Plant creature

Skyfood Tacos

The idea I am settling on is a future setting based on inspiration from "Tales from the Loop" and the drawings of Ian McKewan.

The location is an old skyport that is used to dock birding vessels. It's a rough neighbourhood where the few ships docked at night hover noisily and pump out diesel fumes over the slums below. On the street corner outside the bird processing plant there is a greasy taco stand that specialises in battered skyfood.

The catches from the day are dumped off at the plant but in return for a tasty taco, the stand owner has prime choice of the gulls, pigeons and other treats. He whizzes them through his bird processor to clean off the meat and chucks the useless remains over the edge of the dock wall. He thinks the slums squatters should pay him for the free breakfast.

It's early morning and the shifts are about to change. Workers will soon arrive smelling of tobacco and sweat while the night shift leaves covered in feathers and the odour of rotten birds.

Getting back to Environment Art

I have decided it's time to "sharpen the saw" or make sure my skills are up to scratch. I've been working very successfully as a lead and art director for a while now but I miss making environment art. So this is my first step in getting back into it and spending my free time making digital art.

I need to know what to work on, then make sure I have the software required, come up with an idea or two and start building it.

A) What do I need to work on? There's a bunch of skills I'd like to hone and demonstrate on my out of date portfolio.

1. Physically based materials. I know these inside out but I don't really have any portfolio pieces that demonstrate them.
2. Hard surface modelling. Some good old sci-fi corridor, gun, armour or machine would do the trick
3. Sculpting. It's been a while since I used Z-Brush, would be good to get some sculpted surfaces in a scene.
4. Substance Designer. I haven't had a chance to use this yet but I know it's power. Looking forward to this for some tiling materials!
5. Substance Painter. I want to use this so bad. Just need some props to work on.
6. Unreal. I want to learn blueprints and lighting set-up in Unreal as it's awesome.

B) Software?

1. Unreal 4 for rendering (might try Marmoset too)
2. 3DS Max 2016 for hard surface
3. Z-Brush for da sculptz
4. Substance Designer and Painter
5. Photoshop for paintovers and for whatever I can't do in Substance yet - work copy
6. x-normal/Knald for baking

Final Class of Oil Painting

Ten weeks passed so quickly! I'm quite happy with the results overall. I learnt a serious amount about colour and about using big brushes early. Oils are amazing fun to use, so much easier than Acrylic. Anyway here's my final project which was about 6 hours of painting in total spread over 3 weeks. Importantly I changed (I was forced to luckily) to a better position for lighting because the room where we were painting from over the last two weeks was being worked on to prepare for a graduate show.

So here's the paintings. I'll take better pictures of them when I bring the painting home when it's dried. The second image is where I was at the end of last week's class.

Self Portrait - Blockout (Oils)

Latest work form oil painting class. This is the blockout which I will continue working on next weekend.

Portrait from life in Oil

Here's the drawing first (with paint, I really like drawing with paint now!) and the the block-out. Next week I'll fix the Klingon skull and add details. :)

Return of the Life Drawing

Pretty rusty now... Here's some pics:

Oil painting class - Week 4

I'm studying how to paint with oils. I'm on week 4. Here's some photos:

Week 1: Mixing greys
Week 2: Mixing colours
Week 3: Mixing flesh tones
Week 4: Composition

Staedel Museum and some photos

Museums are great and Frankfurt is full of them. You can get a yearly pass for 70 euro and you can use that to go to any of the museums (there are 30 of them) for free any time you want. You can also skip queues and get invited to special openings.

Today we visited the Stadel Museum to see a photography exhibition (go to this museum if you can, the photo exhibition was OK but the contemporary painting/sculpture/collage exhibition is mind blowing). It was trying to show the influence of painting on photography (instead of the usual other way round) but only succeeded in this with about 10 of the 60 works there. Also the English description of each photo was entirely inaccurate and confusing. If you go I would recommend not reading any of the descriptions and make your own mind up.

There were a couple of images which were interestingly exploring the relationship of post processing on photography to make it genuine art which led me to think again about the often critiqued validity of using digital manipulation to make art. To take complex photos, explorations in paint and combine them in a kind of montage is entirely valid in my opinion, especially if each of the raw materials has been created by the artist. I hope to explore this in the future with my works.

Seeing as I have visited a photographic exhibition I thought I'd post up some of my camera phone pics. This collection is from my travels around Frankfurt and Emilia Romagna.

I started drawing again. Here's a sketch. I have to finish the lemon. I hope to do more studies until I can paint again. Also look out for some pencil sketches in the future. I want to get back into traditional again soon.

Life - A Never Ending Holiday

This holiday just keeps going! I´ve finished with Cambridge at last and moved on to the freedom of Europe proper. No more of this island mentality. I want the continent! So here I am. It´s all very strange though as I can´t really come to grips with the fact that I am starting work again tomorrow after 6 weeks break.

Even the new apartment is like a hotel room and the local super market is filled with mysteries that only linguistic ignorance can provide. I´m sitting in an internet cafe that smells of tobacco and the incessant sound of overlapping slot machines numbs out the distant sound of thunder and rain.

Tomorrow morning I will join an old friend as we navigate the U Bahn and I take my place in what many in my career would consider the dream company. It´s all like some crazy story, not like real life. I think that part of me has become used to living life as a holiday and for the first time I think that it might actually stick around. For if life isn´t treated as a holiday but as a chore then why live?

Things have gone spiritual in this post and in my heart and in my head. I´ve learnt to accept the fact that I believe in crazy non plausible nonsense and I love it. Embracing your own absurdness is rewarding and gives unshakable confidence. I highly recommend asking yourselves what you believe in. Stop playing the oh so clever atheist game and listen to yourself for just a sec. See if something that you are convinced can´t be true is actually something you still believe. If not then go back to being clever and all knowing. :)

Long live the life! Long live thinking! Long live talking nonsense! Long live believing (or not)! Long live the holiday!

GTA Tribute - 1st pass

More to do but here's the start.

New Portfolio Site - WIP

Hey,

After finishing KDA (more news on that later) I had decided to catch up on updating my CV and getting a portfolio site up and running. I found a good free portfolio provider thanks to Andy Matthews (Lead Character Artist at Frontier). You can have a look at my very work in progress site here:

http://jason-hickey.daportfolio.com/

About the only thing on there that is ready to be looked at is my CV. CVs are hard!

Speedpaint - Fog

New lunch time sketch

Chronicles of Skin

A Hickey twin production form Cobwebgames. Please go here to lend your support. Any bit of cash will help.

Thanks a million, I know you'll do the right thing. :)

Lunch Self portrait on tablet

Piggy Bank rough

Spare time project. Used a photo of my line drawing from a phone so made extra work for myself. Will redo once properly scanned.

Warrior_J - Prep for Chronicles of SKin

Warm up drawing to get started on Chronicles of Skin Logo which I need a warrior sized head for. This is a self portrait but a bit warriorified. Spent about 1 hr and a half on it. I'm very slow at drawing now, I really need mroe practice.
Note I didn't use undo or eraser or layers for this drawing, trying to discipline myself for reral sketching again. At the end it looked a bit wonky so I used liquify to straighten it out so did have to cheat but felt ok about original anyway even if it's a bit messy.

Here are both: (First is warrior)

Tablet messing

I`ve done some messing on my new tablet. Still getting used to art rage. Here`s some pis i doodled. one with fede. :)

Study of a super smooth woman

Pose from a photo. Changed the lighting, skin tone, make-up and hair (style, length and colour) and tweaked features to make a bit more elegant and strong.

Night Sky - Better quality

Night Sky - Acrylic on Board - 1.4 x 0.7 m2 - 55" x 27.5" - For sale

Bowl - 25 minutes from life

College Night

Low res photo of my painting (acrylic on paster board).
For sale if you want it.
Unframed.

A bit more detail and working out drawing issues

Undercoat Vignette woman 2

Undercoat, still some drawing problems to work out but composition is getting there.

Lunch

Cup, scribbles and a pencil

Just warming up again. Trying to stay loose.
From life.

Vignette_01: Biblical Hands

All finished. Moving on to the head next.