Friday, November 16, 2012

A Couple Things

Okay one...here's the troll - he's been on the backburner a bit but he's still a project I'm working on. The main problem I ran into was the castle, which took me a bit to get right. It's looking better now, but there's a fine balance between making it TOO detailed, and not detailed enough. I've gotta work on that still.



Other than that, here's another piece I recently finished. Experimenting with using photos as direct reference and then painting over them to imitate their textures. The mountains are hand painted in that way, which was excruciating, but really helped me understand how to imitate their rocky terrain.

I wish I had incorporated more light contrast with it, because the whole thing seems really dark. That's what I was going for, but it turned out moreso than I wanted it. Still like how it turned out and it was a great learning experience.

See, I do post stuff here!

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

A REAL post

Yeah, this blog is a pretty sad excuse for one. So it's time for a real entry. Just went to Dragon Con on Sunday and had a GREAT time! It was my first year there, and I already bought my tickets for all four days next year! Got a chance to grab some awesome merch, meet some cool cosplayers, and even got to chat a bit with the famous Todd Lockwood! That was the highlight of the day.

Anyway, so I started a few new projects, and quickly scrapped most of them. I just can't ever seem to get past the rough B/W stage with a painting - I don't know what it is. However, I'm determined to finish this one up:


Cute guy, huh? I love this idea - a giant troll thing with a city on his back. I'll probably cut the image a bit at the bottom and extend it a bit at the top as well, just to give more space to the city area. Anyway, I'm pretty determined to get this piece off the ground, just because it's been really fun to work on so far. I can also do a lot of experimenting with textures and stuff like that.

Well, there ya go. Not much, but better than what I've been posting, right? I'll post some more updates of this piece as it gets further along!

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

San Francisco! (Again)

Well I'm off to the Massive Black art convention thing in San Francisco! Should be an awesome time. I'm so ready for a whole week for drawing, drawing, drawing, and more drawing!

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Under Construction!

So after attending GDC, I realized I need to switch up a lot of stuff in my portfolio and need to step my game up!

Therefore, my website over at Dannyryba.com is gonna have some maintenance work on it for a bit. It'll still be up and running, but in the meantime I'll be taking images out, rearranging stuff, etc.

Also, I'm definitely going to be putting more posts up about my process and how I make my work. It seemed to be of great importance to some game studios I saw that they see your process, rather than just seeing all finished work all the time. So I'll have some specific projects I post up here, with decisions I made, why I made them, etc. So keep an eye out!

Saturday, March 10, 2012

GDC is over!

I had a great time! I'll do a more extensive post about it later, but for now I'm busy unpacking, getting settled back in at home, and following up on the awesome connections I made!

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

GDC!

Well I'm off to GDC 2012 today, not quite sure what to expect. I'm not part of the game industry, so hopeful I can meet with some professionals and network! If all else fails, at least I get to see some cool panels!

Monday, January 9, 2012

Another One

Another digital piece I finished today, took about 2 hours and is in color! No process this time, just the final:
Looks a bit grainy since I worked in CMYK instead of RGB (it's gonna be printed). I like how it turned out - maybe a little more dynamic composition would have been nice, but I wanted almost an air of eerie calmness over the piece.
Also wanted to play with doing some smoke without the use of a specialized brush like my last piece. It was a bit tougher but I think it got across well enough.

Oddly enough, just saw the movie Contagion after doing this piece. Very creepy movie and well done. However, it really is more of less just a documentary for how we respond to epidemics disguised as a thriller. Not that that's a bad thing - it's all very fascinating - but I felt emotionally detached from everyone in the film, save for the last couple scenes. Still, a very smart movie that I highly recommend.

Uh, right. On to the next piece!

Sunday, January 1, 2012

New Year!

Okay, so it's a new year, and looking back at 2011, gotta say that although it was a pretty kick-ass year, I didn't get as far with my art as I wanted to. So my new year's resolution is to keep practicing and get better! But then again, I make that resolution every year.

Anyway, did a quick little digital painting in grayscale and liked the way it turned out. I just wanted to experiment a bit with different brush types, since I always use soft edged airbrush settings, which is awesome but then gets me stuck doing blending and details for 50 hours. Instead, I decided to just try and do a quick piece using JUST hard edged brushes and some textured brushes I've had on PS forever but never used. Turned out pretty good.

This was the piece about 20 mins in, just blocking in some basics and getting the composition right. As you can see, that smoke brush I have is pretty awesome and really helped out a lot.

And here's the completed piece. Robot dude is standing a little less lopsided, and looks more intimidating. Also made the vehicles and people smaller, to give a much grander scope. It was a lot of fun to do and only took about 2 hours max.

Gonna really start ramping up my digital works, so I'll try and post some more work in progress stuff.

Happy new year!