GreenSock's Sketchbook Diarrhea

[Brun]

simply great,
my only crit would be to sometimes have a bit more defenition in your shapes, altho u are already handeling most of them extremely profesional

keep on rocking

[the ANGRY filipino]

those character designs for class looks really sweet!

[SirGreenSock]

Thanks everyone!

Finished my third year, went alright, but I think i could have done much better if i had focused more. Starting my coop tomorrow, that should be fun.


DanielC - Thanks dude, I will/have been!

rogerb- thanks!

Brun - Thanks a lot for the kind words! Ive been working on cleaning up my shapes and painting in general, slowly but progressing i think...

angry filipino- Thanks!

buncha work:

Some school stuff:
A ghosted illustration of a 19th century hand pumper. Got some good feedback on this one, gonna revisit it over the summer.


Some 3d models, the mantis shrimp is 3dsmax and zbrush, the helicopter is sketchup rendered in 3dsmax. Final illustration is in photoshop




for the above helicopter i tried to do a realistic study of how co-axial rotors look and function. Modelled in sketchup.


Some illustrations i did for the local fire department's centennial book detailling the history of the city's fire fighters



and the rest is a bunch of pages from the last sketchbook i finished.

[SirGreenSock]

Some sketchup stuff i forgot to post

[DanielC]

You been busy ! Awesome stuff man :] Love the mixed media pages especially. Stay busy man

[amarryth]

love the exploration going on here! how's your summer so far.. and where did you score a co-op?

k

[Gloominati]

great great stuff man! seriously I just love all of it The detail you put into that sketchup stuff is just insane and your watercolors just kick ass as they always do!
Keep on updating man

[Ryn]

Heya Nikola!

It's really great to see all your end-year projects bundled together. You've done some excellent stuff this year. Where are you going to be staying this summer? If you're near Oakville and aren't too busy with work we should get together and drawww! Speaking of which, how is the TTC going for you? Learning a lot of cool new stuff? I hope the summer is going awesome for you, at any rate!

Crit time!
The hand pumper is really nice. I see you have a Sketchup model for it. Did you make the model then do a paint over in Photoshop/Illustrator or something? It came out looking really nice and clean, I'm interested in your process for it. I think one nitpick that comes to mind for me instantly is that it's very heavily shadowed for an informative illustration. The mood and form the shadows add are lovely but it does make the mechanisms of the machine a bit more ambiguous. Also, as a person who is clearly well versed enough in 3dsmax to make your mantis, why do you still choose Sketchup for some of your rendering? Do you find it superior to all other programs for mechanical/geometric programs despite how basic it is?

The mantis shrimp has a really nice shape to it; it's well modeled. I'm not crazy about the textures, just that they're incredibly matte everywhere yet have farkles up near the front. I'd think it'd have more 'wet' glossy looking properties elsewhere, at least just a tiny bit more. The colouring looks very stretched out and digital, mostly near the back. Overall it's really nice but I'm just not crazy about the texturing, takes away from the goodness elsewhere.

The helicopter version of the mantis shrimp also suffers a bit of the overshadowing problem. What I can actually see looks great, but so much of it is obscured by blackness!

For your composition with the mantis and helicopter, I think the gradient bar in the back is a bit much. As I see it, it looks like you're trying to connect the two subjects through common colour usage, but to use such bright colours in a gradient comes off as being a bit cheesy. It also makes the bright 'heat vision' colours on the subjects less of a focal point. If you just wanted to established that it was indeed a 'heat seeking' view of sorts, I think the human in the UV spectrum colours would have been enough.

It's really cool that your got a commission from the fire department. :3 The style of the illustrations are nice and old-timey; they really fit with the theme. Would have liked maybe to see a bit more detail in the second picture with them at the shed. You can't really see their facial details and they look like they're almost doing some shady backalley drug deal.

Sketchbook stuff: as always, beautiful, witty, and full of life. Good branching out with different papers/different medium applications. They're nice and loose, which is your best stylization and also your biggest flaw.
I think if there's one overall critique I could give for you it would be that you don't really do finished work. Yeah, you do finished technical stuff for school assignments. But you don't really take the type of subject matter that's in your sketchbooks and take it to another level. You need to practice finished scenes with characters in them. Get used to adding a level of polish to your work. Your looseness is great because it adds so much dynamicism and life to your art, but you need to find a way to keep that movement while you refine it. For example, the gypsy drawing you did for media class is really lovely and painterly. As a freestanding work of art it's great, but if you hand that over to a 3d modeller, they aren't going to know what to do with it. From what I understand, being painterly and loose as a concept artist can be perfectly fine for a lot of projects and themes. But to be precise and refined in your art should be a skill set you can execute as easily as being loose. You have to be a jack of all trades. Luckily, since loose gestural work is in itself, an integral part of good 'finished' work, you're already halfway there. Now it's up to you to break out of your comfort zone and develop the level of polish. You already have the skills to do some nice finished work, it's just a matter of applying it and having due patience to see something to the end.
Nikola, you're a hell of an artist and I respect you tremendously. I think is something that is holding you back from hitting your next artistic plateau. Don't hold back! The cosmic balance will be upset if you don't become a concept artist, so push just a bit harder!

All the best mate, take care!

[SirGreenSock]

Im super bad at updating eh?

So Ive had a pretty busy summer, though not so much with personal work. Did a little bit of freelance, some of which i can post here, and am currently doing my summer co-op work placement with the Toronto Transit Comission doing technical illustrations of the subway cars, none of which Ill be able to post until around September.
Been doing lots of sketching, especially on my DS, I'll save all those for another update so Im not flooding as much, right now Ill just post digital work and some of the freelance stuff i did.

Portrait of Ami


Final illustration for the Oakville Fire Department. Nothing exciting, but it was challenging to make a bucket brigade look interesting.


A bunch of things Ive been doing in my spare time, experimenting with style. These were a lot of fun to do, probably gonna keep doing them from time to time.


[

Freelance children's illustration project. Kinda cheesy subject matter, but was an incredible learning experience. Learned tons about composition, colour and painting in general. That said, I hate the way they look in retrospect, but was worth the learning experience.







Skintone studies



Ryn - Thanks for all the crits! spot on as usual! The hand pumper was a sketchup model, clayrendered in Kerkythea, then painted in Photoshop using looots and lots of layer masks and paths to keep it clean. I know what you mean about the shadows, it was a constant struggle between clarity and prettiness, and I kept making modifications to try and find a compromise, and I still dont think its there. Im still considering revisiting it and reworking, though not sure if it is worth it or if i should just leave it and move on. I chose Sketchup because I prefer it to any other 3d software I tried for this sort of work. I found the process much quicker and it suited my needs better than 3dsmax would have. Sketchup is just super easy and intuitive.
Yeah the mantis shrimp was a bit of a bitch. I learned a lot about 3dsmax in the process, but I still cant really figure out how to do uv mapping very well, so that came out looking like absolute shit. Im not really interested in 3d past modelling for the purpose of painting over so I dont think im gonna be exploring much in that direction any more either. Not sure what you mean about the overshadowing on the chopper, it looks fine on my computer. Its the lightest and most ambient render i could figure out how to do in 3dsmax. The layout with the two is garbage i agree...would you believe it was the best i could come up with? i spent days on just that, trying to figure out how to place them on a page along with the text that had to be included, while also relating the two as best i could...and I just couldnt figure it out. The gradient was a last-minute experiment. I think it works ok considering targer audience, since it was not meant to be for people knowledgable on the subject, the man alone was not clear enough (i surveyed people to see how clear that was) so the gradient was the only other solution i could think of without adding too much clutter to the illustration. half-assed i know... dont know how to do it differently.
The reason why the shed illustration has very little detail is that it is being printed about 4 inches tall... so any further detail would have just mudded up the whole thing. I wanted to do it super detailled with some fine hatching, but my print tests showed that none of that would show up, so i simplified.
Im trying to finish more work!! I even painted up 3 sketchbook pages here! I have more in progress. I refuse to leave work unfinished now, even if its garbage, as long as its still an enjoyable learning experience. Ill have tons more paintings to show soon!

Gloominati - Thanks dude!

Ammaryth - Thanks! Im at the TTC for the summer

DanielC - Thanks! Keep chugging dude!

[wookiedabo]

top stuff man, loving the stylised characters. Oh, and your sketchbook pages are fantastic.

[Ryn]

Ni-ko-ra :3

I think this comic commission is going to do wonders for your skill and confidence in doing finished illustrations. Every one is an incredibly ambitious piece in and of itself! The one you sent me the other night is - already! - much stronger than the ones in your last post here. The style explorations are great too, I can't wait to see where they take you in the next few months/years. So exciting!

Any new stuff since June? I know you've got the gears turning on your thesis, do you have any sketches or anything for it yet? I hope the TTC is being good to you!

When you back in Oakville for school? :3

[SirGreenSock]

Thanks for the kind words everyone!

Starting my 4th and final year at Sheridan, doing an ambitious thesis project, but wont be showing it until i have it more fleshed out.
Also finished my co-op witht the Toronto Transit Comission doing technical illustrations of subway trains. Did 100+ illustrations, but I'll just show a couple, most of it is fairly dry or similar or diagramatical so not too exciting.

For now Im dumping a sampling of my co-op work, Ill have another dump of digital work over the course of the week.

[DanielC]

waaaaaakidiwaaaaa : o
FUuuuuuuuuck.



thank you

[SirGreenSock]

Thanks Dan!
Heres another dump of digital work. This is a small selection of sketches Id been doing on my DS using Colors over the summer. I tried to do a sketch of a person on subway/bus each way to and from work. Intermingled are also a few sketches from the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Ill have more digital work up soon.

[SirGreenSock]

Heres the promised digital dump
Ill try and scan some sketches this weekend or next week!
This is primarily experimentation with Photoshop in technique and style. I learned a lot, even if these arent the most exciting paintings.

[DanielC]

I loooooooooveeeee yoooooouuuuuu oooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhh

[Jabo]

*clicks on sketchbook link* … *red x invasion* … … *goes to last page* …



I can't tell you how much I love all of your stuff. The ideas behind the pieces, the designs. And great color work throughout! The skull in this one is my favourite.

EDIT: Have I told you how much I laughed when skimming through the sketchbook pages? No? Great sense of humor, I really laughed out loud!

[zweiDee]

omg, first time I see this sb. fantastic work. 5starz 4 shure!!!

[SirGreenSock]

Hey thanks for all the kind words guys!
Just went through the whole book and fixed all the dead links past the 1st page, the first page is lost, the rest was still online, albeit a different url.

[Morgado]

Heya SirGreenSock!

I'm really digging your stuff from life. You seem to do them very easily, with sketchy strokes, which give them a great soul. You should apply more of that on your most finished paintings and conceptual work

Definetly stopping by here more often!

[Mag-Neo]

---GOOD JOB, MATE........ KEEP DRAWING.......... CHEERS!.............

[SirGreenSock]

Thanks guys!
Still havent gotten to scanning, will do so next week.
Here are some thumbnails from my thesis project.

[Morgado]

I wish my university works were that fun

[SirGreenSock]

Thanks! Yeah i guess Im lucky my profs are open minded enough to let me do my own thing!

Sick right now, havent been able to do too much thesis work, lots of sketching though, and some 3d modelling, hopefully will scan tomorrow, at least some of the old book and move from there.

some friends in wigs.

[Jabo]

Great collection of thumbs there! Looking forward to the thesis! And get well soon!

[Zord]

[jatherip]

soo much awesomeness! fell in love with you huge updates!

[archipelago]

[Zebz]

You are one of my all-time favorites, sir. Lovin' the updates. I miss your face.

[SirGreenSock]

Thanks guys!

So I dropped off again, whoops.

Almost finished my final year here at Sheridan, gotta get my portfolio finalized. Here is a bunch of work from the past few months. Crits more than welcome!
Last few pieces are all WIP