Orion Mining Spaceship

Aaand back to spaceships.

Honestly, browsing my gallery the other day I realized that the number of spaceships in my portfolio is shamefully close to “no spaceships”, so I tried to put a remedy to that.

After a looong hiatus from ZBrush I eventually managed to clumsily put together a mesh to render and eventually paint over.

The endeavor was a confirmation of how terrible my memory is.
I hadn’t touched ZBrush in about a year, and all my recollections of shortcuts, menus and commands were gone.

Muscle memory, gone.

Tricks and slightly more uncommon procedures, gone.

Sure, I kind of knew what I had to do, fortunately that was well settled.
I just couldn’t remember how to do it.

So, well, the sculpting phase took about a dozen lunch breaks or so, as I had to re-learn a whole bunch of things.
Hopefully next time it won’t be as hard. I’ll just have to make sure I can do it again in less than a year.

As an exercise, I tried to stick with a very simple shape – pretty much a box – and see if I could make it interesting anyway.

As always, all my digital painting now happens with the help of Krita.
For this illustration I had to make a whole bunch of brush presets (lasers, scattered stars, noise etc), which I’ll make available for download shortly.

Sure, the most of this drawing comes from the occlusion shadows exported from ZBrush, but still, I’m quite happy with the confidence I’m gaining with the new tools.

Mostly though, regardless of the result, I’m content I managed to get something done with ZBrush.
So much saw that I rendered the turntable animation.

Look at her spin!

AH! The beauty of a spaceship spinning over and over again.
It reminds me of EVE Online.
Good times.

by Paolo Puggioni

Pyromancer

After long thought, I ended up renaming what had been “New_Document1.psd” for more than a year, into the much catchier “Pyromancer”.

I was very happy about the new name.
I mean, it is very clever if you think about it.
I had discarded “Fire Queen”, “Fire Sorceress”, “Fireballs Juggler” and all the variations of those, when the genius finally struck me.
PYRO! Like, you now, FIRE. And MANCER! Like a Necromancer, but with flames!
PYROMANCER! I’m so brainy! It’s a new word! I made up a new word, and it’s not even my first language!

Then I checked on Google, and it looks like every game with even a little bit of Fantasy spin has a character called Pyromancer.
There are also several books with a pyromancer in it.
Hell, there’s an actual word in ancient Greek for it: Pyromancy – the art of divination by fire.
I’m sure there must be Zippo pyromancer-shaped lighters too.
Oh yes, and of course let’s not forget about Melisandre.
So well, I made up a word that’s been there for almost three thousands years.
Just, all by myself.

So there you go, behold what, unbeknownst to me, is one of the most overused cliches of Fantasy Art in general.
I just care to point out this is not a Darksouls, or a Heartstone or a Skyrim piece of fan art.

It’s just me being unimaginative.

Now, on top of that, I also have to say that this illustration has been a massive thorn in my side for more than a year and a half.

I had started it as a lunchbreak time-filler back when I was at Jagex.
I remember thinking that I could have tried making something nice and polished, for a change.
Something I had actually spent time on.

The days passed, the season changed, and I would work like 5 minutes at a time on this lunch-break project, between a peak at reddit and a bite at a sandwich.

Then I moved to another company, and to a new house, and a new town, and every now and then I would come across this 80% finished illustration and think “aw, I should finish this”, and I would add maybe another 1% to the final result.

Then I changed computer, worked on freelance assignments, start and finish several things, and still every now and then this thing would pop up, demanding a few minutes of my attention.

Long story short, this pyromancer has been sitting in my WIP folder for longer than I care to remember, so yesterday I thought “fuck it, I now declare you finished” and finally sent her on her way.

by Paolo Puggioni

Cyberpunk People

Before I finished off the cyberpunk lady I posted last week, I had started a few sketches for the same theme.
Just rough ideas, really.
I was caressing the idea of drawing a whole bunch of cyberpunk concepts, maybe tying them together in a consistent setting.

Then I immediately got distracted by something shinier that I’d like to work on, so I guess I’ll pause the cyberpunk thing and get back to it later.
That’s the beauty of personal projects after all.
You can have twenty of them going on at the same time and no one can say a thing about it.

So, here’s a sketch of some random cyberpunk people (ok this is not rough, I actually polished it a lot more than I should have).

As always, done in Krita!

The cyberpunk setting I had in mind wasn’t set like a million years in the future.
Let’s rather say a hundred years or so.
So I was thinking that in that case, most elements of our own culture and techology should still be recognizable.

The leg implants of the girl on the left are quite similar to today’s prosthetics, for example.

I took a few of the components of the winged lady from Shimano byke parts.

The old creepy guy works instead under the assumption that, in this setting, people’s life span can be increased almost indefinitely by plugging medical equipment into one’s body.

Impractical, maybe, and creepy, but better than being dead I guess.

Anyway, there’s actually another cyberpunk concept I had started working on, this time in ZBrush.

Since I’m slow as hell in ZBrush (I use it so rarely that I forget everything from one time to the other), I’m afraid that you shouldn’t hold your breath for that.

by Paolo Puggioni

Some News and Some Mummies

I have been very, very lazy with my blog recently.

So much so that I haven’t even posted about some pretty big massive news about my new (umm what’s the word?) working situation?

Well, first off I’m not working at Jagex anymore.

No more Runescape, no more Friday Pub lunch with fellow Concept Artists and Art Director, no more amazing training days to London museums.

I had an amazingly good time at Jagex, and the people there are the best bunch I’ve ever worked with, I’ll truly miss a whole lot of them.

I know, people often say that when they leave a workplace, but I did leave some good friends behind, so it was quite tough to go away.

Good luck mates, I’m sure I’ll see some of you around (no really, this industry is ridiculously small, I met four ex-colleagues at the new job. I’m bound to work again with someone from Jagex at some point).

On the other hand, after more than four years on the same project and little more, I really needed a breath of fresh air, which is why I’m also very happy to work at Sumo now, on Little Big Planet.

I have just started, so it will be a long time before I will be able to post anything of what I’m doing here.

Plus, it’s also taking quite some time and effort to adapt to a completely new game, so well, don’t hold your breath for that.

Luckily, while clearing my machine the day I left, I found a whole bunch of Concepts I made for Runescape that I had neglected to share.

So it looks like I will have some material to post for the next few weeks (more about my recent laziness in my next post).

These three guys below are, as anyone can see, mummies.

I have no memory of where and when they were plugged into the game, if I remember correctly they were part of a big update, but for one reason or another they didn’t manage to go live for quite some time.

This is what one the old Mummies looked like, just so you know.

Modellers at Jagex did an amazing job translating the new mummies in 3D, but what made me jump up and down with joy were the animations.

Unfortunately I can’t find anything on the internet to link. If you happen to come across the new mummies with their animations give me a shout.

That’s all I have for now, I’ll post some more Runescape stuff in the near future.

by Paolo Puggioni

Rats Invasion

There might be several reasons why I thought it would be interesting to paint a rats invasion.

First, I’m afraid of rats. Like, terrified.
Several years ago I was on holiday here with some friends. The place is as untouched as you can get in a first world country.
A good balance between having a shop ten minutes walk from home, an awesome beach in front of your doorstep, and wildlife carelessly sharing your living space as if they were paying their part of the rent.

I didn’t mind the bats who used our living room as a hunting ground, or the crows in the morning, or the toads, or the giant spiders.
Hell, I like spiders.
Then one morning a big rat decided to explore our kitchen.

You see, as a city person, it was the first face to face I ever had with a rat. I really didn’t know yet they’re not my thing.

I immediately figured that out when I found myself on the table.
Like, with a single jump.
Without even thinking.

If I were asked, today, to do it again in exchange for a million British pounds, I doubt I could pull that up with such agility and elegance.
Long story short, to this day I still find rats very disturbing, and a rats invasion is pretty much the most disturbing thing I could ever think of.

Except for an invasion of rats clad in armours and wielding blades, on top of the ordinary carrying diseases thing.

For once, I tried to break a bit the rules of composition.
I thought that in a plague of rats, no single individual should really stand out.
Colours, edge control, details and (just slightly) colour and saturation kind of lead the eye towards the big guy one third of the way from the right.
I also positioned the other rats’ limbs and faces so that the eyes have an easy way to scan the picture and eventually get to that spot on the canvas.

However, there is really no emphasis on anything in particular, which is something that I also tried to force by using a flat, frontal point of view.

Since by the end of it I still had all the layers, here’s a nice gif with the different stages.

Oddly enough, during the few days I was painting this, I happened to read Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (if you haven’t read it, fucking do it! Now!), where rats are indeed quite prominent.

Also, the other day a friend of mine, out of the blue, mentioned his days as a Warhammer player, and Skavens being his race of choice, which is another big serendipity.
I wasn’t thinking about them at all (despite being nerd enough to know what he was talking about). But still.

I don’t know what all these coincidences have to do with me painting a rats invasion. Just use this information as you see fit:)

by Paolo Puggioni

Three Oracles

I painted these oracles over the course of a few lunch breaks.

They weren’t intended as oracles at the start, rather simple anatomy practice.

I had recently come across a massive folder, filled with anatomy reference, naked people in all sorts of positions. I can’t even remember when I saved the whole lot on my hard drive.

No, it was not my porn stash. These were naked people in respectable, artsy poses.

I thought “hey, it’s almost my lunch break, this is the Universe telling me something, I should probably practice some anatomy today”.
I started drawing the first naked woman (the one in the middle), but for some reason I was struggling with her eyes, so I left them blank for a while.

Because the best way to face a problem is to think about it later, right?

Long story short, I ended up liking her that way, and I thought “this could be a seer or something, which is pretty cool. But the main thing is that I’m done with that eyes issue”.
I gave her a weird head gear, because that’s how oracles roll.
I added some clothes, because I couldn’t think of any logical reason why a seer would walk the Earth wearing just a funny hat.

Still, I had already spent some bloody long time painting her entire body, and it would have been a pity to cover her up completely.
So I kept the half-undressed look (or half-dressed? Gosh, which is the optimistic view here?), somehow recalling iconic images of Sybils and ancient female oracles.

Just guessing. It’s not like I did any research on the matter this time.

I painted the women on either sides during a couple of other sessions, and then I went back over all of them adding ornaments and weird symbols to tie them together.
I think that helped them look more as part of “an Order”.

The Order of the Three Oracles, maybe?

Like, there always have to be three of them. The rite of passage consists in being blinded by a spitting snake or something like that.

Each one of them will give you just one part of a prophecy, but you never know whether it’s the beginning, the middle or the end.

Also, they have to be fit. That’s crucial.

Either way, here are some close ups.

What have we learned today?

Not much, probably.

Apart from “if you can’t be bothered to draw eyes on specific women, turn them into blind, attractive, half naked oracles”.

By Paolo Puggioni

Some ZBrush Practice

Between one thing and another I miraculously managed to carry on practicing with ZBrush.
My progress is still quite slow (did I mention Zbrush’s learning curve being STEEP?).
But it’s steady, and in the past few weeks my lunch breaks have been dedicated to awkwardly mess around with subtools and geometry and Dynamesh and stuff.

Now, I believe I got a good grip on soft surfaces, which is where ZBrush sculpting gets more natural and intuitive.
There’s a bunch of ugly faces on my hard drive, which I will post once I’ve cleaned them up a bit.

Hard surfaces are a bit more fiddly and require more care.
Since I’ve been crap at them from day 1, that’s where I focused my practice on.
So, last week I came up with this.

Now, it’s not a masterpiece nor particularly imaginative (in fact, it does remind me of the octopus looking things in The Matrix), but I did it!
I mean, I did things that I considered beyond me just a few weeks ago, so I’m quite happy with it.

No fear, I’ll never be a modeller. I find all the technical aspects involved in making your geometry usable by other people quite outside the Kingdom of Things I Like.
Sculpting itself, however, is just pure fun.

It also allows you to do pretty cool things like this with no time or effort:

The reason why I’m starting to love ZBrush more than I should, though, is a bunch of features that could eventually speed up my design process immensely.

IMM (Insert Multi Mesh) Brushes allow you to save bits and pieces of sculpting and reuse them indefinitely, and most importantly, in a very quick way.

Straps, buttons, belts, but also ears, arms, teeth, various body parts, can be saved as brushes and added to a model in no time.

This means that if you’re designing a monster with a hundred noses and eighty stubby wings, you just need to model one nose and one wing and then insert as many instances of them as you need.

Well, it still takes an awful amount of time for me to get anything done in ZBrush, but I guess with more practice I could eventually introduce it in my normal drawing pipeline, and make quick experiments with 3D shapes before committing to a final design.

by Paolo Puggioni

More Pathfinder Artwork

This is another illustration I made for Pathfinder, again for the Player Companion: Dragonslayer’s Handbook.

Just like the last illustration I posted, the canvas aspect ratio was quite awkward, and I had a hard time figuring out how to pose the characters.

For some time I fiddled a bit with the idea of drawing the Angel further away in the distance, to show more of his wings. Then I thought “why the hell do you want to show ALL of his wings in a vertical canvas?”.
So I ended up stacking the figures on top of each other, which worked nicely in the end.

As far as the composition goes, I OBVIOUSLY strived to lead the viewer’s eye in a circular movement.
Hell, the next step would have been carving actual arrows on the Magus’ blade and maybe tattooed along his arm.
The thing is, the canvas is shaped in such a way that it’s easy to “get lost” and not know exactly where to look at. Which, in turn, would result in an uninteresting and ultimately unenjoyable image.

By the way, since I kept the sketch, here it is, because why not.

Now, as far as the colours go, I have to confess I had to cheat a bit.
The ambient lighting is obviously the directional light that comes from the setting sun, which should have resulted in high contrast surfaces with a very warm and a very cold side.

However, there was also the strong cold light created by the bolt of energy cast by the Magus, which in turn would have cooled down the lit surfaces and warmed up the shaded ones.

What to do? Simple, stop giving a crap! I used a just slightly warm diffuse light for both figures, and proceeded to scatter around almost unjustified highlights and rim lights as if they were ten a penny.

Not something I would bring to a convention about Science of Colour And Light Applied To Digital Painting. However, I’m under the impression that had I used a more scientific approach the result would have been messier, so in the end I don’t feel that guilty.

So there, this was another piece of artwork fished from my Pathfinder folder. More to come in the next few days.

by Paolo Puggioni

Digital Painting Tutorial on 2D Artist

2D Artist Magazine recently got in touch with me asking if I would like to make a painting tutorial for them.
I had a couple of illustrations published on their magazine a while ago (I mean this one and this one), and I was chuffed they got in touch with me again.

“Would I like to write a painting tutorial? Hell yes!” was my first thought. Suddenly followed by “Me? Really? Would anyone actually care about how I do things?” further followed by “oh well, I’ll do it anyway”.

Long story short, if you get this month’s issue you’ll find a nice painting tutorial about a villain who uses nasty spores to hurt people just because he can.

Drawing was the easy part. Writing the actual painting tutorial was to me like threading on a mine field.
Where’s the line between trying to be informative and being patronizing?
What’s the level of knowledge of the average 2D Artist reader? Am I showing stuff everybody knows? Am I trying to teach grandma to suck eggs?
Eventually I decided not to care and write about things I found relevant, regardless of what I thought most people could find trivial.
After all, one of my colleagues, a seasoned professional, didn’t know he could select layers by CTRL-clicking on their pixels regardless of your active tool, so well, even veterans could find out something new.

FOR EXAMPLE.
Something not everybody uses as a way of colouring is the Blending Options in the Layer Style palette (double click on the layer icon in the Layers Palette to bring it up).
I mentioned this in the tutorial but the word count forced me to be
concise, so I’d like to say more about it.
The Blending Options Palette controls how a layer blends (duh) with the underlying ones.
I always ignored this feature, until I realized how heart-warmingly cool it can be!
The basics: The uppermost slider controls what parts of the active layer will be shown and what parts will be hidden.
The other slider dictates which parts of the underlying layer will be revealed though the active layer.
Here’s a quick example: create a new file.

Paint this on the bottommost layer

and this on the topmost.

Now double click on the topmost one and play with the sliders.

Now, one of the reasons why I never really used this feature is that I didn’t know how to use it properly!
When using it to achieve subtle effects the result was always messy, with harsh edges and bad gradients.
Until I found out you can split the slider arrows! Those buggers are made of two halves, did you ever notice? I didn’t!

Try ALT-Clicking on the innermost half of either arrow and drag it towards the centre. Whatever blending you were trying to achieve will now be now soft-edged and nice, perfectly blended.
Now, if in your head you haven’t yet found an actual practical application of this technique, first download the painting tutorial on 2D Artist Magazine, then go on reading:)

This is an old concept I made for a Runescape quest a couple of years ago.

Since I had to paint different points of view of the same city I had to find an efficient way to do it.
So I modelled the city on Sketchup, took screenshots of the relevant views and painted over them.
The first pass was always the following:

I created a Photo Filter set on Warm Colours on top of the Grey Scale screenshot of the 3D view.

I tweaked the blending mode so that only the lit parts were affected.
Then I created another Photo Filter set on Cold Colours and I blended it so that it affected only the parts in shadow.

As you can see in a handful of seconds I went from a greyscale image to a strong separation between warm and cool colours I could properly paintover. I manage to paint a view like this in only 5-6 hours.

Another example is how to paint over fine details without using selections.
In this character I designed for Runescape I painted the highlights with 100% white on top of the chain mail, then blended it so that the dark parts of the texture could be seen though the white (below I painted an exaggerated example of this on the already finished drawing).

You can use this for a lot of things! For example, I never use Overlay mode on the texture I (rarely) put on my drawings, as they tend to mess with the colours. I keep them in normal mode and I tweak the sliders to reveal only the parts that I need.
Give it a try!

by Paolo Puggioni

Pathfinder – Ranger vs Dragon

This is an illustration I made for one of Paizo‘s Pathfinder books, the Player Companion: Dragonslayer’s Handbook .
As a matter of fact, I’ve been lucky enough to have worked quite extensively for the people at Paizo during the past few months.
Which, by the way, is the reason why I haven’t been posting on this blog as often as last year: between these and other freelance assignments I’ve been unbelievably busy!

So, in theory there would be a whole lot of new stuff I could pick from my hard drive and brag about.
In practice, very little of it has been published, so I’m afraid most of it will have to wait to see the light of day.

This is for what I believe was the second assignment I got from Paizo. Which, by the way, is one of the clients I recently enjoyed working with the most .
The setting is still Fantasy enough for me to be in my comfort zone (I keep being asked to draw Fantasy stuff, have you noticed?).
However, both the visual style and the game itself have a strong personality on their own that makes it both challenging and enjoyable to draw for.

Moreover, I must add that the requested revisions are always minimal and the process admiringly smooth, which again makes my work for Pathfinder even more pleasant.

But I digress, back to my dwarf.
This is one of Pathfinder’s iconic characters. If you want to know more about him have a look here!
When I got the assignment I had to read the brief a few times, as I thought the aspect ratio of the canvas was some kind of typo.
It wasn’t.
I had never drawn anything on a canvas that tall and narrow, which made the composition of the first few sketches quite awkward.
I eventually settled with these.

I would have personally picked the first from the left, as the head and neck of the dragon had in my opinion a more interesting shape.
However, I must admit the big mass of the dragon and the smaller one of the hero have a better balance in the final one, so I’m quite happy with it too.

It looks like I’m good to post some more Pathfinder illustrations from the bunch I’ve already done.
So well, you’ll see more in the next few days.

by Paolo Puggioni