Practice

Pewpew!

Splugh

Just brush practice.

Early July practice paints.

More practice rebuilding my digital painting mojo. Been focusing mostly on sketchbook stuff that I will post later.

Wallhax.

Strict brush limitations.

Composition/Layering.

Been watching a lot of Feng Zhu's videos on Youtube, particularly focusing on mindset matters. I certainly think it's a truism that here in Malaysia we generally have poor professional sense when it comes to design as a craft. Lately I've been attempting to spend more time consciously thinking as a designer outside work.

I will be giving a talk on July 17th at the Malaysian IGDA chapter apparently. Will try not to embarrass myself too much.

Got wood?

Ok I just had to pimp this work by a friend of a friend in the UK who is making these baddassed chairs.

This IS the seat you are looking for.

You gonna take it sitting down?

If you live in the UK and interested in getting your own you can hit up aforementioned friend-of-artist Paul on Facebook.

There are worse things-

-than waking up in the morning to find you made the Game App Of The Day on Kotaku ^v^

Delicious Wootcakes!

More trad!

Some perspective and composition practice and also some randomness. Ye olde markers need some getting used to again.

Sinix Design Lab Thumbs

The laptop I use at home isn't very fast at all so I don't like to paint on it much these days, to be honest I think it could run faster and the problem isn't so much that it's a crap laptop as the fact that Windows Vista is perhaps the worst operating system ever of all time.

Still, you know what they say about the metaphorical workman and his tools.

The theme for this lab was "Dragons", not a subject matter I have a lot of visual familiarity with. To get the ball rolling I decided to go with real animals as my inspiration and just jam with it. Results weren't too bad.

Community stuff is a good outlet for practice.

Even at this low res the response time of Photoshop was painful. Took me an hour to get these 3 down and I reckoned it was a good idea to cut my losses there.

Really need me a copy of Windows 7 heh.

For Jason

Even though most of his interactions these days is hating on my posts on Facebook he's still a bro :p

Phat.

Everyday is a practice day

Whether it's getting a page of thumbnails done or scrimping in a painting or two, the importance of practice cannot be understated. I stopped practicing this way 4 years ago and it annoys me a bit to think about how much better at this I would be if I didn't. Ah well.

Lazy, poorly thought out lighting is lazy and poorly thought out. Loads of mistakes here but the practice is helping get my mind warmed up to start recognizing my mistakes faster.

Look familiar? It's a quick paintover of a sketch I lifted from my previous post.

One thing I keep reminding myself this time round is to focus more on fundamentals and work a bit harder at getting them right. A page of mistakes is good only if you learn from them.

The other thing is volume. Being able to work fast makes practice minutes much more productive. Right now my painting and drawing is much slower than it used to be and as result I'm not as productive, however I am starting to feel the muscle memory quickly coming back. Design as well tends to be largely a reflexive act. I can see I need to do more varied subject matters to increase that vocabulary.

Some trad sketches

While digital is always convenient there is always something cathartic about getting back into pen and paper drawing. The process of committing to lines without the benefit of CTRL-Z and flowing off happy accidents has a certain joy to it.

Small spontaneous sketches

LV426ey structures are a staple in my sketchbook

The tools of the trade; Pen, Paper and Music~

Pimping a Bro

Down here in Malaysia there is something of a shortage of folk who understand what concept art is.

Concept art distinguishes itself from illustration from the simple fact that you aren't just drawing a pretty image to realism or getting stuck in on rendering details but participating in that uncomfortable white space known as design.

Design is a holistic practice where one thinks about the whole and the minutia all at once. It's about being outside your comfort zone in the distressing space of "I don't know, but I can make it work." and being skillful enough to manipulate a lot and very little. It also takes practice; getting down with the fundamentals of working from scratch, being comfortable of letting others see and criticize your work and not being afraid to walk away from the many many ideas you will be churning out.

You need to know how to fail often and in the right direction.

Perhaps it's due to the way students are educated here but very few Malaysian artists have that mindset. There seems to be a emphasis on getting things right first time and a hesitance to commit to exploring ideas that might fail. There is a certain level of courage you need in order to be a good concept artist.

Warhammer 40K - The Tyranid Outcast by ~RanDize on deviantART

Randy is one of those rare exceptions of a guy who worked with us for a while who knows what it is to be uncomfortable. Not just talented but also diligent and most importantly gutsy with those artistic explorations. His meticulous research into this artistic field is indicative of the hunger one needs to master their craft.

Kayla 01 by ~RanDize on deviantART

Get ye over to his site and his DeviantArt account to have a proper gander of his wares. Also, offer this man some work!

Peace!

Shipping your first title is a traumatic experience.

Some stress relief doodles.

Beginning this again.

Such is so typical when concerning blogs, you start one, forget it for ages then come back to it precisely because it never seems one has anything interesting to say or at least because one hasn't deemed a thought important enough to record.

So if a man speaks and no woman is around to hear him; is he still wrong?

It would appear that every time I have chosen to restart syndication of my thoughts, it would be because a life changing event has occurred/is occurring/will occur.

For those who do not know, I am a game designer. And the event that is about to occur is the shipping of my first title on iOS. Yey and boo in simultaneity.

Those who know me know I'm no fan of Apple. They also call me Ben. Which is relevant if you happen to be reading this and don't know me.

This blog was once dedicated to the syndication of just art but hey change is good. From here forth I will be posting about my job, climbing, art and life on a regular basis. At least that's the plan before I forget it and start again heheh.

In any case, if you're here make yourself at home, take a peek at the wares and feel free to drop me a message.

Love & Peace~!

Morning warmup

Practice practice practice.

Assassin

Speedie time!

Through the Fire and the Flames we carry on!

Come July 1st, an ambition I set out to achieve 9 years ago will finally come of age. When I was 17, I decided that I wanted to make games for a living. And now after close to a decade of working really hard and coming really close to giving up many times I'm going to move into my first gig in the games industry.

To everybody who kept believing in me during the times I didn't; thank you. It really meant a lot to me.

To everybody who'se still out there working on getting their foot in the door; stay in the fight. Work hard and have courage.

Out of time

This will likely be the last speedy I'm going to do on office time for a while. Our department just caught wind of the new schedule and it is less than intelligently derived.

I love the kind of work that we do but how things are done on the "blunt end" of the spear leave me feeling like our department is going to lose it's head like the goose that laid the golden eggs. We keep exceeding expectations on our performance and instead of being rewarded for it they take our extra effort for granted and just consider it our 'latest benchmark'.

There is such a thing as doing "too good a job".

Yes, it's a privilege to be able to work in concept art so early in our careers, but I'm getting pretty tired of us and ours being worked like dogs for what others doing the same job in this industry might call fruit and nuts.

It's a give and take relationship; We give, they take. We'll see if we get what we were promised.

Fall seven times, stand up eight. ~Japanese Proverb

Thumbnail Dump

Did some random thumbnails of fictional flora and fauna.

This fellow is a little bit... special.

Speedy

A speedy done at work. About 1 hour, no particular rhyme or reason. Can't shake this feeling of melancholy.

Another unfinished oldie

I know I've not been pulling my weight recently; apologies. My workstation at home is still belly up and gathering dust plus I've not been particularly motivated to rectify the matter.

This piccy is a fairly old one. Started as a character doodle and the background adlibbed in.

I need to go have myself a long walk. I don't seem to like weekends as much as I used to.