Session 6 - 05/11/12

In todays session we were asked to use the website turtleart.net to find a concept artist we liked and select a piece of their work that stood out.

Mark Behm was my choice, and i was surprised to learn that he is currently employed at Valve, a studio i have a particular fondness for. We were asked to find out more about our chosen artist, but apparently information on this man is rather scarce, so i've resorted to simply quoting valve's website in a section about Mark Behm:

"Mark grew up drawing on a small table next to his Dad’s larger one, enamored of Star Wars and Frazetta. Before joining Valve in 2009, Mark worked as a feature film animator, concept artist, and illustrator for 12 years. His pre-Valve animation work includes Robots, Shrek the Third, and Madagascar 2. Mark now works as a concept artist, modeler, texture artist, and animator."

Above you can see the piece i chose, i really enjoy the huge amount of character that has been conveyed through such simple sketches. We were asked to take our selected piece and use it as inspiration to draw six quick thumbnail character sketches, below you can see my efforts:

I dont think i managed to capture Behm's artsyle very well, not at all, in fact. I found that my designs tended to steer towards the more menacing or blank-looking creatures, and my attempts to create something with character fell rather flat.
Even so, i took my page as instructed and showed it to a group, the overall decision was to go with the design on the bottom right, i agreed as this was the design i liked the most, and i didnt really like any of them!

Once a choice had been made we were asked to take our chosen thumbnail and refine it in a larger, A5 drawing:

As you can see the design changed a bit from the thumbnail sketch, most prominently with the addition of the protuding eyes, i really felt that added alot to the image.

We were then asked to look for reference imagery to help refine the image even further when we eventually use Photoshop to create a final, digital image of our characters, and given the bizarre nature of my design, i decided to create a list of words that would be useful in helping me find suitable imagery.

"Gills"

I thought of shark gills as i want my creature to have similar openings on its sides.

"Jellyfish"

Although not very apparent in my refined sketch, i want my creature to have jellyfish-like tendrils protruding from its base, and possibly from other parts.

"Fish Eye"



I looked up these images to help me see the way fish eyes appear. This turned out to be completely unlike what i wanted to find and unfortunately after a long time spent searching i wasnt able to find anything like i wanted, so instead i looked to marbles and water bubbles.

"Amphibian -> Slimy Skin -> Fish"

My original thought for my creatures skin compared it to that of a tree frog, but on closer inspection it became apparent that these frogs do not have perferctly smooth skin causing me to change the term to "slimy skin", which led me to the realisation that a fish's skin (out of water) would be perfect:

I would like to capture the slimy, shiny appearance of the skin of these fish in my image, i may go so far as adding the scaly undertones as well but this may prove to be beyond me.

"Muscle Structure"

I needed some reference images on muscle structure so that i could properly portray the shape and tone of my creatures arms and shoulder area as these are based heavily on human anatomy.

I found that making this list actually led me to improving my refined image, making it more focused and detailed. I believe it improved the overall result as i actually went back and changed some things on my refined drawing while i made it.

I thought i would end this post by adding another image of Marks that stuck with me while looking through his work and as you can tell had an influence on my refined image:

http://www.markbehm.com/images/dg_alien1.jpg