Entry 1 - Digital Art of Yoroido

Hello my name is David Bush, I am currently 20, I am in my second year of college on a Games Art & Design course. This is my first entry into the new David Bush Games Art & Design blog. In this blog I will be showing you various pieces of Traditional and Digital Art, 3D Models and Animations in an attempt to receive useful critique. I will also post my thoughts on games design, games concepts and games ideas in which I hope will receive interesting responses.

The Making of Yoroido
Getting more to the topic that is my digital art work that I produced for college. Above is the final piece.  I spent a few hours producing sketches of the concept. These sketches were aided by time I had spent over the summer studying and drawing trees, fields, puddles, farm buildings and landscapes on the outskirts of Long Buckby where I live. Below is the final sketch for the concept which I then changed as necessary in Photoshop. At the moment my sketching process doesn't really have a lot of methods I do it more by instinct as to what I feel, know and see on the paper in regards to what is and isn't already there.


In my final piece to create the sea I used Filter > Render > Fibers with a Glass and Distortion effect applied within the filter. The Sky was made by creating a white strip at the bottom and a large block of blue above it and selecting the two using the rectangular marquee tool and then applying Gaussian Blur to Blur (Obviously)  the two together to provide the sky texture. I used various brush sets to create the clouds, seagulls, dirt, sun and trees. Once the tree was printed onto a layer on the canvas I locked the pixels of it's layer and applied the colour for the leaves and branches. The textures for the cliffs, rocks, grass, and houses were all created by blending various colours together for each one to capture the tone and depth of each one in the piece.

My Criticisms

• Shadows and shadow logic/perspective needs improving including shadows for underneath the group of trees on the far left.
• Design of the buildings is very generic and should have been researched more to improve my visual library.
• Blending could do with a lot more work since I am not going dark enough or adding enough detail to really show the depth and physical traits of simple things such as a cliff wall.
• Reflections need more work to them, especially when I manage to miss out adding reflections from the house and wave on the water. 
• Sea ripples need calming near the sand and the entire sea needs re-blending. Using a fiber render for the sea was a nice idea but it was only good for a base layer in reality that I could get a feel for the sea with a paint an improved sea over the top.
• The seagulls need resizing to give a sense of how far and small they are away. 
• The clouds need repositioning in terms of the Z axis as one of them makes it look like it is level with the tree instead of being in the distance.

The main reason and it may seem like an excuse but it was very important. I should have spent more time on the piece rather than delaying and rushing the project, sounds basic but unfortunately I had a £958 loan to repay before Xmas and wanted it out of the way for the new college year so I spent most of the summer working instead of doing the college task I was set. Which is reasonable since it was a question of pay off laptop or use tuition fees to pay off debt and not get my second year finish the course I had already started and get closer to my dream.

Progression of Skills
What you can see below was the last piece of concept art I ever made digitally before this piece. Within four hours worth of tutorial videos on the internet and some practice with my life drawing I have gone along way in terms of what I can do with Photoshop. If you have any criticisms please feel free to comment on my work or ask me questions. I will be posting more work and information as it becomes recent.Thank you for reading and take care.