I love 'em both... but I think I like the one on the left a tad bit more. I have a little issue with the shading on it, though. On the bottom, the shadow on the blue should follow the same curve as the shadow on the yellow, since the blue is just another color on Dunsparce and doesn't poke out or anything. I also noticed that there's no shadow under the head in the yellow portion. Otherwise, it seems pretty good. You did a nice job with these ^-^
Traced from a card artworks project by @steffenka . I discovered that you can use a drop shadow and a transparent object to make shadows fit to my likely. Wish I knew that before >.> I should also be able to complete the full Staraptor PNG in due time!
Traced from a card artworks project by @steffenka . I discovered that you can use a drop shadow and a transparent object to make shadows fit to my likely. Wish I knew that before >.> I should also be able to complete the full Staraptor PNG in due time!
I like the Staraptor, but I think that Dunsparce should be a little darker. Considering it's in withered leafs (presumeably in a forest), there should be shadows from the trees and/or the withered leafs on Dunsparce.
I like the Staraptor, but I think that Dunsparce should be a little darker. Considering it's in withered leafs (presumeably in a forest), there should be shadows from the trees and/or the withered leafs on Dunsparce.
Thanks for the feedback! I personally don't think I'll change the Dunsparce due to a combination of hassles and having this weird style that I like, but I'll certainly keep natural shadows is mind when making Pokemon for other settings!
The banner made for @thegrovylekid's new Choose Your Own Adventure "A New Day" text that you can find here. I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. I did a bit of experimenting with the Hue filters over a free use image [link] to make the multicoloured eye while sharpened my lassoing + fade to halve the main image.
Say 'ello to the Minccino cleaning a Shiny Stone! Hopefully this PNG is a step up from my past works, as I've begun to work more with highlights and shadows. The pose was traced from an anime screenshot. Also special thanks to @Blui for major inspiration and general tips on making stuff a bit like this.
Artwork created using Minccino PNG. This piece was used on the Minccino card in my Knightly Nights set! Spent absolutely ages trying to find a decent background, and resorted to Unity in the end.
Been experimenting with blending modes and other random effects recently, especially to make cool backgrounds. One such an example is the background on this Victreebel ex card I made. However, tonight, I whipped up this giga thing, which I'm pretty happy with:
So, I finally stopped being lazy about not making art for my Knightly Nights set and tackled a Special Energy artwork that I used on this card. This thing is a HUGE step up from my past pieces, as I've ventured into a form of 3D without using models. I was originally going to have light bouncing off the background, but I couldn't figure out a good way to make that work, so I settled with the more simplistic look. I did also figure out how to make light beams for me EX cards, so I'm pretty psyched for that. Otherwise, I'm really happy with how this piece came out, especially the colour blend.
I'm back again! Does this indicate something more is to come? Tapu Koko is probably one of the two Sun & Moon Pokemon that I actually like, so I figured why not make something cool for it?
Anyway, after about 1.5 years after @9Tailzsuggesting it (and me declining), I decided to use cel shading! It definitely wasn't as difficult as I expected (it was time-consuming, though), and learning it seems to be helping out with my shading in general. Notably, the shading style is a a bit different to that of Minccino, but to be fair, I really like both and think I might end up using both styles depending on what I need the art for.
This piece was traced from this stunning art by Sliplick. I wasn't planning on making a complete retrace, but I ended up needing to do it for something.
Other Stuff
Here's the promotional banners for Fog of War 2, a Forum Game I'm hosting. They use @BigfootAUS' renders used to create the original Fog of War banner, but I've spiced them up a bit. To be honest, I'm really happy with how these turned out, especially the contrast (shoutout to Jabberwock for that). The super stylised text was a new one, but I think that came out well too. It was heavily inspired by the Pirates of Caribbean logo.
I also created this a while back for my area's local Youth Group's Nerf War night. It's a mockoff of the Call of Duty box art (?). I'm pretty happy with how this turned out too, as it is probably my first mash of images that looked decent. I discovered that dark shadows makes things much easier. :x
TeraUpdate!
I've certainly got a lot of stuff to showcase since my last update, in July! Let's just say it's an early Christmas present from me. :U
A lot of you would have already seen this piece before, either on my Alolan Exeggutor-EX FA card, or on DeviantArt. I was really happy with how this turned out. I love the vibrancy and how nicely it captured the spirit of the original artwork by limb92.
Here's another PNG! This one's more recent; it was used on my Ninetales FA-EX card. Instead of tracing from already-made art like I normally do, I had a brainwave to use Unity to create some poses! It works really well, with the only struggle being any of the more awkward shading, which was off-putting at times.
On that note, I decided to do some more with Unity! My first stop was to make a really simple scene using a really simple model, and this was the result of that. I used the Staryu model from SSB4, which is much nicer than the XY model. I used this piece on my Staryu card here.
This one's actually quite a few months old, I just completely forgot to upload it! It was my first attempt to make decent TCG art using Unity. I learnt a few tricks throughout the process, the main one of which being to add different glossiness to different parts of Dragonair by manipulating the UV maps (textures). I used the magic wand tool to select the parts I want to shine up (i.e. the orbs on Dragonair's tail and neck) and delete the rest of the map, so that everything else is transparent. That way, I can sorta lay this shine on top of the rest of the texture! This art used the XY Dragonair model and it was used on my Dragonair GL card.
I then needed to figure out how to make some higher quality, 3D renders that would give me much more freedom for card art. Maya proved too difficult for my computer to handle, so I scrapped that approach and went for Blender instead. Blender is actually a really user-unfriendly program, unfortunately, and I shed a lot of blood and tears trying to figure it out. Thanks to watching hours of tutorials, I eventually managed to output this! I'm super proud, since my aim is to be rendering models as good as 5ban's, and this is one big step further! I did, uh, realise too late that I forget to export this at the right size, so it's a bit smaller than normal. Oh well.
For those who like to see the development process, here's what it looked like in Blender [one, two], and here is what Blender outputted. I ended up doing a bit of Photoshopping to get to this final piece.
This is a banner I made for Cluedo Mafia, which is a mafia setup that I designed and hosted on another forum a few months ago.
Here's the banner that I made for the PokeDex 2.0 community project, of which you can find here. It was @Jabberwock's idea to use a PokeBall in it, which really makes the banner, I reckon! ^.^
Aaaand to top it all off, here's a sneakpeak on a Forum Game that I've been slowly working on! If you'd like to help me in the alpha stages of testing it, just shoot me a Skype message!
EDIT: To clarify, I didn't make most of these images, I just thought I'd show it here.
Ooh is that an Epona/Link icon I see on the bottom right? :O I'm a sucker for Vector images but the ones for that game have me sold. Can't wait for it!
I took a closer look at Exeggutor and Ninetales and I noticed that some of the corners were rounded and others were sharp. Is that on purpose?
Ooh is that an Epona/Link icon I see on the bottom right? :O I'm a sucker for Vector images but the ones for that game have me sold. Can't wait for it!
I haven't posted anything for an entire year! I'm a horrible person.
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I'm excited with how this turned out -- I always considered myself a very average drawer, so it's nice to know that you can do anything when you put your mind to it. Plus there's still so much to work on.
You may not have noticed, but this isn't actually the original. 'Cause I've got terrible spatial sense, the hard copy didn't look like who I intended, and so I had to use a bit of photoshop magic to fix that up. That's why I would prefer to do digital art, as with traditional, you can only erase stuff so many times; that said, it'd be nice to reach a point where my eraser barely gets used. Anyway, this was the original (rip me):
The difference is pretty significant. In the final, the face is narrower and a bit taller, the neck was moved in to the right, the fringe was lowered, the eyes were moved closer to the middle, and the mouth and nose were moved up. There's a few other subtle differences too. It's remarkable how much difference adjustments like that can make!
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bb, why have you suddenly taken up to traditional drawing?
Great question, thanks for asking! Now that school's done and dusted (by the way, I graduated in November), I've been seeking a few forms of creative expression that I find fulfilling. Unfortunately for me, fulfilling equates to "something that meets my high standards" that "does not waste hours of time", so my search has been much more difficult than you would expect. I've tried writing, but matching the image that I want to portray with what I actually write was pretty difficult. Besides, it's not easy to encourage people to spend the time reading hundreds of words. I can't build anything for the life of me, so that was out too. Photography has been an interest, but I haven't pursued it enough yet to be able to make decision. Inspired by a certain artist on DeviantArt, I tried out digital art portraits, but abandoned that after finding the details difficult to paint, and the blending to be wonky. I was recommended to try traditional art instead and practice concepts that are translatable into digital art, such as tones and shapes, and so I did.
I'mma name him Jack. graphite // ~24hrs of experimentation
This was started and abandoned largely incomplete around Christmas time last year. I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed as of late, so I dug this back out and realised that sketching helped to calm me down whenever I am feeling overwhelmed. I'm pretty happy with the end result, but there's still so much to learn and improve on. Based on [link].
Photography
I've been pretty into photography this year, especially portraits. I can't post those for privacy reasons, but here's a few others that I took (without humans!) and don't feel like posting anywhere else. Most of these were taken in Cairns / the Daintree, which is tropical north-east Australia. Camera type: iPhone 5se.
All the other stuff
Here's a few other things that I've worked on over the year:
Credits: Duskull art belongs to DillanMurillo, bg is this official wallpaper, with Lycanroc edited out, some purple recolour and a subtle motion blur effect.
Credits: Slowking is neo-era card art ripped from the original background
Ripped from the HG-era Kingdra Prime card, for a forum project that I was working -- which may or may not be happening, though I'm not sure \o/
I made a series of these graphics for our local youth group program, and this is the one I'm most happy with. Lightbulb credit: [link]
Wow wow, bb. This stuff is great. I swear I responded to this thread in December '17 when you linked me to that post way back, but I'm here to do that now. At 1am. Might be tired but it's worth it cause your work is just that good.
I love your photography, especially the plant and fire photos. They're certainly a lot more simple than my shots are and definitely give me a different perspective on how photography can look depending on who takes a shot. I tend to go for larger landscape photos with something big, but I love this simplistic look of focusing (or existing only entirely) on one small thing, and your lighting for those shots are especially beautiful. Your traditional art is wonderful and you've definitely shown improvement over the past year, and I love the graphic you made for The Big Idea. I've wanted to make visual designs for projects I create just like what you've done, honestly.
Your work is wonderful, keep it up! Don't let your gallery thread fall to inactivity like mine has, haha.
Thanks for your kind words @VioletValkyrie! It's a pity that user interaction in the CWs has fallen as of late, we'd probably see a resurgence of art otherwise -- but eh.
Strangely enough, I find it very difficult to take photographs of landscapes unless I can find a subject to focus on within that shot, whether it be a person, man-made structure in the foreground, or some abstract pattern in amongst the landscape. That essentially makes the landscape nothing more than a complex background, I suppose, which sorta defeats the purpose! I definitely appreciate being in the location during the moment, I just can't find anything special to capture in it haha. Just not my cup of tea, let's say.
I can't make any promises about my gallery (uni this year, wooo~), but you definitely need to do something about yours.
Thanks for your kind words @VioletValkyrie! It's a pity that user interaction in the CWs has fallen as of late, we'd probably see a resurgence of art otherwise -- but eh.
It really is a big shame and it's something surprising I witnessed after making my thread, I'd love to see a resurgence if it was simply a bigger or more populated end of the forums.
Strangely enough, I find it very difficult to take photographs of landscapes unless I can find a subject to focus on within that shot, whether it be a person, man-made structure in the foreground, or some abstract pattern in amongst the landscape. That essentially makes the landscape nothing more than a complex background, I suppose, which sorta defeats the purpose! I definitely appreciate being in the location during the moment, I just can't find anything special to capture in it haha. Just not my cup of tea, let's say.
That's certainly a different way of looking at it than how I've taken my photos. Personally I don't think having the landscape as just a complex background defeats the point, but I think that's just how I prefer taking photos and the difference is quite noticeable between both of our work, though both are still wonderful in their own ways.
I've always thought that even if people aren't interested in photography, they should give it a shot and see what kind of styles they'd enjoy taking photos in to see if they enjoy the art form, especially since smartphones come with cameras that I wouldn't say are anywhere near bad quality now, especially with you crediting your camera choice to simply just being a smartphone like me.
Ah, well good luck either way! I hope you can find the time, and good luck/have fun in uni! I'll get on mine when I've got the chance, I think a certain someone running this thread got me interested in trying to take some good shots again.
I watched Star Wars Ep I a couple of days and felt like drawing young Anakin. My last sketch took a ridiculous 30 or so hours, so I tried a speed drawing to see how I'd go... and now I think I should speeddraw more often!
