I haven't had time to post for ages, so here's a lunch time doodle. I just wanted to do something more painterly than the work I'm doing at the moment. I'm going to get back into a new personal project soon, so hopefully the creative drought will come to an end!

I haven't posted for ages! I've been really busy with work and life in general, but hope to get back into my own work again soon. These two images were done a couple of weeks ago for the start of the cgtantra challenge. The theme was medieval city/village with an ariel view. Neither got very far!

I've started the final version of this matte and unusually for me I've started by braving some CG! I had such a battle with the buildings on the city matte I thought it would make life easier to do a basic model of the temple in 3D to give myself a framework to start on. I also downloaded a trail of Mudbox and sculpted the mountain with that - what a great piece of software, really nice and easy to use! There's a long way to go, but I'm glad the ball is rolling

Here's an updated concept for the cgtantra challenge. Thanks for the feedback Ross and Fred, I'll make a matte out of the concept you like, but I'll have to do it later. I want to make a matte that would be suited for animation and I think the concept would be best for that!

Hello,
Here are some thumbnails for a new project - the theme is Ancient temple for the challenge over on CGTantra

Here's an updated camera move, this one is working a lot better - thanks for the comments. You can view a hi-res version here

Here's the video showing the camera move.

.....its quite hard to see, there's a higher quality version here

I've now broken this shot up and projection mapped it in Maya with a camera move. I've been using Nuke recently, its amazing - really fast to use, I set a projection camera move in that too, but the trail version of the software limits the output so the final is from Maya.

Here's a quick update, mainly with changes to the far mountains - I'll start working in the river and lake next and then have to think about a camera move.

Here's an update to the mountain matte. I've started to texture the valley floor and am working into the mountain side. Lots still to do to get everything to sit together correctly!

Heres the rough start of the next matte, the previous one is still being tweeked, but I wanted to get started on something fresh. They'll be a pan from left to right hence the slightly odd composition when seen as a whole. I'm going to put some ruins of some kind onto the mountain, but for today this has given me a rough idea of composition and colour as well as getting the basic references in.

Here are some thumbnail ideas for the next Matte. I'm still working on the last one so will post an update of that soon. Lots of little bits and pieces to fix!

Pretty much there with this one now. I might add the camera move and animation in a few weeks.

Here's a new update, lots of changes. I didn't like the way the buildings were going, they were getting too cluttered so I removed them and put in three large structures that I made in Maya.

Here are a couple of the exercises from the CGtalk class. The original photo were provided by and are copyright of David Luong who is running the class. The aim was to do a sky replace shot and a day to night. I have also posted the latest matte update. I've put some really basic cg elements in to act as templates for some textures that I'm going to get working on next.

Update time again..........got to try and push this towards photoreal so I've reworked the background a bit.

New update for the matte painting. I've made the canvas wider so I can incorporate a camera move and started working into the detail. All the little dots and the ship in the foreground will be animated once the matte is finished.

Here's a near final (the cars need to be taken out!) concept for the CGtalk Matte course and a sci-fi type concept I've been working on recently.

This is a concept for a project I'm working on with a friend - it should have some fun environments to work on!

Here is the latest rough concept for the Matte painting. I'm going to work up a version with some more detail to refine some of the points and then will start gathering reference.

I'm still playing around with ideas for the matte painting. I still have a couple of days to decide, I think I ned to get more story involved at the moment!

They sky was doing interesting things today so I decided to sketch the clouds into photoshop. Its more a composition of clouds as they didn't stay still!! Also this is the first time I've painted something from life into photoshop, I've never bothered before as I prefer natural media. It wasn't too bad though, I found it quite hard to get the tone and colour right - they seemed to exist right at the top most edge of the colour selector, but once I got used to it it was ok. I might try and do them more often.

I'm doing a Matte painting course on www.cgtalk.com at the moment. It lasts 8 weeks, the tasks for this week is to come up with the concept for the Matte we will be working on over the duration of the course. I wanted to do something where I could gather reference locally and am basing the story on Celtic Mythology. These are some quick colour key thumbnails exploring some ideas I've had. The story is based around a voyage through a series of islands. I want to do something at dawn, using lots of fog. Early day!!

Here are a couple of London sketches and a quick paint over.

Back to sketching - I haven't done this for a while! It was nice to be back out and drawing. I only got a couple of drawings done. I spent a long time wandering around - it was ultra busy because of half-term so it was hard to find somewhere to hideaway!
I went drawing with Annes and Iain, it was great to have company and inspiring to be with them.