Thursday, January 25, 2007

Digital Set Design - Tino Schaedler

Based in London, Tino Schaedler is a former Architect who has transitioned into the visual effects industry. Having worked for such firms as Daniel Libeskind and Barkow Leibinger, Tino has expanded his skills and has now worked as a digital set designer and art director on many well known films including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, V for Vendetta, and Harry Potter.

Tino has an academic background in architecture and visual effects. He graduated from the University of Hannover in architecture with honours, studied at the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam, the University of California Berkeley in the U.S. and at The Art Institute of Vancouver. He has taught at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin, the architecture department of the University of British Columbia and the Architectural Association in London. He is currently working on a book and is planning to curate a traveling exhibition on contemporary film design. Read the interview on cgarchitect.com and baunetz.de

www.tinoschaedler.com

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Illustration - John Berkey

As a staff artist at the Brown & Bigelow advertising firm for eight years, John Berkey produced more than 500 calendar images, featuring everything from pastoral scenes to historic tableaus, before turning to freelance illustration in 1963.Renowned for his robust and impressionistic style, he has created paintings for book covers, movie posters, advertisements, and such periodicals as National Geographic, Life, Time, and TV Guide. Among those attracted to his masterful science-fiction illustrations was the young George Lucas, who commissioned him to work on the pre-production designs for Star Wars. His images appear on 16 U.S. stamps.

gallery 1 gallery 2 buy book

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Peugeot Design Contest 2007

Paris - Voici les 30 projets sélectionnés parmi les 4000 projets reçus. Vous allez maintenant prendre part au Concours de Design Peugeot en sélectionnant les 10 concept cars finalistes de la 4ème édition.
En cliquant sur un des projets, vous pourrez visualiser l'ensemble des visuels soumis par le candidat, ainsi que le texte de description du concept car.

www.peugeot-concours-design.com


PARIS — French automaker Peugeot is asking the public to vote online for their favorite from 30 entrants in the 2007 Peugeot Design Contest. The winning vehicle design in this fourth annual competition will be woven into a video game for Xbox 360, sponsor of the contest. Thirty design studies, chosen from 4,000 entries that came in from 113 countries, can be viewed on Peugeot's special contest Website. The deadline for voting is January 27. The winner will be announced at the Geneva Motor Show in March by Frédéric Saint-Geours, CEO of Peugeot, and the design will be built for a debut at the Frankfurt show in September — not to mention a debut as part of a future Xbox 360 auto-racing game. Read more... http://www.cardesignnews.com /forums

12th international conference on animation, effects, realtime and content


Started thirteen years ago, fmx has grown into a leading event for Digital Content in Europe attracting visitors and speakers from all over the world. After a successful co-operation in 2006, fmx/07 will again run back-to-back with the Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film (April 26 to May 01, 2007).

fmx is a platform for Animation, Visual Effects, Realtime and Content where experts and audience exchange ideas, experiences and insights on digital creation, production and distribution of the whole palette of digital imagery.

Animation studios, effect houses, game developers, production companies and postproduction facilities present their latest achievements. Researchers, hard- and software vendors and users debate new technologies and practical application. Creators, financial backers and distributors talk to each other and pitch projects. Graduates and freelancers meet recruiters looking for new talents

fmx/07 is organized by the Institute of Animation, Visual Effects & Digital Postproduction of Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Digital Techniques - Craig Mullins

Concept artist Craig Mullins has worked on some of the highest profile films and video games in the last decade.Based in Hawaii, he is employed to bring his artistic talents and imagination to bear at the early stages of game or movie development.

Mullins has worked as a matte painter on films such as The Matrix Revolutions, Armageddon, Apollo 13 and Forrest Gump; and concept visualization paintings for games like Halo 2, Marathon 2, Final Fantasy, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent and Prince of Persia. and is working as a concept artist on the film version of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, currently in pre-production.

He started as a commercial artist in 1986, producing paintings from architect�s plans. But his career path changed when he worked briefly at the world-famous special effects firm, Industrial Light and Magic. There he got his hands on one of the early editions of program Adobe Photoshop.

He was urged to try digital painting by no less than John Knoll, visual effects supervisor at ILM and co-creator of Adobe Photoshop.

His work is featured in the Expose 1 collection of digital painting from Ballistic Publishing, in which he was unanimously voted the first “Grand Master” award for that series. There is an article about him on the Ballistic site. There is also an illustrated article on the BBC News site.

See his website here(www.goodbrush.com)




Some notes taken by Octavian during one of Craig's lectures at Gnomon
// Digital Techniques

Process by which he starts a painting always changes.

This time he started with a photo and smudged it (smudge tool had a scattering effect on it) leaving only an abstract palette.
The idea is to work from a middle grey value canvas. This way you only have to render maximum of 5 steps up to light, and 5 steps down to dark. Unlike a white canvas where you have to render down 10 steps to absolute dark. Working abstractly with shapes. Using only two values: a light value of about 3 and a dark value of about 7.

Keep working with only these two values until something emerges. (again, this is not to say that he works this way always as he says he always changes it up (and the idea behind this is that he figures since he can't change his way of thinking too dramatically, he figures no matter how he starts he'll always end up with "Craig Mullins" images))

Be careful not to put in too much contrast, not until last steps.

It is better to remain flatter in the beginning to keep the silhouettes clean. Also, keep to much texturing out of the early stages as it confuses the shapes.

Looking for design and composition first

Tips on techniques:
-you can model something up in 3d, take a screen cap, and run a find edges filter over the 3d model. Set the layer to multiply and you'll have something to paint on that gives structure without too much variation (value?)

-some times bring up a canvas, like 500x800 pixels, marquee off little sections and do very small thumbnail roughs in there until something emerges. Then blow it up and paint.

-allow yourself a certain amount of time for brainstorming and creativity. Do not allow judgement to come during that time. At a particular time, look back at the brainstorm and then make decisions about where to go from there.

-Hierarchal significance for any color: 1. Value 2. Saturation 3. Hue

-Positioning of head mass relative to torso mass is a key relationship in the attitude of an illustration.

-To detail or "figure out" a section of a painting in a lower rez image; make a selection of what to detail, copy and paste in new file. Uprez the file by 1000% and paint all on a new layer. When done reduce file to 10% it's size, copy all the painting on the extra layer, paste back into original image (marquee selection should still be there though!)

www.linesandcolors.com

Monday, January 08, 2007

Spectrum Deadline January 26th!

spectrum 14 entry forms now online:
New Category Added (CONCEPT ART)!!

The entry information and forms are available as printable PDF files (Acrobat Reader required) by clicking HERE. They will also be mailing out the actual Call For Entries poster to everyone on the mailing list starting this month and will continue until suppy is exhausted or the deadline for entries hits. A new category for “Concept Art” has been added to the competition this year. Jurors for this year’s annual are Mark Chiarello [Art Director for DC Comics], Marc Gabbana [illustrator/concept artist for such films as War of the Worlds and The Polar Express], Daniel dos Santos [artist], Dawn Murin [Art Director for Wizards of the Coast], Ragnar [artist/animation director], and Adam Rex [artist]. Make their job HARD! The more quality art that is entered, the more difficult the selection process — and, ultimately, the more definitive the Spectrum annual becomes. Let’s make this jury sweat! www.spectrumfantasticart.com

...AH! Cover Art

Adam Hughes is one of the greatest artistic contributors in the field of comics today. Primarily known as a 'good girl' artist, Adam has worked on a myriad of books. Some of Adam's credits include the Justice League, Legionnaires, Star Trek, Ghost and Gen 13 as well as doing countless covers and pin-ups for just about every comic company.

Currently, Adam is the monthly cover artist to DC Comics title CATWOMAN. He tours, appearing at close to a dozen conventions a year (see the appearances page for a list of this years shows).

Official site
'Things That Make You Go..AH!
bio and checklist @ wikipedia

Sunday, January 07, 2007

iPhone concept art

Okan Vardarova has put together a huge collection of iPhone concept art over at his Apple iPhone blog. The art, which has been created by Apple fans, runs the gamut from the impossible to the brilliant to the absurd. In a way, it will be a huge let-down if Apple actually delivers on the iPhone at Macworld this January because it will cut off some of the most creative expressions of Apple fandom.
http://appleiphone.blogspot.com/
The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.apple.com/

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Blizzard Art Contest 2006: The Winners

They received an incredible number of entries for last year's Blizzard Art Contest, with more than 3,000 outstanding submissions. Here are the galleries for the 2006 Blizzard Art Contest’s Grand Prize Winners and Honorable Mentions, featuring more than 100 pieces of artwork representing the Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo universes. http://www.blizzard.com/

Monday, January 01, 2007

Cover Art

Benjamin lives and works in Munich/Germany as a freelance illustrator for book covers. Further he wrote the scenario for "La Chronique des Immortels", a graphic novel based on the book by W.Holbein. See more of his work on here.