]

Thanks for posting your workflow, going to give your sketchbook a good once over! And for the record, subscribed!

[stalsby]

Nice sketchbook, I see a lot of improvement from the first page to the last!!! keep posting! Cheers :]

[lancer_idenoure]

youre doing great buddy. your creature and colors are as great as ever. good to see you bouncing back i think at this point you would benefit from some environment studies. a lot of your landscapes are somewhat vague and it would be nice to have a background in some of these. if not actual paintings of them then at least visually study them to get a grasp on the visual language.

fantastic work man, and congrats on cow see you around!