Concept art portfolio

Hey guys! Just a little bit of happy news!

The studio I work at, Snow Castle, recieved a Nordic Game grant for our passion project “Winds of Edéa”, which is awesome! We’ve gotten a bit of press about it as well, in Norwegian, mind :) Read more over at pressfire, gamer.no and arcticstartup!

We’re very proud and excited! I’ll keep you guys posted as soon as I can talk more :)

My AD let me publish a little concept sketch as well: (click for larger version)

Thanks for stopping by!

Hey guys! Just a short post. Started sketching this dude, and figured I could post a WIP and update the post when I get further along. Nothing special, just having fun :)

Right, so I had a little spare time and started laying down some color :) Doing a lot of more stylized/cartoony stuff at work, so I feel it’s cool to get back to some good ol’ demon/fantasy character stuff on my spare time. Hope you enjoy seeing steps! I’ll update when I’ve done more on it :)

Thanks for looking!

Hey guys! I’ve been experimenting with more cartoony stuff both at work and at home lately, and at the bus to and from work. I sat down today to sketch and have fun, and I scanned one dude and slapped some color on there. It’s not much, but I wanted to keep things going on the blog as well and I had fun painting the dude :) I know the profile isn’t the best of things to render out, I prefer a 3/4 view, but sketching profiles for like base designs works really well, because you can really produce a lot of sketches in a short amount of time, so there ya have it.. hehe.. Actually got some steps saved for this one, so I figured I could put them on here as well.

First step; sketch and scan.

Second step; I used a multiply layer to drop in the base colors. I basically just throw them down with a big round brush with opacity to pressure to get some control.

Next I go into my usual flurry of layers, getting into more defining of the light direction and forms. I really have horrible control of my layers, but it’s mainly normal layers and every time I want to try something I’m not sure about, I add a new one as fast and big undo. I’ve set up my Photoshop preferences with 10 undos, so it won’t slow down my system with lots of undos stored in the memory, and the extra layes adds some extra safety nets. I also use overlay layers a bit to push colors a bit more.. Overlay works really well for adjusting existing colors seeing as how it gives you a layer that adjusts hue, saturation and value all in one :)

And skip to the final render where I’ve done more of the stuff from the previous step:

Now this can by no means be called a tutorial or any such thing, but maybe someone can pick up something from it :)

Thanks for looking guys!

Hey guys! As always it’s been too long since I posted last. Busybusybusy.. looks like I’m gonna have a little breather coming up soonish though. Gonna pack in some personal art when that happens :)

I’ve been happily making concept art at Snow Castle while freelancing a whole bunch for FantasyFlight Games, an unannounced 3d animated short, visual development on a game for Virtual Game Worlds, and some art for an iPad sci-fi game. All the while functioning as an AD-light for a PC point’n'click in pre production. It became a bit much for me for a while there.. haha.. I’m off the point’n'click adventure as it is now, which feels good actually.. gonna get some time to hang with my girl, do some personal art and like.. not burn out :)

Anyways; here’s some art! I’ve rendered a bit on the pirate dude, and some quick morning sketches I do while on the bus and subway on my way to work :) Still playing around with more toony stuff.. it’s interesting working in such a different style than I’m used to! Having a bunch of fun with it :) Hopefully sometime in the future this stuff will evolve enough to look good too ;)

Hope you enjoy, and thanks for lookin’!

I know, I know… I’m more on the ninja side of things, but sometimes you gotta draw a pirate. This was a really quick warmup today at work. It’s done in about the same style we’re working on for our game ;)

Not my usual style, but it’s fun to do some more cartoony stuff as well! I’ll color and render him up properly later.

Thanks for dropping in!

Hey guys! Just stopping by real quick with a 50-60 minute speedpaint I did today after work… Need to work on my speedpainting.. I’m rusty as hell :P

Thanks for looking!

Hey guys! I was told yesterday that I hadn’t updated my blog in too long by one of the guys I’m working with on a game, and he was entirely right!

I have been working my ass off on three different gigs lately so there hasn’t been much time for anything but working and sleeping. I really wanted to share something though, and I got the green light from Cosmic Apple to show one of the character designs I’ve done for a movie they’re producing in collaboration with Rowbot Street.  Doing concept art for movies is great! I’ve had a lot of fun working with Dan Rowbottom who is writing and directing the thing. It is currently in pre-production, and it’s already started to pop op on various movie sites around the net, which is awesome! Cosmic Apple is also doing a podcast series during the production. The second one is out now and I’m in it stumbling over words and trying to be coherent about what a concept artist does on a film.. haha.. have a look at it here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcz5ly_raven-waiting-podcast-episode-2_shortfilms.

Anyways.. here is the character/creature design I was allowed to show:

Thank you for letting me put it on here, Dan!

It’s gonna be awesome to see the guys I’ve designed walk around on screen!

And the title promised a photoshop tip as well; I was thinking about composing pictures and placing focal points. So I wanted to make a way to get the rule of thirds as a guide when I’m doing the composition sketches and such.

Some of you guys might have already found this one out, but I wanted to share nonetheless.

So here it is; the rule of thirds tool type thingamajig:

Step 1:

Step 2:

And you’re done! You can turn off and on the guides by pressing CTRL+’

The beauty of this thing is the guides will readjust regardless of your canvas size or pixel count :)

Hope some of you found it useful!

Thanks for stopping by!

Here’s the final image. Scroll down for steps.

So I did a rough sketch yesterday I’ll be continuing on today. In the last post I said I might do a projects page, so consider this a soft start in the blog :)

I don’t think I’ve ever done a werewolf illustration before, so now I’m going to.. haha.. I decided to put the scene into a passenger car on a train.. Felt a little more original than having them fight in the woods :) Also it adds sort of a claustrophobic feel to it (I hope). It’s hard to run away in such cramped quarters. I’ll update later on today with where this has ended up.. gonna split my time between work and this one until it’s done. There will probably be a lot of changes before It’s finished.. I’m just having fun with it :)

Right, need to get on with some other work, so here is where it’s at now.. still very much a WIP :)

I’ve changed the design on the head of the werewolf. I wanted it to be something more in between a man and a beast. The first design looked too much like a dog.

Added an overlay layer and dumped some color in with the paintbucket tool in order to be sure I got color in on everything. Nowadays I’m usually working directly in color, or at least switching very early to color, but seeing as how this piece started as a fun sketch, and I was just messing around with the design, the color came in later :)

I’ve added some reds in the focal areas trying to create a triangle-ish composition going from the werewolf head, to the dude on the floor to the guy shooting.

I’ve also started thinking a bit more about the atmosphere. I wanted to give this piece a cinematic feel, and go more for dramatic lighting rather than pushing “natural light”. Like a DOP on a movie will put a spot off the side if it gives off a cool light, even though it’s not necessarily the way the light would’ve behaved in real life.

Still a lot to be resolved about the passenger car itself, and the characters, of course, but I wanted to give myself a focal point early on so I can gauge the detail level off of that.

So I noodled a bit more on it today. Rendered out a little on the werewolf and the dude shooting, started correcting a lot of the lines of the passenger car. If I had done this for a job, I would’ve had a stage in between the sketch and where I’m at now where I would’ve made sure the perspective lines were more correct from the start of the illustration, but hey.. it’s all for fun, right? :)

Trying to figure out a little more of the light as well. Putting some light that bounces off the floor, to push the shadows a little more. I’ve also started to think a bit more about my edge control going in with a soft brush to round off some edges.. up until this point I’ve used almost exclusively the standard round hard brush with size to pressure and opacity at 100%.

Had some huge issues with the shooter guy’s fedora, it didn’t read like he was actually wearing it. One google image search later, he looked a bit better. If in doubt; get reference! :)

I’ll update the post when I do the last session on this piece.

And of course the obligatory studies ;)

Hey guys!

Had some time today for a little speedpaint in addition to my studies! Woohoo! The concept of a hidden city in the jungle is a very cool one, and I don’t think I’ve explored it before, so I did today. I kinda like this 30 minute sketch, so I think I’ll refine it and do a finished piece of it. (Click for larger version)

I have been thinking about adding another sub page to the site for a while where I would do a more in depth look at individual projects and pieces. I would very much like your thoughts on this. If you’d find it interesting or rubbish and if it’d be nice to see some steps, thoughts and background on what I do both with professional work and personal art? I’d arrange it so there would be some more meat to each post so to speak. Say if there’s a particular world I’m developing, you’d get to know a bit more than just the final pieces.

Do leave a comment on here about that! Very interested in hearing you guys’ thoughts!

Right.. and the studies :)

Yeah, so I had a little breather in between gigs which I figured I’d spend doing some concept art for a personal project I’ve picked up again; the steampunk meets western thing I have going.. I also had the brilliant idea of trying to install windows 7, seeing as how I was fed up with vista.. turns out 7 was pretty unstable on my system as well.. so I’ve spent the last two days fighting to get my machine to work again.. panic indeed! I ended up reverting to XP in the end.. and now my machine is totally stable, works faster than ever and I’m generally really happy about that!

Anyways.. I had time to finish up a character design I started on a while back, so here he is :)

Click for larger version

- Fredrik/dCepT