The Art of James Teeple

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Leicester, United Kingdom
I'm 21 / DMU Art Student / British-American.

Sunday 22 January 2012

REEF- Character project themed around the Reef.


Mood Boards and Research.
This project is a fairly open one and its based on characters which is where I see myself specializing. So far I'm really enjoying it, and aim to have a interesting character concept by the end of it.
Right now I want my character to be human, so I'm looking into the creatures you find on the reef and what natural resources for clothing, armour and weapons he or she may have available to them and how that could influence their appearance in my designs.




After some initial research I created a few silhouette concepts building upon that reasearch, aiming my focus at the outfit of the individual.

Development of fourth design & colour tests.






Cool idea's that didnt work!


 This painting was an experiment of mine a few months ago. I wanted to practice lighting effects that i had never tried before, especially in digital paint as I am relatively new to it still.
I started and left this painting in one night, having decided that the pose threw off the over all image too much to be continued with. It was completely unintentional for the sword to appear phallic, having worked fairly speedily I didn't sit back and examine the position of the arms earlier enough to want to consider removing them and starting again. So i went with it and focused more and the use of colour and lighting in the image, rather than the actual composition.






It was painted it Gimp 2.6 freeware as i didn't have Adobe Photoshop at the time and have only just recently acquired a copy.


My main focus with the painting ended up being the sword, and his face. I originally wanted to convey a very menacing and agressive feeling from this character, and no face shows that more in my opinion than a snarling wolf or dogs face. So he ended up being a kind of werewolf, which was fun to do because i had never drawn one before so made it interesting blending the human anatomy with the wolf's animal fur and face.

The sword was more difficult than I had thought it might be, and gave me quite a bit of grief!
I was a complete novice when it comes to painting fire and intense flames. I game myself more difficulties with this painting by working without any reference material intially. In the end I wasn't happy with the cartoonish Red and orange flaming sword i was becoming, so i decided to opt for a more realistic look and found an image of a coal fire. This is what game me the basis for the colour pallet on the sword. Which i am quite pleased with. Although I would reduce the blue flame percentage and add more cooler flames to justify the orange highlights on the character.

I mean to do something like this all over again, and use what I learned in the making of this painting to improve upon it in the new one. ;)



Concepts- The Behemoth.






Behemoth


This is a colour development from a series of concept sketches I worked on a while back. They were never used so I thought i'd spruce them up. I always wondered what my Behemoth would look like fleshed out...
This was a 10 minute quickie, but I hope to develop the concept further in future. I have always been interested in Insects and animals, and my inspiration for this was a collection of pictures of moths and Other  insects, which i dissected and rearranged to form one cohesive creature. Then i worked from that collage and rendered a pencil sketch of my concept.
My intention was to give the creature colossal scale to enhance the threatening anatomy it was sporting, and give it a otherworldly sense of belonging.
It may scare some and look cuddly to others, but that's where the phobias come it I guess. My girlfriends mom thinks Moths are devil spawn, but i know not all do ;)
It was not intended to be an aggressor, but more of a docile giant, when scaled next to the puny human. Flipped the scales you might say...

Friday 13 January 2012

Dhurik the Dwarf.

This was a random painting I decided to do when I got back on Sunday because I felt I was being very unproductive and it was about time I did some art after a lazy Christmas...
I loosely knew I wanted to draw a fantasy Dwarf Character, D&D sorta style.. but with my own twist.
just over two hours later this had emerged. I don't normally like to use any kind of reference, instead I try to challenge my memory of shape, form and anatomy at first. so I just set about scribbling in Gimp 2.6 Painter.


  It started off as a pile up of about five layer, starting with the loose line art to guide adding tone.  This is a rough lay out of the stages I went through thanks to me saving quite frequently, I wouldn't normally be able to do this as i don't tend to think that far ahead lol...

As you can see on the end there. I added a few more layer in overlay mode and layered on some colour which worked nicely and took only 20 minutes-ish. This was the first time i'd gone about painting this way, starting totally in grey-scale then adding colour later.

 
I am quite pleased at how it turned out, for a quick painting. I mean to do this again but perhaps with less fantasy themed material.