Strike a free pose!

It seems July has gone by without a blog post! I apologize to ALL of you who came here last month and left disappointed. ;)

Today's post will be one of recommendation to my fellow artists.

I've never used Poser, but many artists do. Poser is a software package that  " ... comes with everything you need to create incredible digital art or 3D animation. 3D Characters, Animals, Vehicles, Props, Scenes, Cameras and Lights, all included! Poser is simple to learn, but powerful. Best of all, its fun. "

What would an illustrator use this for? Sometimes we need to reference a pose and human anatomy, but can't be bothered to go get a friend and shoot our own photo material. Some use mannequins, others will use a 3D dummy in Poser. I used to use my own rigged character, but not very often. The rig wasn't well done, there was a lot of weird stretching of skin, unnatural joint movement and so on.

Here's where today's recommendation comes in - BlenRig 4 for the Blender 3D package. The best thing about it? It's completely free!

Blender

"Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU Public License."

http://www.blender.org/

Blender does take some getting used to, especially if you've ever used other 3D packages. The UI seems unintuitive, but the "free" part helps with getting over that. ;)

BlenRig

"BlenRig is an Auto Rigging & Skinning System for Blender 2.5+ series.
It features an adjustable rig which proportions can be changed  to fit existing models, or to create a new character based on a previously rigged mesh."

http://jpbouza.com.ar/wp/blenrig/

More importantly for artists, it's very easy to adjust the pose of the character. The default model is very good, if a bit boring muscled guy. You can get other models already rigged in this system too!
(and everything you need to know about this system is covered by video tutorials)

You can do lots just with the default guy too, you can change scale of his parts separately, or stretch and  squish them at will - so you'll get your dwarf/ogre reference as well.

Now it's not some super lifelike "muscles sliding over bones under skin" type of rig, but it deforms VERY well. Especially for quick reference of human anatomy in perspective and a particular pose you'd be hard pressed to find a better system.

Grapes of Wrath

I don't get to do personal pieces these days. I don't have the time to draw or paint everytime I think of something cool, in fact it's mostly not worth it.

But some ideas stick with me, crawling in the back of my skull. Some of them scratch their names on the wall and I can't get rid of them in any other way.

I have to paint them.

Many of these are quite silly, or strange, like this one. A painting idea is like a minibus full of stray thoughts, hopping on and off before and even during the painting itself.

Guardian of the Grapes

• I've watched the "Somebody I Used to Know" music video by Gotye, as everyone on the planet has, only I was a bit late to the party and it was old news already. I was fascinated by Kimbra's voice and more importantly by De Backer's makeup. The pale paint leaving only his (rather fascinating as well. Those teeth!) mouth gaping open and almost obscenely red. It reminded me of how red wine dyes the mouth and lips blue or purple. 

          If you're the last person on Earth who hasn't seen the video:  

                 

                      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UVNT4wvIGY 

• I've been reading books by Gregory Keyes, and most notably "Waterborn" influenced me quite a bit. I won't go into detail about the plot, you can read that on Wikipedia:

                      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Keyes

   

          The world full of gods and people interacting with them in a very common and regular manner appealed to            me.  

• About a year ago I realized I actually liked red wine. So I read up on wine-making a bit, looked at photographs of vineyards.

For some reason, an image of the singer in makeup, but warped into inhuman form with dark godly eyes emerged in my mind. And so did the words - "guardian of the grapes".

And I knew who he was. A lesser guardian god, protecting a sacred grove of olive trees, among which wild grapevines grow. 

He's scary at first, hulking large, with knobbed joints and clumsy limbs. His eyes are beyond the point where large pupils are cute, they're already quite creepy and alien. He's not evil though, he doesn't hurt people. He just wants to be left alone. If only those pesky humans didn't like his grapes so much!

And that's it. I knew exactly what he was, what the situation was - a group of girls tried to pick grapes in the grove without performing an appeasing offering first. The guardian is blasting out of the bushes, vines tangled around his arms, smashing everything in sight and trying to scare them away.

I painted this in the past two months, not having time for proper painting (yay for university! :)), doing ten to twenty minutes here and there. Today I felt it was finally there. I may tweak it some more, but that's the good thing about personal pieces. It only needs my approval right now. ;)

(painted entirely in ArtRage Studio Pro as always)

My MA thesis is finished!

No funny title today.

I'm currently trying to finish my MA Computer Graphics studies and after months of struggle, I managed to wrangle my thesis into existence.

The topic is "Digital Reconstruction of Archaeological Finds" and here's the abstract:

This thesis defines archaeological reconstruction and describes its history
and evolution. It explores the use of computers in reconstruction and lists
currently used techniques and methods. Romanian archaeology and a brief
historical summary of the ancient Dacian people are discussed with Romanian
archaeologists. The practical part presents the results of attempted reconstructions
of Dacian archaeological finds supplied by Romanian archaeologists.
Various freely available applications suitable for reconstruction were
tested and their performance compared. The thesis also suggests possible
course of further research and development of digital reconstruction.

I know, it's so DRY and boring.
You can download the whole text (with pictures too!) here: http://pospabr.sweb.cz/dpJanPospisil.pdf

Anyway, as part of the thesis I also did a painting.

It shows a family of Comati (or Komatai), ancient Dacian commoners. If you want to know more, check out the link above. :)

3 points on pauldrons in fantasy illustration

I'm sorry about the unimaginative title!

My armour posts seem to be among the most popular ones and I just got an idea for another one today.

Pauldrons are difficult, I won't lie. Armour in general is very hard to understand and to draw. And an illustrator usually needs to come up with acceptable yet innovative designs on a regular basis.

I won't even talk about massive Warhammer marine/Warcraft pauldrons, or pauldrons with giant spikes, those are a bit obvious and I'll leave them for an even less inspired post in the future.

There are three things I want to address. Let's look at the amazing drawing I put together five minutes ago:

(click to enlarge if you wish)

1) Single pauldrons held by body straps

This is all for the sake of coolness and asymetrical design. Single pieces of pair equipment probably were used here and there, but more because of the lack of the other piece rather than any deliberate purpose. It's also much easier to strap and set up a pair of pauldrons. As we've no doubt seen many times, these pauldrons are magically held on the body by (often really crazy) webs of straps and belts. Often they'd make it very difficult for the person to move.

Everytime I see this, I have to question the sanity of people who'd choose to wear only pauldrons and no other armour, for whatever reason. Is it ideology or bravery like with the berserks? Well then a pauldron is just as armour as any other piece.
Is he supposed to be a "light" build? Some kind of a rogue? Why on earth a pauldron then? It's not like the shoulder is the first place anyone would attack, or a bodypart one needs to protect above all others. I'd wear a cuirass, or a padded jack in that case.

To me this is the equivalent of a chainmail bikini - a dinosaur of fantasy illustration we should forget.

2) Pauldrons on hinges

I wonder who came up with the idea. Some unfortunately placed rivets on an original armour might have deceived him. Or maybe he just thought this was how it worked.

Pauldrons are not riveted to the cuirass. No.

Still, fantasy armours repeat this design over and over.
You even see it in movies (and boy oh boy, does it show how uncomfortable and awkward it is!)
 - I'm looking at you, Dungeon Siege!

also games like Dragon Age:

And man, does it NOT work when you make it into a costume!

(that poor actor had to pretend he could lift his arms comfortably)

So how were these things attached to the person? They were usually tied onto the cuirass/gorget/padded jack at the shoulder/neck. No, it doesn't flop around wildly, you can always put a strap going under the arm to hold it in place.
Putting the weight on the shoulder is a good for mass distribution and it doesn't get in the way of any movement.

3) Pauldrons wide enough to make you stuck in the door

Pauldrons are not just any massive bowls you stick on your shoulders. There are many different types and shapes, all very specifically shaped to fit the body very tightly and closely. You want to be a small target, not a huge one. You don't want it to change your balance.

I get it, wide shoulders make the silhouette seem powerful. I beg you, do it with the actual shoulders and then put pauldrons on those, don't put massively wide protruding pauldrons on narrow shoulders.

Illustrations like that remind me of American "football" players stuck in that harness of theirs. They have padded shoulders, because they want to tackle people.

There's no shortage of large "shoulder pads" in historical armours, but they're designed in a way that makes them cover a large area while remaining fairly close fitting:

I've posted mainly medieval plate armour as examples of how it "should" look. For a good reason - most fantasy is still based on our limited view and understanding of medieval Europe. Sure, it's changing, we're adding Asian and other influences. But the majority of knights, paladins and other armoured characters still wear "knight armor".

We could speak about more "primitive" shapes and designs like the tube-and-yoke armour, or the lorica segmentata. But we won't, not today. :)

I'd like to stress this is not a hate post, meant to tell all illustrators how dumb they are. Far from it!
The portrayal of fantasy armour IS getting better and better all the time.

These are just my personal pet peeves with pauldrons, that's all. Now you know how to do it LESS WRONG! ;P

A BONUS POINT! - Redundant besagues

Have you seen stuff like this before? I'm sure you have.

Those funny looking discs around the shoulders, or the armpits. Preferably painted on amazon warriors clad in mail bikini.

How? How do those make ANY sense at all? These things are called "besagues" and they're meant to protect the wearer from blows or blades slipping between the pauldrons and the cuirass - into the armpits where dem arteries are.

I only wish the artists hadn't forgotten to pain the cuirass and the pauldrons on in most cases.

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As always, if you have anything to say - SAY IT in the comments! :) I want to hear it.

Candy From a Stranger

Here are the last two black and white illustrations I did for Picks and Hoes. The more I've done of these, the more I started to enjoy myself. 

And here's a cover for a book soon coming out by Moon Design - a wonderful tome about the city of Pavis.
It's been done for quite some time now. It's not at all how I meant to do it, still I'm quite content with it.

This image was a challenge - a first real piece in colour (and a cover at that) I did after a long time of doing greyscale quarter-pagers.
I had a 3D model of the city, which was of huge help to me. Thank you, awesome Glorantha fans, who make 3D models like that. ;)
It was much easier to pick an interesting point of view while keeping the architecture and layout completely accurate this way.

As soon as we started talking about it with Jeff, I knew I wanted to have the sun play a major role - the first sketches were done in normal yellow midday sunlight, but a scene of worship atop a zikkurat just begged to be happening at sunset/sunrise.

And dragon worship used to be a big thing in Pavis, apparently, so I put in dragon banners waving in the wind, hints of dragon shapes in the smoke of the scensor and the scensor itself is shaped like a dragon too.

Then it was just getting the lighting and mood right, painting all those people in the square and keeping the perspective right on the priests.

Some random guy at Dragonmeet last year told me it had "good lighting", so I see it as a success. ;P

I'm drawing again!

Hey, long time no post!

I've been stretching my drawing muscles lately. I seem to have forgotten a lot, it's always a struggle at first. When I get into it though, it's a lot of fun.

Here are 4 illustration I've done for the "Picks and Hoes" book - it's quite rare to see interior illustrations in fantasy books these days:

(there will be two more in the book, still working on those. All "ink pen" over "pencil" in ArtRage)

And this is a drawing I did for a LARP group reenacting the men of Dale from J.R.R.Tolkien's Middle Earth, for a poster I think. It felt like I was drawing this for myself though - very relaxing, no stress over reference, I just drew what I knew well and enjoyed the process very much.

("pencil" in ArtRage)

  

I'm quite pleased with the result. It weren't necessarily the Osprey illustrations I was thinking about while drawing it, Victor Ambrus fans will no doubt see my attempts to be as loose and effortless as he was in all his wonderful elf drawings.

Focusing on the armies of the north of ME was also interesting. I've done many drawings and paintings of the Gondorians, the Haradrim also - all southern nations. But the elves of Mirkwood, men of Dale, Beornings, the Woodsmen, those were all neglected for some reason. They don't appear in LOTR that much and somehow don't seem to fit - the inspiration, their source and origin is more obscure, yet rooted in history and mythology even more than that of the southern people.

Quite possibly it was a combination of purchasing The One Ring role playing game by Cubicle 7 (illustrated by Jon Hodgson, Tomasz Jedruszek and John Howe), reading The Hobbit again in English and also reading "Road to Middle Earth" by Tom Shippey, that made me want to illustrate these less explored parts of Tolkien's world. Less eplored in the past that is, and in the better known media. I'm sure the MERP games have done all kinds of books on the North, but it seems to me that TOR is the one game that deals with it properly at last.

The North isn't quite as boring as I once thought it was. Hopefully I'll get to draw or paint some more of these mysterious lands.  

Totemic Creatures

"Totems of the Dead" GameMaster's Guide seems to be released, so I'm posting these pieces I did for it.
Had a lot of fun doing creatures instead of warriors for a change.