DOTA 2 Style Guide

DOTA 2's Art guide is a wealth of great tips for character creation. It also shows that within such studios, artists go to great lengths to ensure that they work in unison in terms of style. The guide is available all across the web, but below is a public link to dropbox where I'm also hosting it.

https://www.dropbox.com/home/Public?select=Dota2CharacterArtGuide.pdf

Here are some of the great tips for character design below:

Silhouette is very important to the DOTA2 style. Not only are the silhouettes meant to define the character body type, but the concept art all starts with a Silhouette with the colours and details painted in.

This is something I never considered before, because I work in flat colour, I never considered that a gradient should be used to keep the eye on the important parts of the character.

Painting the characters will be my biggest challenge in this project, but the DOTA2 Art Guide has a lot of helpful information on using colour effectively.

 Throughout this entire process I will be deferring to the Art Guide for guidance on my design choices. This not only will fill me with useful info, but will also help to replicate the feeling of working for a real studio.

Study: DOTA2 artwork.

I tried to replicate some of the artwork for DOTA2.

There's a long way to go.

In doing this piece I found out that my colouring is off, I use far too obvious tones and don't deviate enough from the original tone when doing shadow etc. It's all progress though, I learned a lot about brushwork and how minimally it needs to be used to achieve the illusion of texture.

The original image can be found at: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4iR2eUHDpW1vscQWIFVt3T8kW4wDs6NevVOxoMCRPqn9tqNLUHCs9JiIh50ntqFx-rrIka8zcXEFfPnuHRdmEfiQe5gPwYD9KDatJAhqQ1YZrd9GVHBprH_1uIKf3WJdY4tEvU7LL0-0j/s1600/dota2_LoneDruid_concept.jpg

Creative Studios Speed Paintings

The Creative Studios speed paintings are pretty hype.

Creative Studios get loads of artists to create speed paintings for their channel, the paintings themselves are sped up to hell so you'll never see what brush they use without going out of your way, but everything else is pretty clear

What I love most is that there's a definitive point where the painting becomes great. The point of  "Oh.... ohhhhh.... OH SNAP!" For me this was about 3 and a half minutes into the video below.

There's loads to watch from fantasy art to realism and a lot of them are game related. Most are recreations of iconic pieces which is pretty cool. There's something about one artist being able to recreate another's epic piece that gives you hope.

Paint Practice with Magic The Gathering cards.

I've been playing alot of Magic The Gathering lately - the artwork is just fantastic - so why not practice painting on the cards themselves? Card alters are quite highly coveted among some players. So I get some practice in and they get fancy cards to play with, tis a win win.

Also I found out I love painting water. It's so splashy and awesome.

I have learned a lot so far in painting these cards, especially when it comes to usage of colour in setting a mood. The cards have strong, thematic colours and I really like MTG artwork's minimalism at times.
The cards have also taught me a lot about using physical paint, from mixing colours to creating texture, which is especially important for any 2D artist.

The Art-Goat Rises

Finally got the blog up and running. Lets do some art. 

I drew this after the first Computer Arts Practice Lecture. Why draw if you can't envision yourself riding an Art Goat into creative battle. It's my native style, but I'm looking to get a bit better with digital painting this year.