New Paperdoll Music Video

Given that this was finished over a week ago, this is kind of old news. Well, old to me, but new to anyone who follows this blog.

The NY band, Paperdoll has recently had a song of theirs ("If Nothing Happened") featured in a Dayquil commercial. To capitalize on the exposure, it was decided at the office to new an official music video for it. The last video was, of course, for the song "Anything At All."

We wanted to get the video done as soon as possible, so animating it was out of the question. After knocking around some concepts, we settled upon a video comprised exclusively of public domain footage.

It took three of us (including myself) roughly two days to rip enough clips from various dvd's. They all came from one of those cheap "50-pack"-type deals. After the footage was compiled and organized, I took the directorial duties and edited all the clips together myself. That took about another two days, but the total amount of hours added up to less than 24 hrs.

A high def version of the video can be seen here.

A Doodle

Did a little sketch of Piccolo a couple of days ago. Just thought I"d post it.

Bayonetta Redesign: Progression

I've been meaning to put these concepts up since Ignition's contest wrapped back in August, but just never made time for it. Each of these concepts were pretty large and had to be sized down for the web. Since the development of this concept had so many more steps, that also meant that I'd have to upload a lot of pix for this post. Well, I had a little time to spare, so I decided to get this thing together.

For those unfamiliar with "Bayonetta", she's the title character for an upcoming Playstation 3 game. My laziness would like to direct you to the wiki page for the full description.

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

Since this is a post regarding a re-envisioning of the character, then I suppose I should post pix of her in her original garb.

Alrighty, lets get right into it shall we?

The picture above was my first round of concepts. This is more or less a "warming up" peroid. The focus here is just to generate ideas. Before I start using reference for a character desgin, I like to see what I can come up with straight out of my head, get a feel for whatever directions I'm unconsciously going in already, and continue from there.

I was probably going for Victorian kind of look, but I decided not to go that route. However, it did remind me of some good reference. The anime incarnation of Witchbalde had a lot of good armor designs. The aspect that I wanted to utilize the most was that of the hair swooping down around the breasts.

I think what also reminded of it was the fact that Bayonetta's been described as some sort of witch. (Incidentally, Witchblade has supernatural elements, but actually has nothing to do with witches.)

The curvature of the designs seemed applicable since Bayonetta's "costume" is all just her hair. Whatever I did would have to convey the sense that her outfit is truly wrapped around her.

When Bayonetta uses her hair to attack, that means there's less of it to cover her body. In which case, she's nearly nude.

Soooo, near-nudity is another commonality between Bayonetta and Withcblade. :)

With all that in mind, I did the 2nd round of concepts. However, I wound up giving her more cover than I expected.

In a few of these, I started channeling one of Angel's outfits from "The Big O."


I was also considering using Erakah Badu's headwraps and reference.

At some point, in the midst of coming up with hair styles, I thought of "I Dream of Genie."

This was a big turning point in my conceptual process. The "look" had finally been established. She's just similar enough to Bayonetta, yet still feels like someone new. The djinn(genie) influences really sell the exotic feel I wanted to achieve. She even has the best face out of all the other drawings. I actually think that this concept embodied my aesthetic intentions more than the final product. You can be the judge of that shortly.



First, I decided to work out the positive/negative balance of the space. I didn't exactly know what pose I was going to do, but I had a general idea of how dynamic it was going to be.


Here, I drew some "lines of action" that turned into a loose gesture drawing.

Once I was fairly certain of how the body was going to be positioned, I began building the forms.


I didn't notice it at the time, but her left leg (on the right side of the image) came out kinda weird. I think my unconscious intention was to have that foot completely off the ground (As evident in the orange stick figure). I must have forgotten about this and put the foot partially on the ground. This resulted in and odd angle.


I like to start with flat values whenever I do digital painting. I also like to keep them in black and white, and overlay color later. This picture obviously has the values colored.

You'll also notice that my costume design started leaning more towards those small concepts in the far left and far right of that 2nd page of ideas.

Here I tried to add a little more "witchiness" by incorporating some funeral veil-esque fabric.

I finally fixed that leg, but I never changed the knee. Maybe I was just focused on meeting the contest deadline.

I also made a big change to the hair. I was having a hard time selling an exaggerated version of the "I Dream of Genie" hairstyle. Then I discovered another variation of it that worked better, or was easier to draw rather.




I kept the gesture lines to jazz up the background a bit.


The previous one had some minor issues. Not only was it too dark, but people also mistook those rings on her guns for handcuffs. The ribbons I drew in somewhat fix that. I don't think I had a function in mind when I drew those rings in the first place. They're mainly just there to fill out space and add some motion to the pic. They'd probably be less ambiguous if I actually came up with a purpose for them.

Overall, I think the final product is just OK. It's fine just as a finished illustration, but it's not a finished illustration imbued with any sort of spark. It's too boring. I feel as though I could've cranked up the sexiness and exoticism a bit.

I'll probably do another iteration of this concept in an attempt to satisfy myself better.

Two Contest Entries Done.

I've spent most of this month working on an illustration for that Bayonetta contest I mentioned before.

http://www.wizarduniverse.com/bayonettacompetition.html

As I was wrapping up the Bayonetta piece, someone told me about a fan art contest for Muramasa: The Demon Blade.

http://www.muramasathedemonblade.com/?fbid=BB9i2AqSlSZ#/fanart/page/1

Lucky for me, I had already done one. Soooo, I pretty much just slapped some color on it and made a background pattern. I submitted it yesterday and it's already up on the site among the other entries. It's the one with my user name "burntmoth19."

Here's the progression.

I dropped in a bg color, added values (with a lavender tint) , and changed hue of line-art to be pinker. I wanted the overall feel to be reminiscent of cherry blossoms.

I then eye-dropped her colors from her official character art and muted them down. As this point the umbrella still saturated.

Here, I decided to just mute out the umbrella as well. Then I drew in some highlights here and there.

Gave the umbrella shadows a slight magenta tint and colored the ears.

In this last stage, I created a sakura pattern for the bg and repeated it. I only wanted a slight implication of a bg element so I dropped the opacity down on it. It also gives the overall piece some texture.

In the next post I'll post my progression of my Bayonetta fan art.

Monster Monday cont.....

Ah, here's the final. I wanted to clean it up more, but I've been here at the office waaaay longer than I should be.

Blast from the Past Pt. 2/ Monster Monday

In this installment of blast from the past, I present to you a monster I drew six years ago in my 1st year of college. For some reason it possessed me to draw some monsters in my 2D Design sketchbook. One of which was this thing.

I don't know what exactly I was going for. It like a wingless griffin with a gorilla torso, donkey ears, and a unicorn horn. Well whatever it is, I chose it to begin a series of illustrations in which I take and old drawing/concept and update it.

It's also my first entry for Weigy's Monster Monday.

http://blog.weigy.com/

I'm too lazy to link directly to whatever his latest installment is.

The 3-month old pic below was my very first attempt.

These next two, I did today. Orginally, I wanted to keep the pose relatively the same for compare/contrast purposes. In the end I just couldn't resist giving it something better.

This one's the closest to the final. I just have to clean up the lines a bit. Notice my creative usage of watermarks? hehe

Blast from the Past Pt. 1

Last month, I was going through some a couple of portfolios filled with old work. Most of it is stuff from high school with a few works from SCAD. I figured in the next few posts I should show a few.

These pix are some mastercopies I did 9 years ago.

(The scanner cut Raph off below)

I drew them from a TMNT book I sent away for.

When I ordered the thing, I thought is was a graphic novel, but it turned out to be an Role-Playing Game.

Wiki can sum it up better than I can.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles_&_Other_Strangeness

At the time I had no idea what an RPG was, so I was a little confused when I opened it up. After reading through it, it seemed pretty interesting and there actually was a decent amount of artwork, and comic scans in it.

The art alone made it worth the purchase. This was one of the few times I had ever seen the original TMNT in any form of print. I wasn't one of those hip kids that read the comic before the cartoon aired.

Just for kicks, here's a real oldie.

This little gem was a product of my own creation. It's not dated, so I don't know when I drew it. I think I was around five. The image looks weird because I scanned it still inside the frame. I was paranoid about taking it out.