Saturday, February 5, 2011

Dwarf Warrior progression

Here is a digital painting that I am working on in my free time. Its a work in progress. I am getting the work flow down going from basic silhouettes, to blocked gray scale, to finer gray scale. I am not sure about he compostition, comp gives me a lot of trouble it seems, and the overall mood of the piece.
I usually start with a bit of research, looking at a ton of artists and what they contribute to the industry. Artists like Kevin Yanner, Daarken, Francis Tsai, Fang Zhu, Boris Vallejo, and others. I will also study different types of action poses or in this case, Dwarf poses. Then I would move on to different armor types, and there is a large amount of references online that I have found on different armor. I tend to drift more toward the medieval side of armor, or I will tend to go more ancient in some cases, like Hallstatt Celts type armor. But with this piece I chose medieval. At first I wanted to use a large stone hammer for the dwarf, but it seemed to lack pizazz. So I ended up replacing it with a large cross bow.  I plan on using some Germanic style or Gothic style of artwork to ordain the weaponry and the armor. The ornamentation will reflect the time frame of the armor. The dwarf looks like a hunter type with the cross bow, so I decided to have an ogre or something large peppered with cross bow arrows to show the savageness of the dwarf. A mighty hunter of ogres. It seems to work. With the background I chose a single perspective in the forest. A hunter usually hunts in the forest, and a good place to find ogres I am told. So, I put them in a small clearing of sorts in front of forest trees. I put a fin on top of the dwarfs head like a roman soldier or something, it kind of looks interesting, but I think its conflicting with the rest of the armor. Anyway, here it is. Painted in Photoshop, and took about 9 hours so far.











Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Welcome!

Welcome to the first blog by yours truly, Ron Root. I am an artist exploring the digital medium of 2D and 3D design for games, film, or comics.

I began with character design early in my career. I was drawing comics in the 6th grade with a friend from down the street. Typical, eh? Just a couple of bros making up characters for the comics we were about to create. I really enjoyed characters that had some sort of edgy mask at the time. When I was in the 6th grade it was the hockey mask of Jason from Friday the 13th. Or, from Eastman's Ninja Turtles story KC Jones. The rugged brawny badass that has been hell and is looking to get back in by means of armored assault with heavy weaponry. There needs to be more characters like this in stories and art today. I will start by bringing characters that I have found in history that could use some light, to some biographic character of some seriously sadistic SOB's that I have known and written about, to story-worthy art. I am new to this blogging thing but I want to explore some processes or creativity as we transverse the realm of Digital Painting for Character Design.

Thanks for reading, and stay creative!