Nadeshiko Japan - Women's World Champions 2011

This is Homare Sawa and Nahomi Kawasumi of the Nadeshiko Japan soccer team who are the current FIFA Women's World Champions. I also thought that they had my pick of goal of 2011. This gigantic, split-second lob:



Art wise, this was done fully in Painter, again trying to use new brushes. In this case an edited Oily Bristle. I tried to mix it up by not only caricaturing their faces, but shadow patterns and designs to try to make it appealing. It was a fun study and process.

The Innsmouth Look

Inspired by HP Lovecraft's description of 'The Deep Ones', this is my own take on the ever popular Innsmouth Look. These are hybrid human's who, as they age, get consumed by fish or frog-like features and seep back into those murky waters of Innsmouth. Little creepy for my tastes so he has a bit of my weird spin on it.

This was sculpted in Zbrush 4 R2, rendered in Zbrush 4 R2 and composited in Photoshop. Although it's been awhile since I used purely Zbrush to composite out a render, the process has improved a tonne using BPR. No more accidently shifting things, forgetting focal settings, painting in cast shadows etc. Just render separate passes and plug into Photoshop. It feels as if it's not a hack anymore but a focused streamlined process that more and more people are taking advantage of. Fun indeed.

Happy Halloween!

A Wicked Witch done just in time for Halloween. Done in Zbrush, decimated and bought into Maya for rendering. Zbrush 4 R2 mind you, and I really like the new features. I even accidently created fabric rips using the new feature Dynamesh. You can mess up topology and Dynamesh will 'sew' it back up making it look like a tear. That's my top tip. yeah.

More renders and blab after the jump. I will also post a video turnaround in future I'm sure.

The Karate Kid Painting Montage

Going through my hard drives made me stumble on some old WIP files of my Karate Kid painting I did awhile back. What a joy it was too.

Although I still watch the movie on a religious basis, artistically it was the European Masters exhibition held at the NGV last year that really made me want to stick with this painting - it was a study.

It was a real privilege to see such works at that exhibition - but what amazed me was the artists' richness, variety and control in their darks - things you'd never notice on crumby scanned or photographed images on the internet. Works like this one by Edgar Degas were one of many inspirations for the Karate Kid painting that I should credit in the video above.

Hope you enjoy it anyway!

'The Big Squeeze' for Fountain Sauces

Fountain's latest campaign is now live and on the airwaves! If you haven't seen it already, check out the video above.

I was lucky enough to work with director Stephen Watkins of XYZ Studios on the CG animation advertisement. Cute!

Fittingly, I worked on the old, cranky Salt and Sugar shakers who, like me, have a problem with young punk tomatoes running amok. You've been warned tomatoes, you've been warned.

iPad Painting from Live Model and video

Keeping things fresh by changing the process for this one. Colour is one of my favourite subjects and I saw a technique by Jeff Watts where he'd first lay down 'abstract notes of colour" - ie anything he feels like. I guess it harks back to Harley Brown's book where he talks about making sure you aren't timid about your painting from the get-go.

Mucking up the painting up from the start did relax me, I must admit, but since it was on the iPad there was always a thought in the back of my mind that I could undo this. So...not as brave as I could have been.

The video of the process is below. I firstly did a sketch before a 2 hour live model session and scanned it in, Placed it on a layer, and went ahead.

Done with the Brushes App.

Modern Game Art: Weapons with Jon Rush - CGWorkshop

Jon Rush gave a workshop on "Modern Game art weapons". There were buttons clicked I didn't even know existed. As you can tell, it was a fun course. Highly recommend it!

Seascape Plein Air with iPad inc video

Yet another iPad finger painting using the Brushes App which STILL remains the most responsive and simplest painting app out there.

People often ask me about the glare off the screen. Although, yes, it does exist, if you crank up the brightness to max and paint under some shade there really isn't any problem. Which got me in thinking, how great this thing will be for night plein airs with a back lit screen? Next time perhaps.

Hope you enjoy the video process too.

Baby Lionel Messi

For such a beast in the game of football, Messi has one of the most softest faces, kind, cuddly. Hardly someone to be feared on the pitch. His likeness has endless possibilities though, and this one somehow ended up like a 3D baby version of him...with stubble.

Dr Sketchy's Melbourne and Life Drawing

Pencil, rough paper, scanned into Painter - Square chalk and Gessoed canvas paper

Chalk pens seem to react best to the surface. So it seemed a nice complement to a 'real' drawing on toothy paper. All settings on default as far as I know

Watercolour brush and burnt umber Tombo Pen

Found a Tombo pen at an art store and thought I'd take it for a spin. Not sure what sort of people use it, perhaps fashion designers? I do like them because they work with water so well, but when the paper dries, you are still able to chisel in the hard edges.

Hugo - Street Fighter IV remake

Hugo. The one and only Street Fighter character post 2 era that deserves to make a comeback. He's made cameos for sure, but after the long list of names to appear in Street Fighter 4, Capcom decided this lovable, dopey, burly bloke from Germany wouldn't make the cut. For shame!

The Queen Elizabeth II - One's iPad painting

As promised in an earlier post, here is a snippet process video of my Queen Elizabeth II painting on the iPad! Hope you have fun watching it.

In it I hope you see abit of the process I have to go through - it's not easy to come up with something with good design but also a good likeness. Once the strokes are estalished though, the rest is rendering.

I remembered to do this JUST as this thing called the Royal Wedding is heating up. Kate Middleton? Prince William? Something like that.

I feel British this week. We are ALL British! **Cough...**

31st Worldwide SketchCrawl for Japan

The 31st Sketchcrawl was dedicated by Pixar's Enrico Casarosa to the victims of the recent Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

He also set up a Sketchcrawl fund with Give2Asia. So please give generously if you can.

The death toll from the earthquake and tsunami stands at 13,700 and even more are missing. It's sad to even think what the surviving are going through.

Not to put a downer on this blog, this is the Melbourne Sketchcrawl once again, and relatively speaking, the weather has been rather kind! In Melbourne terms, it's a miracle. Yes I'll even go as far as saying that.

For this special Sketchcrawl, I wanted to do something cool, so I figured I'd take the iPad out behind Federation square along the Yarra and began painting using the Brushes App. I lost my stylus so this is 100% left finger - It cramped after awhile.

These other sketches are from earlier in the day in a cafe and the outdoor area of Federation square where a month long comedy festival is happening. Lots of atmosphere and a great day to be drawing.

The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary

Don't know what's making me so incredibly nostalgic these days. Or somehow all these marketing 'anniversarys' coincide with my demographic. Curse them.

Anyway, this piece was done for CGHub's 2D Jam of Zelda's anniversary. The Dark World in 'Link to the Past' was the thing that jumped into my brain. Probably because I spent so long there running around not realising it actually had some relationship to the Light World. I'm reminiscing here and probably not making sense to anybody out there.

I tried to change up my workflow for this one. Colour palette was derived from a Richard Schmid painting that had a similar mood to what I wanted. I 'mosaiced' the image in Photoshop and mixed from there. It's NOT a Nori original idea - I read it somewhere in a magazine and thought I'd give it a shot. It's nice if you need to paint a feeling out there and remain gestural. The rest is drawing, really. However, now that I look at it, you can lose something using that technique and I probably wouldn't use it if I were going for a finished painting?

The other thing I tried to do was stay with a singular hard edge brush in Painter and work from large to small. That way I concentrated on the graphic shapes and how they worked in the overall composition. Bit of a puzzle, and still a challenge.

And here is the theme that sent shivers down my spine when I began working on this.

The Foundry Mari 1.2 - Impressions

I subscribed to the Mari 3D texture painting newsletter last year on the hype that it was coming to Windows and it was used on HUGE Hollywood blockbusters like Avatar. New software in the industry is rare, or if they are, tend not to be adopted in the mainstream, (or they get bought out :/). Give this software a few iterations and hardware advances, I reckon this powerful package has amazing potential.

NuPastel on Hemp Paper

So I have some boxes of NuPastels which I mail ordered from America and until the end of last year, never really gotten to around using them. Nor have I never really liked them.

Although I hate pastels and charcoals, NuPastels are alot more gritty and more transportable. I carry alot of materials in my bag and I just hate it when there's vine charcoal dust everywhere.

And maybe it's the paper, but I really love the final effect. And you can use your kneeded eraser, stump and even water to throw it around. It's very forgiving (I find).

So yeah, this is a life drawing session predominately NuPastel and a bit of conte.

And here's a nice lady explaining the virtues of NuPastel

Megaman Tribute, Preview

A small snippet of my Megaman painting for Udon's Megaman Tribute book. Whether or not I actually get into the book is up to Udon, but we find out come end of February.

Fingers crossed.

Worldwide Sketchcrawl 30 (and other drawings from life in 2010)

First 3 are from Sketchcrawl 30 which was done yesterday. And the rest are a few select ones from other Sketchcrawls and Dr Sketchys in 2010.

There is nothing like drawing from life. And as many artists have said, there really is no better teacher than nature.

Not only are there obvious aspects like, design and drawing skills and all that, but you learn intangible things. Like understanding your sensitivities towards your subject. Improvisation. The experience of actually being there. They all contribute to how you understand yourself, the world and your work - and therefore you improve.

I remember a Craig Mullins presentation where he talked about the value of doing sketches. Although he makes it look easy, he said he would do tonnes of sketches over and over and over to understand how he works. He would take his experience from one sketch and apply it to the next one and sooner or later, different experiences begin to bolt together and eventually he found a way that works for him. There's no one way of doing it.

So in conclusion, sketching is good.