The motion graphics work for Thor Media continues. This time, a complete 3D piece (done in Blender) with some minor character design and animation, with allot of motion graphics design. Join me on the “silicon slopes” and lets talk about the thorough process this piece went through.
Before I get deep into this one, I must credit Brek Bulton with the initial concept of the video, and for bringing the job to Thor Media. He wanted to show a skier progressing through a day trip on the slopes. This was to be the backdrop of the for the heavy legal verbiage used for the voice of the video, while highlighting the contemporary nature of the client’s service with the idea of the “silicon slopes”.
With the scripting we were fortunate that Brek was handling that as well. After a few meetings hashing out the details, and pulling back to fit in the client’s budget, we got a near final script. I say near because the script was technically not locked down until the near finish of the project.
After the a final version of the script was in place, we had to make a bit of extra effort to convince the client of the concept, and present a visual motif that they would be happy with. This is where motif and character design came in. Because of the budget, I had to come up with a simple but attractive character design to minimize animation work. Inspired by allot of current motion graphics character animation (see Kurzgesagt), South Park, and Google’s paper design, I found a solution. I decided to stick to a 2.5 dimension paper cutout feel, which created a great sense of depth and interest in the image, while minimizing animation work (primarily 2 axis to animate instead of 3).
With a start on the visual design, I put together two shots to show how the video could look along with a temporary voice over. A long story short, the visual concept was accepted, and now it was time to approach the rest of the video.
At this point, problems began to crop up when it came to finalizing the script. So, in an effort to keep the good momentum on the project, while accommodating an indecisive client, I decided that an animated storyboard would be needed to check the changing script against planned visuals to help the client to make final decisions in the script. This decision turned out to save everyone allot of time and allowed for flexibility in the visuals, almost right up to the end of production.
After some minor back and forth on some of the text and visuals in the video, and putting together a small vanity logo for the client to use in another video content, the final video was finished. Even though the project went a bit longer than expected, the final product came out well, and the client was very happy with the final result.
Traditional art commissions are always memorable, growing experiences. With the bit of extra attention that my Inktober 2016 | Atari Propaganda artwork has been bringing, I have had several people reach out about art commissions. This one in particular is one that I would like to write about because it was such a positive experience for both me and the client.
Subject Matter
First, the Atari theme has been such an amazing experience for me this year. Taking time to think about these consoles that I have quite a bit of nastolgia for, putting them to abstract and realistic situations, with only female subjects is incredibly gratifying. It has provided me with an opportunity to stretch myself with the ink medium, composition, drawing people, research (80’s and early 90′ clothing specifically) and applying that research. But I have to admit, this year for Inktober was much harder than last, and with commissions on top of that, I really got a feel for how hard I can push myself at this point in time.
…the process of drawing, mounting, framing, and shipping the final work was a great experience.
Being Willing to Start Over
I actually lost money on this commission. This is definitely something that happens from time to time. In this case, I didn’t do enough in the planning and thumbnail stage of the piece. So, when I approached the first version, I felt my technique was good, and the overall composition was good as well, I didn’t get the likenesses of the subjects to a point that I was comfortable with. Because this is ink we’re talking about, that means starting from scratch. So I started over, essentially doubling my time on the piece.
Making sure you have enough time to work (2 weeks minimum) on a piece like this, along with studying your subjects thoroughly, will help ensure that this doesn’t happen again. Regardless, even with the do-over, the process of drawing, mounting, framing, and shipping the final work was a great experience.
…this project will feel like a head stone for it all.
Schedule Affects Everything
This is my main takeaway from this experience. Because I am still working at Thor Media, finding time to actually sit down for a solid block of time is difficult. With this one, I ended up telling Thor Media I wasn’t going to come in for a couple of days, and then I turned off my phone. In the future I would like to avoid this, and, like what I mentioned before, two weeks should be a minimum for a project like this. I am certainly going to stick with this requirement.
A Landmark
With all the Atari stuff that I have involved myself with lately, like Inktober and releasing/selling Flappy McFur, this project will feel like a head stone for it all. I have other projects coming up, but this one was so positive and memorable, I will always consider it a hallmark for this period of my career. The client was happy about the final result as well. Here is what he said in the STatariART group on Facebook:
Friends,
For Christmas, my wife commissioned William Thorup to do a custom drawing of my family: he did a brilliant job and captured my daughter and me playing 2600! Absolutely lovely piece, perfect in detail, and totally captures the 80s feel. Mr. Thorup definitely gets it.
Atari Never Die!
-The Last Atarian
Three years of learning. Three years of programming. Three years of drawing. And it all should have taken three weeks. Flappy McFur is finally in the hands of the masses, or at least the 80 or so individuals that were actually interested.
The beginning
Atari Jaguar programming has been something that my brother and I have been interested for years, and ever since returning from my church mission from Taiwan, I have made it a primary goal.
With the formation, branding, and online presence establishment, all that was left was for me to learn a bit of programming, and start making games. To help facilitate the programming learning curve, we took on a request from Paul Westphal to put together a demo specifically for his booth at the Portland Retro Gaming Convention.
Programming at this time wasn’t completely foreign to me, but C programming was. So this little demo was a great opportunity to start my C coding adventure, and it led well into Flappy McFur.
Development
Version 0.3 was the first fruit of my efforts, and the fruits were bearable. The gameplay was there, but it was far from enjoyable. McFur moved around more like a horizontally locked fly than a disembodied Jaguar head falling in style. But, the core gameplay was there, and this little demo was well received by those out there who look out for anything new for the Jag.
After the demo though, there was polish. I planned out menu systems, with a simple achievement system. Worked out four different play modes that changed the speed of the game and how the pipes behaved. With Bryce’s help, a simple text engine was implemented to facilitate menus, and he also implemented the save code system. All of this along with an end game made Flappy McFur a much more noticeable product and a more enjoyable experience overall, with a bit of depth to the gameplay.
Development also included some play testing. Usually I would setup our Jag-In-A-Box at family parties, Draw Nights with friends, or just let all the nieces and nephews have a go at it. It was interesting to see how some people caught into the gameplay really well, while others found it impossible. It made balancing the difficulty a bit of a challenge, this is one reason why the additional play modes were added. To try and accommodate a wide spectrum if players.
Even though the game overall is fairly simple, there was a massive learning curve for me to overcome. Overcoming that learning curve has had its payoff though, and I feel much more prepared to takle our next project.
Art
Sprites and Palettes
Though few, painting sprites for this game was a highlight if the whole experience. Working with reduced color palettes and putting together simple animations like rotations of objects and the achievements, to more complicated animations like Cutter’s run cycle, all were a joy and remind me how much I love animation in general.
We used the Gimp primarily for sprite work. I have been using the Gimp for nearly two decades now, and it is great support for paletted graphics with a more than adequate tool set. I did use Krita for Cutter’s run cycle animation because they had recently implemented a basic 2D animation tool set in Krita, but with the lack of palettes graphics support, I still needed ti pump those graphics through Gimp to prep them for Jag. Krita is supposed to have palettes graphics support in the near future, and I am looking forward to using Krita exclusively in my pipeline.
With all that in mind, when I actually started putting together Flappy McFur, I was a bit lazy in figuring out how to do 8-bit paletted graphics. So, for a long time, I was dealing with performance issues, especially when music was implemented. It wasn’t until late in development that most of the graphics were converted to 8-bit paletted sprites for 16-bit sprites. This was a good switch though as it allowed us to do fade transitions easily.
Box and Manual Art
I initially wanted to do more artwork for the game, but the 3 primary illustrations ended up working really well for our needs.
The first illustration was used to establish the character relationship and heavily influenced the game in both tone and narrative. The colored pencil and crayon look of the artwork was intentional as well. It gave it an elementary, non serious feeling throughout, inviting everyone to come and pick up the controller and play.
Video Content
I tried to keep any video advertisement minimal since the beginning. Primarily because if how time consume it is, but also because of the uncertainty of actually releasing the game.
When we decided to actually finish up the game and release, effort was spent to get a good video for advertising the game, and a good gameplay video. At the end of the day, I am not too sure how much these videos helped at the end if the day, but they were nice to have, and will be good to have for history’s sake.
The release and marketing
Newsletter
In and effort to reward our mailing list subscribers, we made sure that everyone that had signed up knew about the game first, we also provided a small discount for them as well. The discount was taken advantage of by a handful of our subscribers, and is something that we will definitely do in the future.
Press Release
It was fun to actually learn how to put a press release together for news websites. I distributed to a handful of people, with little response. Again, this was good to get familiar with, and it serves a good historical purpose. You can read the press release here.
Before people actually had the game in their hands, many of the comments were about the pixel art, and general support for the release. Responses to gameplay have been… mixed, maybe. Its hard to tell if people don’t want to say anything bad about it, or they are just a bit frustrated about its’ difficulty. Either way, below are a few reactions for the AtariAge forum thread.
My wife and I enjoyed spending the evening playing Flappy McFur a couple nights ago. It’s certainly addictive. I found myself getting the controller back less and less. My wife and I probably haven’t played Jaguar together in 10+ years. She buys me Jaguar games as gifts and watches me open them. Maybe she’ll watch me play a bit. It was nice to actually play together. Thanks for the effort you put in to it!
I wanted to finish one more piece before Inktober begins. I started this one over two months ago for one of the Krita forum challenges, “Futuristic Princess”. I got the sketch done at that point, but couldn’t find the motivation to finish it at the time.
After reviewing some of my sketches and unfinished work, I decided to finish this one over the past couple days. The color scheme has been floating around in my head since I started the sketch, and I really like how it came out in the end. The depth in the clouds was fun, and also playing around with the metal materials of the characters arm and back.
I am glad that I was able to finish this one before Inktober, and I plan on submitting this for the Krita Kickstarter art book. I just need to figure out what black and white piece I want to submit along with this piece.
The people who support Krita pulled off another amazing Kickstarter this year. And in a way, they are allowing everyone to contribute on an artistic level as well. This is where my next illustration comes in.
This year, along with new features for the next version of Krita, the group behind Krita is producing a book filled with art from various artists that use Krita. They are taking submissions currently, but this is for a future post. This post is about the T-Shirt design challenge on the Krita forum. This is something that I could not simply pass up.
With this much freedom I wasn’t sure how to start.
The topic was “Flow”, and nothing else. With this much freedom I wasn’t sure how to start. So taking to the great library that is Google, I started doing searches for the word “Flow”. Synonyms, images, music, etc… all to draw inspiration from. I eventually started thinking about my home here in Utah, and challenged myself to think of the things that are generally attractive that could relate to “Flow”. This led me to the most unlikely of places when someone things of the word “Flow. Southern Utah, a dry desert, and almost the exact antithesis of the word “Flow”.
The reason why I was brought to this place was the color of the rocks. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Southern Utah, the rock can be very red in places. This went well with some of the other notes I had written down at this point for the painting, which included the colors from Krita’s logo. The red of the rocks of Southern Utah would provide a good and attractive contrast to the blue floating paint I already had in mind before I had put pencil to paper.
…I realized that message wasn’t in the detail of the rock, but instead in the very nature of the rocks
But this was the catalysis to a greater idea, and one that I think is what brought the painting together in it’s last stages. If you watch the time lapse video, you will see this in action, but I first draw the rocks with detail, and symmetrically. This looked “Okay” but it didn’t seem to fit, but soon after spending a while drawing detail into these rocks, I realized
that message wasn’t in the detail of the rock, but instead in the very nature of the rocks. The juxtaposition of the rock against the flowing nature of paint was the key, as I discovered a way to include the rocks in a more harmonious way than before. By focusing on the silhouette and the visual movement of the rock, instead of the rocks themselves.
So now the flow of the paint, and the flow of the rock, mirror each other, matching the “S” curve of the woman, and just tying everything together in a neat little package.
At the time of writing this, voting has opened for challenge, and even if I don’t get the most votes, I am still very proud of the piece, and the troubleshooting opportunity that it presented.
Here we go. Time to give it a try. Inktober. I have been wanting to do this for the last few years, after my friend Michael Buhler first introduced me to the event. Be sure to check out his blog, as he is currently inking away as well. I think I final have myself worked up enough to carry through the end of the month.
Goals
I think that the only way I am going to see this through is if I set a few goals to help generate ideas, but keep it basic to avoid being too ridged. I want to keep it fun as well. For the sake of keeping my blog clean as well, I will be posting everything in this post, and I will also be sharing out to the Facebook Draw Night group, Google+, Deviant Art and to my Instagram.
Goal #1 is to produce 10 larger, 11×17 vertical illustrations, for my top 10 video games. I won’t list that here now, don’t want to spoil the surprises to come.
Goal #2 is 21 other small scale pieces. This can include inked sketches, smaller, and quicker to finish.
Quick Link List
A list of what is done, and linked for quick navigation.
I have been drawing/painting allot, I swear. Just haven’t been finishing much. I start on a piece, and before I know it, I have moved onto another one, and another one, and anot…… You get the idea.
So, I thought I would post something I did manage to finish up (Sorry, forgot to hit the record button, no time lapse this time around). This was a little concept born out of a sketch session, and, because I liked how the composition and concept were coming together, I decided to push it further.
A soldier, after the battle, brought back into her assigned quarters for healing. The robots remove the worn armor, as others tend to the wounds occurred in battle. I imagined a world where children would grow up in relative isolation, bred by a computer to oversee the conquering of worlds. Kept separate from the general population, and all for the progression of man. She is one of the many victims of a human-less world, created by humans.
A sad story, but I found it very inspiring while working through this. Because of the dark, and messy nature of the situation I chose to use a pastel brush in Krita to maintain a rough texture throughout the drawing process. That along with one of the default fill patterns to add a roughness to the whole image.
The whole image took about 3-4 hours, and is quite different from anything else I have done in the past.
So, during my long hiatus from posting, many projects, many new pieces of art, have been brought into existence, through the sacrifice of time. By myself and others. Unfortunately, this includes the time that is spent putting together videos and posting on my blog. If you are consistent to my blog, or my YouTube Channel, thank you, and sorry for not being more consistent. But enough of the excuses, lets get on to the good stuff.
This time around more Jaguar projects, and this will be the first of a few posts. As you already know, my brother and I are involved in homebrew development for the Atari Jaguar. One of the projects we are working on is a Flappy Bird clone called Flappy McFur. There is more information on the project page, if your interested. In a nutshell, we are about halfway through development, and I am in the process of getting some art together for packaging and inserts, while my brother closes in on our end goals for the game. This is the first piece of official artwork for Flappy McFur.
Before I get started though, just a thank you to everyone in the Thor Media office for feedback on the piece. It is always great to get feedback on my work, when I am too blind to see the mistakes.
Because of the light nature of the game, certain design choices for maintaining a consistency across the artwork became apparent. First, match the saturation of game. Simple enough, yellows, greens, and reds are saturated, while everything else not so much (I guess that leaves my blues…) Which medium to use was a simple choice for me as well, colored pencils. I love working in colored pencil, probably the first medium I truly dove into and experimented with. Because of it’s affinity to the the look of crayons, but still maintaining the ability to create the detail I want in my drawings, I feel that it will match the mood of the game well. Also, Krita simulates pencils pretty darn well, and it feels almost as good as the real thing.
With these few design choices, I believe the next 3 or 4 pieces will maintain a consistent feel.
Speaking of the next pieces. I want to go with a cute and sometimes funny theme for each. Where McFur and his friend are in a playful mood. We might be incorporating McFur’s friend in the game some how. I like her design so far, but it may need a few tweaks for the game. I am hoping to put together a small comic for the game manual as well, but we we’ll see what happens there. Stay nearby, I will have a few more of theses over the next few weeks.
I have been meaning to write about this one for a while. I put this one together about a month ago, and it has been posted in my portfolio and other galleries. No time lapse video, but I was able to put together a small snapshot video with the different revisions I had saved. Also, before we continue, I have to thank Michael Buhler for his input on color, lighting, anatomy, and proportions.
There were a few things I wanted to focus on for this one. First, color was priority. I wanted to keep my color pallet very specific. At first, I was trying to go for something a bit more abstract, overall blue line art with pinks and reds. I was struggling to get it to work, so, I decided to revert to something a bit more comfortable, and realistic. And, I decided to focus on the overall message I wish to portray in the piece, making sure that the composition, pose, lighting and color, all tell the story well.
From a skill building perspective, I focused on rendering various materials. There is the bubble, obviously, but also the rock, clothing, hair, and skin were focused on to create the subtle differences each material has. While still maintaining my current style, I believe that I pulled this off fairly well, but there is still room for improvement.
As for the story I was trying to tell. I wanted to make a something political, focused on China’s booming economy, and how every bubble eventually pops. The characters on the left basically say that, and the characters on the right hand side of the piece are a Chinese idiom for someone who is loaded. The use a bubble gum not only covers the idea of a bubble growing, and establish anticipation with the inevitable pop, but gum tends to be something that is sweet and enjoyable. All good things must come to an end, right? The girl is dressed in very casual, and somewhat immodest clothing, to represent the adoption of many western trends. But as things are with transitions like this, she still holds on to whats familiar in traditional Chinese culture, shown by her gripping the lion towering over her.
Here is another piece for your eyes, a treat. You may be thinking to yourself that this isn’t the kind of work I usually do. You would be right in thinking that, this is definitely off the beaten path for me, and here is why.
We have been in some minor communication with someone who works at Arrowstorm Entertainment. A movie studio here in Northern Utah that focuses on fantasy and science fiction films. This person asked if I could put together a concept piece for a possible B horror film monster. A Wendigo creature that originates from the Great Lakes area of the United States, and is usually centered around myths that deal with the, pseudo, adverse effects of cannibalism. The content isn’t my favorite, but the job paid good, and it gave me a change to stretch out of my usual bubble.
I did quite a few thumbnails for this piece (20+) and actually did three complete paintings, before we found what the client liked most. The process was very enlightening, and had allot of momentum. Really, the momentum is what made this painting fun. The client was in constant communication with me, and gave feedback when I needed it.
Overall, I spent too much time on the painting though. I was trying to keep my total work hours under 6, but ended up going over 9. This was for a few reasons. First, and foremost, when I was first presented the job, I should have asked a bit more about the production and where it was currently at. This leads to the second problem. The project had hardly been refined, and the story, background, and other details about the creature, where watery. This is why so much time was put into thumbs and other paintings.
I should have stepped back, asked the client to refine their ideas a bit more, and then approach the painting after a bit more forethought was applied.
I am happy with the end result, and the client was as well. I hope to have a bit more work with them in the future, and hopefully work on some of their movie posters and other concept work.
