Second Life Modeling Contest!

Calling all Second Life student developers, artists, architects, inventors, and everyone else who is interested in building great things within the SL community! The USC Second Life Student Developers Group will be holding a contest starting on the first week of November for any student modelers who wish to submit entries built around a special theme (that will be announced at a future date). And, yes, a prize will be involved. More details to come, so stay tuned!

Guest Post: Rough it Up

Hello everyone! My name is Susie and I know Claire from back in the good ol' days in college. So a big "hello" to everyone out there. Like Claire, I also like to paint and draw digitally. I love not having to deal with the mess that comes from working traditionally. So I started up a new blog with some resources for artists that like to draw/paint on the computer.

My new blog is called Rough It Up. This blog features Photoshop textures, brushes, stock photos, and other freebies for you to use in your digital artwork project.

Here are a few items in particular that we've featured on the Rough It Up Blog:

Furry Wave Brush - My own PS brush that has a nice texture to it

Chalk Brush - Another brush of mine that mimics chalk/pastel mediums.

Foliage Textures and stock - 38 free stock images of ivy, plants, etc

Rust Texture Pack - 5 rusty textures

Splatter Paint Brushes - for that really great grunge feeling.

Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter (look on the right) too so you can get awesome textures and brushes straight to your inbox. Let me know if you have any suggestions or requests.

Thanks everyone!

-Susie

Coop's Challenge Post - Life Sketches

Ok, I know we were supposed to do 5 for this, but I only did 2. I'm lame, I know. =p Anyways, the first drawing is a sketch of some people on BART (public transportation in the Bay Area), and the second one is of a fountain on Stanford's campus. Check it out:


Also, I was wondering...is it ok to post stuff not pertaining to the challenges here? I did a bunch of creature designs recently, and would love to get some feedback on those. =)

Tracey's first post.

Hey gang! I'm so glad the art people are getting together, since I haven't spent enough time talking to them while at the GDC. I seem to have more of a knack for finding programmers?

I'm at an awkward point right now where I am out of school but haven't found a job yet, would like to work in art but am not professional enough yet, want to go to more (industry-specific) school but don't have any money. It's time to get serious and focus on my art!

My creative playground is at http://euphoric-designs.net.

Challenge: Draw outside on paper!

This next challenge is to draw outside on paper. No digital stuff! We are not concerned with the quality of the drawings just the fact that your working outside in de' world. Go to your favorite park or Coffee shop and draw what you see.

Buildings: Perspective stuff is always good to practice
Humans: Think quick gesture because you never know when your subject will move.
"the nature": Animals, Plants and of course TREES ;)

Pick your top five of the 100 drawings your going to do (plenty of time right?) and scan or photograph them for your post. Extra "points" for posting cellphone photo proof that you were out and about.

Challenges are now Bi-weekly.
Have fun!

Claire.

Hello all. My name is Jason. I am a programmer/3D indie game developer and I also teach computer game design. Here is my website. There is some of my projects art and non art there:

http://www.geocities.com/bitburd

Jason

Too formal?

I feel like I might have made this blog roll sound to formal and scary to get more people to post and comment, more. I really like what's gone up so far!

Please by all means don't be afraid to post something that is half finished or that you don't like. Getting feedback early on your work is sort of the whole point of starting a forum like this. So don't hold back, drowned us in art! I post the challenges to give people ideas but you are by no means limited to just posting work that is responding to a challenge.

Claire

Week 1's Tree Submission

My apologies for this being late but I didn't want to sign on for this and submit anything so here is my submission for Week 1. I hope this looks okay, been awhile since I painted but I had this idea for a swirl like tree. trying to take it outside the box a bit.

Yo!

Hey dudes, allow me to introduce myself...my name is Cooper Welch, and I'm new to the CA program. This year was my first GDC and it was AWESOME. I definitely left feeling very inspired, especially by the indy games stuff...those guy rock so hard.

Anyways, on to the artwork. I'm seriously bummed right now because I can't find my Wacom tablet. I think I've lost it. That being the case, I just did a crappy little 20min sketch. I don't really know what was going through my mind when I drew this except that I had just finished playing some Cortex Command (really awesome indy game with awesome art) and listening to progressive metal. Also, I think I just wanted to draw myself with a bionic arm...because bionic arms are cool.

So...yeah. There's no "deep" meaning in this. I was just being silly. Here you go:


Note: I'm really bad at drawing people. If you guys could give me some good crits on any characters I end up posting on here (like this guy), that would be fantastic.

Also, if anyone has an old Intuos Wacom table they're willing to part with (preferably for the cheap), please let me know. Thanks guys!

Is anyone having trouble posting comment here?

I just noticed that I cant post comments on this blog. Im going to switch it to the other format. Please let me know if it still doesn't work for you!

Claire

Week 2 Challenge: "Self Portrait"

I probably do too many self-portraits since I'm full of myself and can't help it, so I tried to push away from something conventional this time.

Week 2 Challenge & Introduction

Heyo fellow CAs and artists! I'm Corvus, semionaut and narrative design consultant. While my primary means of storytelling involves speaking loudly and waggling my hands about, I also sketch, design, script, and animate. I figured the self portrait challenge was as good a time as any to introduce myself and share one of my favorite self poor-traits. It's an idle doodle, but I find it to be far more expressive and representative than the more concerted efforts I've made.

Week 2 Challenge - Self Portrait

This week's challenge is Portraits and Self Portraits!

Self portraits:
You are your own best model. Try to draw from your imagination or use a mirror, its much better practice then working solely from using photo reference. For an extra challenge pick your favorite artist and do your portrait in their style. The thing I'm trying to challenge you to do the most this week is try to convey the character of the person in the drawing.
- What elements can you add in the background that tell us more about who you are drawing?
- How you render the image can tells us a lot about is your character. Do you like to draw very loose and with lots of different colors and visual noise? Or are you all about correctness and order. Think about really trying to push this in way you render the image. Once again its not about realism.. unless that's like your thing. Then try Hyper-realism.

If you don't like drawing yourself. Try getting a friend to sit for you! This is portrait I did for a friend in the style of Shepard Ferry's Obama poster.


I really encourage pushing the concept for this challenge. You dont see my actual face in this cartoon. But hopefully it captures my essential "claire-ness"

This is me, "Clara Beara" greeting the students for my multi-media class this week. This will be the first time I will have my own class, as opposed to being a TA for someone else. I'm very nervous and excited. It should be fun!
____________________

You can still post stuff for the tree challenge. I feel its important to introduce a new topic each week to give people a since of deadline, otherwise I know I probably would procrastinate forever on these as well :)

'ello

Hello all - what a great idea for a blog - I'm glad to be a part of this!

I've been working primarily as a game designer the past few years, but also have a background in illustration (you can see my website here: www.reynoldsphobia.com).

Looking forward to seeing more of everyone's work!

Oh, and below is my tree for the week:

Photoshop Brushes Tutorial

First off, it's great to see so many of you starting to post on the Blog :) Don't forget to leave a comments for your peers. We all like to know that others are reading our posts!

In addition to the challenge posts. I thought it also might be useful for me to post some actual instructional content for those of you still learning the craft. As always your input and questions are appreciated, and I encourage everyone on this blog to post links to tutorials they find helpful.

Photoshop Brushes

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This tutorial pretty much tries to explain all the finer points of the photoshop brushes pallet. To get you started on making your own custom brushes, I've provided some download links to my own custom brushes sets. View the tutorial images for instructions on how to install and edit them.

Tutorial pages:

1. How to install custom .abr files
2. Brush Options and Brush Creation Pallet
3. Create Brush Tip Shape and Customize Stroke
4. Shape Dynamics, Scattering and Color Dynamics
5. Texture Brushes & Dual Layer Brushes

Custom Brushes
Standard|Pixel Brushes3|Calligraphic3|Rakes|Dotted Lines|
Chain Stamps and Scatter Brushes | Spots and Stripes Pattern Brushes|Pencils and Fuzzy Brushes |

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Best Regards,
Claire Marshall

claire@claire3d.com
www.claire3d.com

Week 1 Challenge: "Tree"

A tree inspired by our prompt.

I'm a 3D Artist that's freelancing and boy is it hard. I work at an elementary school right now but I'm still looking for my career job. I've also started to learn digital painting so I can expand my skill set hope you guys like it.

Hi!

I'm a former artist, but still like to mess around with art since it's what I got my degree in. Haven't done handdrawn art in quite some time, but enjoy scripting, so I figured I'd submit something I generated in Context Free.

Russ

Hi!

Hi! I am a 3d artist form Portland OR. I thought i'd come out and play. 

Here's a quickie tree to get us started.

--eriKa 

Neon Yellow CA Reporting In

Greetings! Those of you that CA'd with me in 2007 knew me as Joyce Ann Santos, survey entry expert and deliverer of fancy programs to the W Hotel. I've been incognito these past couple of years but couldn't resist joining you guys in art blog merriment. :) Professionally, I've found a calling in children's art, so that's what you'll be seeing plenty of from me.

Here's one of my favorites lately:

Hope to see more of y'all's art soon, and a big thank-you to Claire for setting this up...huzzah!

Week 1 Challenge: Trees!

Tree's are natures great design inspiration!
I thought I would start the blog challenge off simple. Try to incorporate a tree somewhere in your first challenge post. Draw or model as many trees as you like. This challenge is intended to be open ended, you can take it as literal or symbolic as you like.

What makes your tree concept have its own unique character?
All trees have some design features in common:
- Trunk, Leaves, roots, branches.
- Trees grow in particular pattern.

Looking at some reference will help take your conceptual idea of what a tree looks like to something more visually interesting. Don't feel locked into realism either. This is all about having fun and being creative.

Welcome Artists!

I've started this blog in an effort to get the GDC CA Artists folks to get to know each other better. Hopefully by participating in this blog we can all learn and grow together as artists. At first I think we will just start posting pretty casually so that we can all see what everyone is up to and then later I might start a challenge of the week. A lot of art studios are doing this sort of blog now, here is a good example: http://avalanchesoftware.blogspot.com/ The goal is it's always good to be showing other artist's your work. I encourage everyone to write constructive feedback for each other.

So don't be scared just post something, mabye a link to your website/reel. I'd like to see any kind of creative post. If you can figure out how to show us your game demo or latest creative writing in blogger format than go for it.