March of Robots 2016

For the entire month of March, I participated in the March of Robots sketch challenge: drawing at least one robot every day for 31 days, and posting the results to Instagram. It was a fun exercise, and my main goal was to explore different styles (both analog and digital), and really just try and generate work at a regular pace. I think I came up with a fairly diverse set of robots, and it was very cool seeing what other artists came up with. Tons of creativity and skill out there!

Here's a sampling of the some 40-plus illustrations I let loose upon the world:

The #marchofrobots has begun!  #sketchbook #sketchchallenge #robots #drawing #illustration #marchofrobots2016

A photo posted by Ben Nuñez (@benerator) on Mar 1, 2016 at 8:35am PST

"Brute_01" #marchofrobots #marchofrobots2016 #autodesksketchbook #galaxynote2 #illustration #robots

A photo posted by Ben Nuñez (@benerator) on Mar 4, 2016 at 4:41pm PST

"Smoke Break" #marchofrobots #marchofrobots2016 #autodesksketchbook #galaxynote2 #wacom #bamboostylusfeel #drawing #mech #mecha

A photo posted by Ben Nuñez (@benerator) on Mar 5, 2016 at 2:38pm PST

"Deep Dive" #marchofrobots #marchofrobots2016 #autodesksketchbook #galaxynote2 #wacom #bamboostylusfeel #digitalpainting #robots

A photo posted by Ben Nuñez (@benerator) on Mar 8, 2016 at 8:58pm PST

"Rest Stop" #marchofrobots #marchofrobots2016 #AutodeskSketchbook #galaxynote2 #wacom #bamboostylusfeel #drawing #robots

A photo posted by Ben Nuñez (@benerator) on Mar 14, 2016 at 7:48pm PDT

"Stroll" #marchofrobots #marchofrobots2016 #autodesksketchbook #galaxynote2 #wacom #bamboostylusfeel #robots

A photo posted by Ben Nuñez (@benerator) on Mar 17, 2016 at 8:16pm PDT

"B-Gundam" (My own attempt at a Gundam-ish mecha) #marchofrobots #marchofrobots2016 #autodesksketchbook #galaxynote2 #wacom #bamboostylusfeel #robots #mech #mecha #gundam

A photo posted by Ben Nuñez (@benerator) on Mar 18, 2016 at 2:13pm PDT

"Contemplation" #marchofrobots #marchofrobots2016 #AutodeskSketchbook #galaxynote2 #wacom #bamboostylusfeel #digitalpainting #robots

A photo posted by Ben Nuñez (@benerator) on Mar 23, 2016 at 9:54pm PDT

"Robo sketchy sketches II: The Quickening" #marchofrobots #marchofrobots2016 #sketchbook #drawing #robots

A photo posted by Ben Nuñez (@benerator) on Mar 26, 2016 at 6:50am PDT

"MetroPol" #marchofrobots #marchofrobots2016 #autodesksketchbook #galaxynote2 #wacom #bamboostylusfeel #illustration #mech #robots

A photo posted by Ben Nuñez (@benerator) on Mar 28, 2016 at 6:46pm PDT

"Space Giants" #marchofrobots #marchofrobots2016 #autodesksketchbook #galaxynote2 #wacom #bamboostylusfeel #illustration #robots #tbt #throwbackthursday #spacegiants #magmataishi

A photo posted by Ben Nuñez (@benerator) on Mar 31, 2016 at 1:52pm PDT

"In the Realm of the Shadow Lords" illustration development

We're having an "Artists Among Us" gallery show at the place I work, with the theme "Retro Arcade". Here's the show description:

The idea for this show is to pull from our rich history of Bally and Williams Pinball and video arcade games. You can do an art piece on any theme that inspires you - or create a piece based on what pinball or video games mean to you! Use your creativity and do the artwork in your own personal style.

Original Joust poster illustrated by Williams Electronics artist Python Anghelo

For the subject of my art submission, I chose the classic videogame Joust. I felt like there were a conspicuous number of great elements in the game that would be fun to paint. Knights riding ostriches! Pterodactyls! Floating stone platforms! Sounds like the sort of thing you'd find on a heavy metal album cover (which is another thematic convention I drew inspiration from). The only way it could be more metal was if the ostrich shot lasers out of its eyes-- oh wait, it's been done before.

Thumbnail sketch

I kicked things off with a thumbnail sketch of the layout. I started out in Photoshop with a fairly limited color range, using Gradient masks to lay in colors from warm to cool. I already knew what my image area would be, as I had the opportunity to borrow a spare electronic lightbox from our Topbox department, and could spec things out accordingly. Since the image area was primarily horizontal and curved, it lent itself well to a panoramic-style layout.

Comprehensive rough

Working the sketch into a rough, I tried playing around with angling of elements, searching for something that felt right. It was a fairly organic process, tweaking things like scale and placement as I went along.

Rendering work-in-progress

Initially I envisioned something of a fisheye-lens view, but as the painting further developed, I found myself toning it down to emphasize the horizontal orientation. I also added some diffuse color, harmonizing it via Photo filters, and progressively tightened up the details. With this illustration, I really pushed for a higher level of polish using all the tricks and techniques I could come up with. I leveraged the use of layer styles like Inner Glow and Inner Shadow to quickly lay down lighting and shadow effects, and used Bevel and Emboss for detailing in the armor.

Special attention was paid to the flow of the overall layout, making sure there was a definite hierarchy of visual weight (through the level of texture, color intensity, and repetition), employing traditional design strategies to direct the eye. With all the things to look at, areas for the viewer's eyes to rest were also important.

Rough diagram of the intended visual rhythm

Once the art was completed, it was sent out for printing on clear film. To take advantage of the fact that the art would be lit, I asked that a sheet of special effect "sparkle" material be mounted to the 2nd surface (back) of the film substrate, with some areas masked out by a layer of screenprinted semi-opaque white ink. This enabled some of the highlights, and anywhere magma appeared, to have a prismatic glittery shine across the LED lighting. It's hard to see in photos, but in person it's an attractive look.

Sparkle material showing in the highlights and lava

I'm happy with the way the final printed piece turned out. It looks great amongst all the fantastic game homages in the show, and it's a nice way to showcase glass art. All in all, the project was an enjoyable, engaging design exercise.

Mounted backlit film

Final digital illustration

Glare

Haven't done a painterly robot in a while, decided to revisit an old doodle in Sketchbook on the Galaxy Note 8, playing around with the smudge tool and layer blending modes. Lots of happy accidents with this one, I learned a few things about manipulating pixels, so all in all I'd say it was a successful exercise.

Galaxy Note 8 setup

Not too long ago I bought a slightly used Galaxy Note 8 off of eBay for surprisingly cheap, and have since been using it to do preliminary sketches and comps for my Geek Bar assignments. Combined with the Wacom Bamboo Stylus feel and an Otterbox Defender case with stand, it's a very comfortable and portable digital sketchbook setup.

The 8-inch screen offers a decent amount of real estate, most definitely when compared with the Galaxy Note 2 (which remains to be great for on-the-go sketching). The soft rubber nib on the Wacom stylus combined with the surface of the Otterbox's built-in screen protector makes for a drawing experience that feels like working with natural media; I'd say the closest analog might be felt tip markers. Good stuff, y'all.

Mira's Bear in a Tutu

My daughter Mira asked me to cut out a crayon drawing that she did of "a pink teddy bear wearing a tutu" which I thought was fantastic:

I loved it so much that I had the urge to embellish the drawing, with Mira's permission, along the lines of "The Monster Engine" illustrations by Dave DeVries. I painted it up in Autodesk Sketchbook for Android on the Galaxy Note II with a Wacom Bamboo Stylus feel, and I'm pleased with how it turned out:

It was a fun exercise, one that I'll have to do again in the future.

With Mischief in mind...

So lately I've been messing around with a vector drawing/painting program called Mischief, and it's really interesting. Because the program is vector-based as opposed to raster, filesizes are small, and you can work within what they term an "infinite canvas". Mind you, even though the artwork is vector information, it's a proprietary technology (which is referred to as Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields a.k.a. ADF) that isn't handled the same way as Adobe Illustrator with splines and bezier curves, and as such can't output files useable by Illustrator. What you can do, however, is output layered Photoshop files at just about any size and resolution you want, up to a max width and height of 20000 pixels-- at 300dpi, that would translate to about 67 inches! I did notice that outputting a piece of art really small, say an inch high at 72dpi, introduces some odd artifacts, but I'm more likely to output a file bigger than smaller so I don't consider it an issue.

I've never really been comfortable drawing lineart with Photoshop, because I had problems with the quality of the linework. Mischief offers a freehand curve smoothing feature that takes care of that rather handily; I find that I genuinely enjoy drawing within the program, especially on a large Cintiq with multi-touch. It feels natural, it's just a really smooth experience overall.

Painting with Mischief, on the other hand, is still something that I think could use some work. The toolset is pretty barebones, and kind of reminds me of the early days of painting on the old homebrew app Colors! for DS. But I have no doubt the developers will get the program up to speed sooner than later.

Here's an attempt to create an illustration fully within Mischief:

Still a bit rough around the edges, but with a lot of potential, I'm really digging Mischief. At only $25 for both the Mac and PC version, it's definitely an affordable drawing and painting program worth checking out.

Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile

Autodesk just released their latest version of Sketchbook Mobile today, and what better way to commemorate a new drawing app than with a cyborg portrait?

I really appreciate all the new additions to the program, they've genuinely elevated the utility of my Galaxy Note 2 as a portable digital sketchbook. Things like selection tools, smudge brushes, gradient fills, and guides are warmly welcomed. Unfortunately, even if you already own the previous app Sketchbook Pro, you'll have to pay to upgrade Sketchbook Mobile in order to access its full feature set. Still, it's only a few bucks... For the cost of a comic book, I can't ask for much more.

At any rate, great app, available on iOS and Android.

Motoko

As part of a development initiative, I've spent time doing tutorials and getting some coaching from Cristian Silva, a senior lead artist in one of our Australia studios. We went over the fundamentals, and he taught me some very useful Photoshop tips and tricks. It's helped tremendously with things I do on the job, and I've wanted to apply some of this new knowledge to my personal work, perhaps for a portfolio piece.

I knew Michelle Eubank-Mussoni from back in the days when I used to help staff and run anime conventions; she's a great cosplayer, with strong attention to detail and a very professional approach to costuming. I saw a pic that she posted of her dressed up as the main character from the anime/manga series "Ghost in the Shell" and thought it'd be good to use as the base for a photo illustration. I received permission to use the pic, along with a thumbs-up from the original photographer.

Motoko Kusanagi from "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex"

From Wikipedia:

Major Motoko Kusanagi (草薙 素子 Kusanagi Motoko) is a fictional character in the Ghost in the Shell anime and manga series. She is an augmented-cybernetic human employed as the squad leader of Public Security Section 9, a fictional law-enforcement division of the real Japanese National Public Safety Commission. Being strong-willed, physically powerful, and highly intelligent, she is well known for her skills in deduction and hacking.

Source photo:

Costume and modelling by Mogchelle Cosplay. Photography by The Enthusiasts.

Photo illustration:

I "up-rezzed" the art from 72dpi to 600dpi (a bit of overkill perhaps, but I wanted the option of having something I could print big later). I had to smooth out a lot of JPEG artifacting, using two copies of the art on separate layers; the top one set to color mode, and the one underneath set to grayscale, where I could concentrate on cleaning up the art and not worry about affecting the colors. I did some editing to simplify the wrinkles in the clothing, and added rim lighting using a technique I picked up from artist Glyn Dewis on Youtube. (Being able to separate the layer styles from a layer and apply masks is a revelation.) I then did more painting on an upper layer to fix problem areas.

I was shooting for the sort of character portraiture you find in work from High 5 Games, and I like the way this photo illustration came together. I need more practice, and this is a good step towards that.

Salutations Redux

Did a little touch-up on an older piece, adding a little texture, cleaning up some edges, and adjusting the levels here and there:

Before and after

It's taking a while, but I'm starting to get it...

Portraits for RedditGetsDrawn

I stumbled on the RedditGetsDrawn group not too long ago, where Reddit forum members post pictures of themselves and artists of all skill levels create interpretations in the form of sketches and paintings. I decided to participate as a way of putting my Galaxy Note II and Sketchbook Pro for Android through its paces, and explore different illustration styles. The subjects have been varied and interesting, with people sometimes requesting to be depicted in anime style, like Disney characters, or zombies and what have you. The group is very supportive, and really nice work gets posted. Here are some pieces I've done, all drawn or painted on my phone/tablet, sometimes taken into Photoshop to add texture or make slight adjustments:

New stuff

After what seems like forever and a day, I've got some new stuff to post. I've been super-busy at work, and haven't been able to do much art for myself beyond the random quick doodle. But recently, we were offered the opportunity to submit illustrations to display in an upcoming gallery-style showing at work, and I decided to take some older sketches and develop them further...

Frostfoot, watercolor and marker

The original drawing of Frostfoot sprung from a weekly sketch challenge I participated in for the topic Ways Penguins Fly, and I've always wanted to return to it. From the outset I envisioned the Frostfoot sketch as a watercolor painting, like something out of a children's storybook, and this is pretty close to what I had in mind. I think the colors I used are still a little too "standard" but I feel like my sense of value is getting better.

Drizzle version 2.0, Photoshop

Another one where I was going for a storybook feel, per the original DS painting. It's still rough around the edges and I consider it a work-in-progress, but the intent is there; I'm mostly happy with the way it's turned out so far. I may tweak it a little further before final submission.

So hey, new art! Woot!

Trying not to get ahead of myself

 

This is a work-in-progress I've been doodling on and off during my morning and evening commute. I've been keeping it pretty loose and painterly, conditioning myself to work with larger textured brushes. I started to jump the gun a bit in terms of detail with the cockpit window, I'm going to leave it alone for now and try and get everything else in the scene up to snuff.

Thanatos

I started out this painting as a Colors! 3D doodle, after being inspired by reading a blog post  about the work of Ivica Stevanović on Muddy Colors . I had initially intended to make it more illustrative, but it just organically grew more painterly as it progressed, and I just went with the flow...

I didn't realize until about the halfway mark that I had defaulted to painting with local color; I have to remember to take into account the color of the light. I ended up trying to go back in with some transparent washes, but it's not ideal. I just have to keep working on it.

Also, I turned down the brightness of the screen on the 3DS XL, and that seems to have helped with picking more correct values. The image isn't as washed out as it's been previously; that being said, there's still room to push the values even more...

Once more into the breach!

I was up again far too late working on this painting, one of those instances where I got lost in the flow:

Hardsuit 85
(A bit of trivia: the 85 is a nod to Robotech, which had 85 episodes and first aired in 1985.)

Tried to concentrate on a couple things in this exercise, with varying degrees of success:

• Contrast/1-2-3 read of form
• More detail in the light, less detail in shadow
• Unified color palette
• Working with more opaque paint, rather than building up transparent washes

Painted with the app Colors! 3D on my Nintendo 3DS XL. Here's a playback for your viewing pleasure:

Anne Bonny, Pirate

I attended the September session of Aaron Miller's Figurative Illustration Workshop last night, and the model this month was dressed as Anne Bonny, the Pirate Queen. She wore a great costume with a ton of accessories, like sashes and pistols and swords. It was an overwhelming amount of detail; seriously, I could have spent days upon days trying to capture it all. As it was, I constantly had to fight with the tendency to linger on every little area, and instead concentrate on capturing the gesture and form. Hopefully there'll be good photorefs made available so I can go back in and give the paintings some more polish.

It's been a while since I've been to one of these workshops, and it was pretty evident to me how out-of-practice I was. I definitely felt very rusty, and slow. Still, it was a nice opportunity to use Colors!3D on the 3DS XL, and for the most part it worked out fairly well... I have to adjust to the XL's larger footprint; my hand cramped a couple times while holding it. But it sure was nice being able to paint on a (relatively) bigger touchscreen.

Overall, it was a great figure drawing/painting session, as per usual.

Tachikoma... Stiiiiill working on it.

This project is feeling like I'm rebuilding a muscle car in my garage... I work on it bit by bit, whenever the kid manages to take a nap, or my wife takes her out while running errands. It's coming along, perhaps at a snail's pace, but there's progress.

Here's my "to-do" list:

Tachikoma polish etc. etc. etc.

More work on Tachi, still not done:

Tachikoma polish continued

After some constructive feedback, here's another iteration of the Tachikoma rendering:

More tweaks to come...

Tachikoma polished

Here's the Tachikoma rendered out in Photoshop:

Working on this piece has been something of a learning experience for me (well, moreso than usual). Back when I used to do freelance illustration in my spare time, it'd take me about an hour or two to get revved up and find my flow, and then I could be at it for 5 or 6 hours and just knock it out. But now, everything is all fits-and-starts. I'd be working for an hour or so, and just when I start getting into it-- the kid wakes up from her nap, or I have to change her diaper, or she wants to crawl up into my lap and "Paint like Daddy!" Bye bye flow. Still, there are ways to find time to work on stuff, it just takes some sacrifices.

Works-in-progress

Gah, I've been so busy lately... Haven't had a lot of opportunities to work on my own stuff, but I didn't want too much time to go by without posting something here.

I've been working on this piece during my daily commute, re-working an older illustration into something a little more painterly, using Colors! 3D. Unfortunately, the file seems to have gotten corrupted, so I'm not able to output it at high resolution. I might take it into Photoshop and build it up more from there:

 

I'm also doing a paintover of another previous illo, a more dimensional version of the anime-style Tachikoma. I'm working out all the shading in Colors! 3D, and then I'll take it into Photoshop for a more finished polish: