Joshua Gardener's Art Blog

As of now I am fully started on a 2D project, the outline of which that provided we conduct ourselves within a proffesional manner and meet certain output criteria, we get to design something of our choosing (which is pretty damn nice to do). For this i've decided to go into making a character design. The first milestone of this little project, i that we have to define intent of the project, what am I hoping to create here, which involves me giving a rundown of the sort of character I'm interested in creating (some world details, backstory, base descriptors that sort of thing) as well as some imagery (which is definitely not mine) to give some information to my teachers.  In this sort of situation the intent is the "Sell" of the project, I'm trying to convince them that they want my designs. So if the above images didn't give enough of a rundown, my character is a one armed Knight woman, working as a sort of apostle to an order of demon...

For a little mini task I was asked to make a smallish sheet with around 10 of my most influential artists to my own work; All of our art is influenced by something, nature, history, people and other artists and so forth. I gathered some of the artists that have most influenced me in how i draw or the things i like to draw. I guess the place to start is from the top left to right as it were;  Chris Bourassa is someone i came upon with their Kickstarter for their game, Darkest Dungeon. This game featured really well stylized Gothic art. I particularly enjoyed the use of heavy shadows, its painterly feel and the unique characteristics of the art being used in the game (things like the eyes always being obscured) All in all the feel and subject matter of alot of his art was very encouraging to see. Next is the Art from Final Fantasy 14, although i've been having trouble tracking down specific names involved in the project, the point remains that their art has been ...

With a little more specialisation comes some assessment of where we are at, the new term allowed me to orientate myself more for 2D art (the more concepty side) as this is the kind of art that i prefer to do, and through that we needed to get a judge of how our skill levels were. For this, within the 2 hour session we had (more like 1hour 40 by the end of the intro of our lecturer talking) , we were tasked with doing 2 quick drawings; one of a diorama style of room view and a character in 3/4 view. Considering i did the room first as i wanted to get my weakest aspect done first i was more pleased than i expected with the results of this drawing.  the idea for this room quickly went to a sort of madman's hideout, someone obsessed with patriotism in the USA in a world where the US didn't exist anymore. I wanted to get this feeling of desperation and madness from the environment, so things like the grate being the only window, weapons carefully stacked and arranged in t...

While a little late, a new year is a new year and this year as per usual i am undergoing new projects for my course. To start off my new group project is underway...and this time i actually intend to post stuff on it here (cause last time my posts were entirely on the group blog, this time we're doing something different). At any rate the new groups project blog is at HERE  so if you want to see the new joint project i'm a part of i'll be there. secondly as part of some changes i'll be more strongly specialising in 2D art, as we were given the choice to start specialising at the start of the new term and we will be attending lessons that help improve our specialised skills. so new years resolutions here, just to air them out; I will hopefully be posting more frequently, mainly because it doesn't do me any justice if i have things to show, that i don't actually show. so there hopefully should be more posts here now. second is to just continue to refine an...

Firstly i did make a low poly model prior to this, i took the model i used earlier and stripped it down, trying to minimize the poly count, however... when trying to unwrap the UV's i realised a had a lot of problem areas that was consuming alot of time to go through so i have opted instead for a slightly "messier" route. Here are at least the screenshots from the attempt to at least show i did something prior to this; Shame this didnt go far, i managed to get it down quite a bit by shaving off edge loops and faces. So the other route; Firstly in Zbrush i had to merge down my model so it was all one component and then decimate it down. this was quite.... rough on my model, mainly because of the shaping, so this mangled the shape a fair amount, but i was able to export this to maya and then start quad drawing over the top of it to create a simple version of my model. so by this point i've completed anothe...

So after a couple of failed starts at this, This is the portion of the model where i am applying texture to the model, this effects that make the model appear like they are made from a specific material. For this i have exported all of my parts from my model as their own OBJ files, and then started importing them in. For now i just started testing the application of an alpha to my main piece of the gun. to get the right kind of effect i used an iron texture (mainly for the brush like strokes through the material) but the texture wasn't quite right so i had to alter it slightly to meet my needs. In the surface section there is an option for noise, and that allows for the application of alpha's onto the model, by playing around with the scale and strength of the metal texture i managed to get some of the brush stroke effect onto the main piece, giving it an effective metallic feel.   For the importing I selected one and then created subtools for it, allo...

Short on words for this post, the process here was to UV unwrap my higher poly model so that i can import these parts into ZBrush to texture individually. UV unwrapping is rather like doing the reverse of those paper craft boxes you got when you were a kid, instead of folding the edges and connecting edges of the paper to make a box, you're instead separating zones of your model in order to flatten it onto a 2D plane, this is more important when you need to map things like textures, colours or text onto the model. The method i am using here, works from the automatic unwrapping, then selecting edges that i want to combine and sewing them together, for the bits that came out well, they ended up nice and tidy like some of these, and means i can nicely apply a texture onto them, as well as count on them mapping well. As a note not only do you sew edges and unfold them, but also use the layout option to make them take up the optimal space on the UV editor. ...