Robots Attack! - 08.17.10
I’ve been trying to focus a lot more on my environments and composition lately. This is one decent thing that has come out of that.
Chrispy Graphics
The Portfolio Site Of Artist Chris Goodrich
The Portfolio Site of Artist Chris Goodrich
Welcome to the new ChrispyGraphics.com! In an effort to make my site a bit more personable I’ve decided to drop this whole awkward third person narrative. Everyone knows it’s me writing this nonsense. I’ve also added comments back into the page and a brand spanking new social widget, so if you see something of mine you like by all means spread it around or leave a comment! Also, if you’re not already using one of these browsers, I recommend Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox for viewing this site… or any site for that matter. Hope everyone enjoys the new look. It should be easier on the eyes than that stark white atrocity I was pimping before. Cheers.
~ Chris G
Allie Approves! - 07.14.10
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Approved sucka!
Allie Brosh is a busy lady when it comes to e-mails, but she finally got around to checking out my humble artistic gesture towards her greatness. The alot has muy approval! W00t! Thanks, Allie, for digging my art. It means “alot”. <--Lame.
For anybody wondering about this, Allie Brosh writes a blog called Hyperbole and a Half. It’s super good stuff, go check it out. I had made some art for her a few months back and she sent me some custom art right back. It’s pretty bad ass if I do say so myself.
“The Alot Is Better Than You At Everything” (Allie’s Post)
My Post About The Alot
Earth Golem - 05.27.10
There isn’t much to report on this fellow. He’s just a creature concept I did for work and will probably not be used for anything. It was still fun working on him.
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Earth Golem, Dream Forge Entertainment, LLC
There Are A Lot of Alot - 05.16.10
The Elusive Alot (born of frighteningly bad grammar)
For those of you who haven’t yet discovered the awesome madness that is Hyperbole and a Half, you have no idea what you are missing. Hyperbole and a Half is a blog by Allie Brosh. Sure she’s not a household name and she didn’t write Twilight or Harry Potter, but her musings are good for several hours of entertainment.
My sister sent me this link several weeks ago when I was unable to view it on a proper computer. I made a valiant effort to view the site on my iPhone, but the sheer volume of images caused my phone to have a minor seizure and stop working. Luckily, I was able to check it out with proper equipment and was grateful for my sister’s recommendation. This blog is awesome.
As for that critter you see at the top of the post, I’m sure that any wayward internet traveler is wondering what the hell that illustration has to do with Hyperbole and a Half. As I was reading through the posts I came across one called “The Alot Is Better Than You At Everything”. It basically consists of her annoyances with grammar, but the part about the Alot made me laugh so hard that I felt I had to pay homage to a similar grammatical annoyance that I share with her. I’m no English major or grammar Nazi and I probably can’t fathom all of the mistakes I’ve made in this post alone, but I do know that “a lot” is two words and that there, their, and they’re all have unique meanings/spellings.
Thank you, Allie, for giving me the tools I need to smile when I read something like “alot of watermelons fell over”, or “the pizza guy brought alot of pizza to the party.” High five. I’m sorry if there is bad grammar in this post.
Slip Stitch - 05.15.10
A couple of weeks ago I was doodling some rough sketches when this strangeness appeared. I guess I was in a cynical mood, but I ran with it and tried to create some kind of narrative. I was hoping for a really nice, finalized illustration, but it inevitably turned into more of a lighting study. I’m not particularly pleased with the rendering. I feel like I could have done a lot better. I learned a lot from rendering the lighting, so there’s that. Hopefully the next piece I do will be an improvement.
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Slip Stitch
By the way, that’s a crochet needle for anyone who may be wondering.
IOGraphica Is Neat - 05.12.10
Today my co-worker (a Mr. Davi Blight, I know you know him) sent me an interesting link called IOGraphica. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it tracks mouse movements and stops. Movement is represented by thin lines and circles represent inactivity (the bigger the circle, the longer the stop). Having a duel screen at work (one used for painting, the other used for internet/reference and such), it was interesting to see how much time I divided between the two screens.
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IOGraphica At Work
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Parachnid and Process - 05.06.10
I thought it might be useful for other artists as well as myself to document my digital painting process. This is one of several ways I get paintings done. Usually when I’m doing an illustration or concept piece I will be all over the place with techniques. I’m much more of a means-to-an-end illustrator and I’m not very set in my ways. I will do my best to talk about some of the processes I used to make this particular creature happen.
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Parachnid Creature Concept
So I’m calling this guy a Parachnid. It’s not particularly clever, I just combined the words parasite and arachnid. What’s worse is that he only has six legs, but I’m not here to nitpick what makes a species fall into a particular class or genus. It’s made up. It doesn’t exist. Moving on.
This piece was created in Photoshop CS3 using a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet. I have the strip set to brackets ( up=], down=[ ) for altering brush size on the fly and my pen buttons set to alt (for color picking) and right click (for changing brushes/hardness). The canvas is 12×12 in. and 300 DPI. I’ve broken down the process into twelve parts with accompanying images for reference. Let’s get started:
00. This is sort of a precursor and side note, but I wanted to point out that with this particular concept I had a clear image of what I was going to paint when I started. Otherwise I would have started with a lot of warm up sketches and thumbnails before delving into the real deal. I also didn’t use any reference for this piece, which can often be a mistake for people new to painting. Reference is always helpful. I’m sure there are tons of glaring anatomical inaccuracies I can’t spot, but this wasn’t too much of a serious piece. Take home message: thumbnails and reference material are your friends.
01. As it is plain to see from the first panel, I have laid in a gradient tonal going from dark at the bottom to light at the top. I will often use desaturated colors consisting of a dark brownish color to a lighter skin tone.
02. At this point I’ve created a new layer. I’m using a #000000 color on a square brush with minimum diameter set between 13-33% and pen pressure control. The flow is set very low, usually between 3-10% depending on how confident I’m feeling. I will be using this same brush later on with Other Dynamics: Opacity Jitter 0% Pen Pressure. This is where I began laying in lines to define the form. There are also lines at the bottom of the canvas that I’m using to rough in some perspective. This will be useful later in determining the placement of the creatures feet and will give me guidelines on where the shadows will fall based on the lighting.
03. I’m doing a lot of refining the linework and finding the forms that are going to carry out through the rest of the painting. I’m still only working with two layers, a tonal gradient and a second layer for blocking in lines/shapes.
04. Over the next few panels I won’t have much to talk about. I’m still doing cleanup and defining shapes with shadows. Something I do want to mention is I haven’t started putting in any highlights yet.
05. Now that it’s getting into serious refining, I’ve color picked the lightest background color and am using it to push the dark tones at the bottom of the canvas to match the light tones in the top. I’m also being painfully careful with the anatomy of the human part of the creature. His right hand was giving me a lot of grief, but eventually it works out and doesn’t look wonky.
06. This is the final black and white refinement I will be doing before blocking in colors. Now we can see pretty much all the details in the creature. I also took a little time to play around with the spear and sword that this poor bastard is holding. In my opinion, I feel that the more designed something looks the better the piece sells. Instead of slapping a rapier and javelin in his hands I took a moment to make sure that they look a bit fantastical and not necessarily of the earth realm as we know it. I also took extra time playing with the front legs, making sure that each one looked similar and that the toe portions looked believable enough. I’ve never seen any kind of bug with wacky anatomy like this, but for all intents and purposes this is a fantasy creature. He can look however he wants to.
07. Now we get to color, the bane of my existence. Luckily I’ve seen some professional tips on how creature artist Devin Platts handles his colors. You can check it out here. What I did is a bit of a modified version of how he goes about his process.
So what I’ve done is create a new layer and set it to Multiply. I didn’t put too much thought in the color scheme sadly. I knew I wanted the human to have a darker skin tone. As far as the insect components I chose red for the carapace because it remind me of a gnarly tick of some kind. And purple for the legs? Don’t ask. Guess it seemed like a good idea at the time. I mainly wanted the legs to stand out from the rest of the beast, so it got a vibrant color choice. Oh well.
08. Now that I’ve got my colors set in I create another layer above the multiply layer. This is where I grab some white pixels and start slapping in lighter tones and highlights. This isn’t the final pass for highlights, but I wanted to start roughing in some kind of lighting. I’m also blending some of the colors together and cleaning up as I go.
Now that I’m starting to do some serious cleaning up I have switched to using a round brush. I leave the Size Jitter set to between 13-33%, similar to the square brush. I will also alternate between using completely 100% hardness (for edges and fine detail) to 0% hardness (for blending and color mixing). This is where the right click on my pen comes in handy. A quick right click on the canvas and I can move the hardness slider to wherever I need it, but it generally doesn’t land anywhere between 0-100%.
09. Render render render. I’m making overlay layers to make a bit more of a dead flesh skin tone for the human portion of the creature. I’m also cleaning up the strange egg sack thing on his head to look more like what it’s supposed to be.
Note: It’s important when rendering to not go overboard with the detail. The rule of thumb I go by is spend the most time rendering the details you want your audience to focus on. The rest doesn’t need as much refining, as it will be secondary to your main focus. Most illustrations will have noticeably less details in the areas outside of the artists focal point. This isn’t an excuse to slack, but if you find yourself taking too long on a piece it could be important to take a moment and decide which area you want the viewer to focus on, then focus on that.
10. This is the home stretch. It took the least amount of time out of the whole piece, but it’s also the most technically detailed portion. I will do my best to describe my process (next time I will just make a video). I’ve got him rendered to a state I’m satisfied with, so I will start adding textures and environmental elements. There are a lot of ways to go about this, but I’ve decided with this piece I’m going to use an Overlay layer. I first dropped in a ground texture above my tonal background but underneath the creature and then transformed it using Free Transform and Perspective. Once it start looking proper I applied a layer mask and start painting out the bits I don’t need that are sitting on top of the creature.
I use this same process with the texture on the creature, only it’s slightly inverted. I make an overlay layer, drop in the texture, then I mask out the entire layer. Once this is done I will select white (#FFFFFF) and start painting in the mask the areas I want to show through. This is a good time use Opacity Jitter Pen Pressure on your brush, as it will give you more control over the intensity of your texture.
11. Since I’ve done well to keep my layers separated thus far, I now take a custom cloud brush and start painting in swatches behind my creature but above my ground layer. These can be any colors you care to use, as long as it matches the mood of the piece. I’m also going to make a layer above the creature and paint in a few more light clouds to give the piece a bit more depth.
12. Unsharp mask. The last and quickest of all the steps. I start by using CTRL+A to select the canvas and then use CTRL+Shift+C to copy all of the layers together as they appear on the screen. Then, selecting the top layer, I will use CTRL+V to paste my new, final layer above all of the others. Then all that needs to be done is go to Filters Menu > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask. This will bring up a new window with settings for the unsharp mask. You can play with these to your liking, but I will usually set the amount between 70-100%, 2-4 pixel radius and threshold at 0 levels.
I hope you have found this process piece enjoyable and informative. And what have I learned from doing this you ask? Making a video would be easier. It’s hard enough to remember all the stuff I did, and a video would be easier to digest than reading a laundry list of hyper-detailed text. For that I apologize. Just look at the final image and enjoy. I’ll make a video tutorial one day.
Cheers.
Dog Dragon - 04.27.10
I was working on this guy yesterday. It was supposed to be some kind of dragon, but it didn’t totally turn out that way. I guess it’s whatever I say it is. Dog Dragon.
Dog Dragon Creature Concept
Acclaim CCO Likes My Work - 04.26.10
The studio I work for just finished working on a match 3 title called Jade Monkey. Sure it’s a clone, but I’m pretty proud of the art that’s gone into it. I can’t take credit for every pixel on the screen, but I played a part in determining the look and feel of the game. A co-worker told me today that David Perry, the Chief Creative Officer of Acclaim, liked the look of the game. I quote:
“This looks great!
Nice job!”
It’s always nice to hear industry big wigs compliment your work. Props to the Jade Monkey team. Now go check it out on Facebook! Keep checking in on Jade Monkey for a big update soon.
