ED SAVAGEMajor Project Handbook

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“And I cannot touch her face

And I cannot touch her hair,

And I kneel to empty shadows—

Just memories of her grace;

And her voice sings in the winds

And in the sobs of dawn

And among the flowers at night

And from the brooks at sunrise

And from the sea at sunset,

And I answer with vain callings …”

William Hope-Hodgkinson

The Night Land

1910

ContentsExploration 4

Defense of the Ancients 2 18

3d Exploration 19

The Night Land: Overview and Reflections. 20

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Exploration

I started this project with the simple intention of exploring my digital painting practice; I’d move around, cover different subjects, and try and build on the developments of the pre major unit.Figures in particular were a focus for entirety of the major unit: I noticed during PMP how infrequently I’d attempted full figure illustrations, and quickly realised that no-one is going to hire a concept artists who can’t draw feet...

A few of the following images are speedpaints, like the frog below, and were completed in roughly 30 minutes. Most of them aren’t, but I have found that the speed at which I work increasing throughout the course of the unit. This is undoubtedly a good thing; I’ve heard (and read) that concept artists tend to work very quickly; it being rare that they are given more than one day for any particular illustration. Rather, the focus seems to be on experi-mentation and producing viable designs.

As for subject matter, I was sure that something interesting would pop up sooner or later. As it turned out, it would be later (with one month left), but I enjoyed the freedom available to me in the earlier parts of the unit, and the exploration that followed.

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Attempting a more painterly style...

Good concept artists are able to change and adapt their aes-thetic to the needs of different projects; flexibility can be valuable, especially if you’re seeking a full-time studio position.

My struggles with feet continued. The barbarian with his feet covered in gold would seem to sug-gest that author of the picture might have given up on that par-ticular day...

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The above picture illustrates a development I made in my practice concerning masks and photoshop’s transparency lock tool. By combining both, I was able to quickly and effectively create foliage forms, in a non-destructive manner. First of all, I created a large mass covering the entirety of the higher parts of each tree. After appllying the transparency lock, I could quickly apply texture and light and shade to said mass, without overshooting the bounda-ries of the form; slapdash painting, through a temporary stencil, in other words. After this, I used a mask to selectively and non-destructively chip away at the foliage mass, reducing it down into the ‘clumps’ present in the image.

The benefits of this workflow are speed, practicality and control, and I’m sure the process can be applied succesfully to more objects...

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More experiments in foliage and feet.

Trees and rocks seem to have become an important part of my visual vocabulary over the course of this unit. The reason is, I sus-pect, simple; I enjoy painting them. The forms tend to be playful, and toe a nice line between abstract forms and detailed textures. Some-thing about the natural rhythm of them is also a pleasant to paint...

To the left: a gorgon soldier; why not?

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3d Sketchup models, inspired by a Jonathan Meades documentary about brutalist achitecture.

There’s something to be said for the idea that architecture doesn’t have to be ‘nice’.

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Two different figures, in one picture! progress! This illustration was satisfying to create. It’s one of the more complex ones, and even has a vaguely implied narrative; not something that is a particular focus of concept art, but something which I’m interested in nonetheless.

This picture did, however, trigger another realisation. I noticed that I’d fallen into the habit of using a particular colour palette for my ‘important pictures’, something illustrated by the se-lection of pictures I’d placed on my portfolio website, and stressed further by the above image.

As such, I made a concerted effort to move away from light blue and green during the later parts of the major unit.

Collosi, however, remained a firm fixture, from PMP right up to hand-in.

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Quixiotic Swan Knight: sits on trees, dreams of days gone by. To the right, assorted sketches, and in the top left, a Cowboy Vampire Wizard Vicar; why not?

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Defense of the Ancients 2

The image below was made for someone in the industry, who approached me through a friend to do some design work for some 3d assets he was preparing to make. These assets would be for the open marketplace of Valve’s hugely succesful pc game, Defense of the Ancients 2, where they would be sold as cosmetic items to those who wished to ‘customise’ their avatars. This can be very lucrative; good ‘sets’ have been known to earn upwards of $15000, but, of course, the marketplace is very competive and restrained by a number of quality control mechanisms.

The below illustration is a armour redesign for the character ‘ember spirit’. I based the set on a statue I found in the British Museum, complete with dragon pauldrons. They were smaller on the original statuette, but given the high fantasy aesthetic of DoTA 2, I substantially increased their size. Interestingly, the feed-back I received regarding the pauldrons was, wait for it - that they should be even bigger. I think would take the design towards the cliched, over-sized pauldrons that are so preponderant in fantasy designs; the type which would crush the wearer’s skull should they stand in a T-shaped pose... But if that’s they want...

Following graduation, I intend to work on other designs for this contact; he’s already taught me a lot about the industry.

3d Exploration

Primarily using blender, an open source 3d modelling program, I started to learn some more advanced model-ling techniques. This was a step up from Sketchup, towards a workflow more typical of high end software and the industry in general. These two head meshes were originally made by subdividing cubes. I pushed and pulled various vertices and faces, and then eventually hand painted a quick and rough tex-ture, as seen below.

3d modeling is a complicated and lengthy process, but I feel that dipping my toes in further has given me a better idea of the video game industries workflow. This is important when considering the place of concept art in the pipeline; any work I did in that particular capacity would later be handed over to a 3d modeller. Under-standing that process allows me to take it into account when designing objects.

Should I become more profi-cient at the discipline, it would also make me more useful to small development teams, where flexibility is often valued more than specialisation.

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The Night Land: Overview and Reflections.

This novel, produced in 1910, by William Hope-Hodgkinson, is perhaps best described as a proto-typical horror story. Hodgkinson’s work would go on to inspire a several other important writers, pehrpas most notably H.P.Lovecraft, who in turn would become one of the most influential writers of the macabre. What Hodgkinson shares with Lovecraft is a sense for disquiet; the ruinous and twisted forms of ancient things best left shrouded in darkness.

The Night Land principally concerns an inhabitant of ‘The Great Redoubt’, a giant pyramid, and last bastion of humanity in the far distant future; a future where the sun has died, and all manner of evil has spawned in the resulting darkness. I first read it a few ago, and in a similar fashion to Engines of God, the novel I iillustrated for the pre-major project, it had stuck in the back of my mind. Not so much for the characters, who happen to be devoid of any character, or the prose, which is occasionaly aggravating, being as it is a kind of faux-17th century olde worlde parlance.

Rather, what had stuck in my mind was the locations and creatures described; the great pyramid, the watchful, living collosi, the silent ones and the blasted heathlands. ‘Twas not a happy place.

Compared to the previous unit, I felt very little doubt or anxiety over commiting to concept art as a disci-pline, and, happily, I still feel that way.

Of the images I produced, the most interesting, to me, were as follows:

Diskos, 1 & 2 (Right) - The first illustration, of various different forms the protaganist’s weapon could take ( akind of spinning buzzsaw catherine wheel) is not particularly beautiful or pleasant to look at. However, it did contain several different designs, and the images utility was in preparation for the second illustration of the weapon, wherin I combined and polished select elements from the original picture. In my Handbook for the pre-major project, this is exactly something which I said I wanted to do more of. Although I got around to the second iteration fairly late in the day, the result has made me feel much more comfortable with the notion of exploring several different ideas in a very rough and unpolished manner, and then taking those further later on.

The Pyramid (Below) - 3d concept modelling. This is something I did in the pre major project, but never with regards to architecture. I’d take this approach further with the work on the observatory.

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The humped men (top right) - Exploring different anatomical forms, for a group of “sub-hu-manoid” creatures who attack the protaganist. Being mostly nude, these are perhaps the most anatmoically challenging figures I’ve drawn, and whilst not physically accurate to the 100th degree, I doubt I would have been capable of this even 5 months ago. It did, however take a fair while to paint, but I felt like I was learning throughout. Which is likely a good thing.

The land of fire and oceans (Bottom left) - An early piece, this was a deliberate attempt to in-voke a landscape with a different colour palette; one specifically without green.

The protaganist’s armour (Below) - An attempt to move away from often silly fantasy armour, towards something more functional in nature. No oversized, spiky glowing pauldrons here... modelled after 15th century German gothic armour, which I felt meshed well with the histori-cal feeling of the books aesthetic.

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The Collosi’s - of the two, I found the watching thing of the south east (Right) the more in-teresting to paint, principally on account of the landscape stretching before it. I feel like this illustration was a comparative step-up in communicating a sense of scale and space. Both employed fairly strict colour palettes, and I think they were integral in letting me feel more comfortable with the use of colour in general.

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The black hills and the seven lights (Top Left) - Carrying on from watching thing of the south east, I again attempted to illustrate a landscape of considerable scale. The other point of inter-est, personally, was the speed at which I completed this illustration; roughly 4 hours, which seemed impressive when I considering the average speed at which I paint. Most paintings tend to to take me around 2 days to complete; thehumped men took me 4, on account of the varying figures.

Concept artists can specialise as environmental artists or character artists, but I feel that, in the long run, I’d rather be capable at both, even if I struggle considerably more with figures.

The observatory images (Below, Below Right) - These were novel to me principally on account of the way I used Sketchup to model the environment, and the telescopic array, before using that as a basis for a still paint over. In the illustration of the telescope, I did little to hide the pictures origin in 3d software; the figure in the bottom right, for example, is sketchup’s default scale reference. This was an acknowledgement of something I first heard at the conceptart.org workshop in London last summer, and have read again since; concept art is not neccesarily about making ‘nice’ illustrations; rather, it’s about concepts, and the methods used to commu-nicate those concepts matters little, so long as the idea is loud and clear. Josh Atak, a concept artist I contacted while writing my dissertation, told me that ‘promotional’ artowrk is often confused by students for actual, functional concept art, which is apparently far more rough and ready. This would make sense, given the speed at which many concept artists work.

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