Sunday, September 27, 2015

Sharks on land\\

Hi everyone, what's happening ?
So in the last post I was talking about how I was working on a concept of my own and I think I'm finally ready to elaborate a bit :]

I really wanted to mix an abstract and weird idea with realistic visuals and try to give it a dark and grungy vibe.
So I came up with an idea to make a series of cinematic black and white (or low saturation frames) in which I'd show different species of sharks circling people on land.
the idea was that the people being hunted by the sharks should be in situations where they have no idea in how much trouble they are, but it wouldn't take long for them to find out.
It would kinda be that "silence before the storm" moment.

Since I recently visited Death Valley together with lovely my parents here in California I decided the first frame should be a desolated desert landscape.
I Thought it'd be funny if the person in this frame would be trying to do his thing in the outhouse and
2 sharks would be relentlessly waiting for him to come out.
Maybe I'll leave the door open a bit and let the toilet paper roll out or something but I'm not entirely sure about that.

So I started by making some concepts to try and wrap my head around it:



After I felt confident enough that the idea had potential I decided to continue in 3d, so I moved to 3ds max and tried to do some composition layouts:







As you can see I changed the composition elements quite a few times.
Mostly because I felt they were cluttering up the frame and it felt too busy for a desolated desert landscape.
Also after the second frame I switched from the standard max scanline rendered to Vray.

After I felt I found a suiting composition it was time to start working on the sharks.
First I photobashed and painted a concept of what kind of proportions I wanted for the shark and then moved to zbrush:




After the sculpting was done I tried to quickly incorporate the shark into the frame to see if it would work:


I was quite happy with the result so I continued and started to properly shade and texture the shark in a vray IBL rendered test scene:


Well that's all I got for now but I'm working on it everyday.
Hope you guys like it and are as excited as I am at the moment :]
More soon !

Sunday, September 20, 2015

Blacksad\\

Hey guys, what's up ?
Felt it was about time to post a little update on some stuff I've been doing but never really showed.
One of them is a project around a graphic novel called Blacksad.
If you haven't heard of Blacksad it's definitely worth checking out.

Anyway I wanted to make a frame out of one of the books (below) in 3d, so I started on it some time ago.


However the longer I worked on it the more I felt like it wasn't going to get finished any time soon.
The reason behind that is that I missed being creative in my mind and make my own ideas instead of other people's ideas.
This is why I started another personal project recently with an idea of my own but I'll talk about that  soon!

Some screenshots:








Hope you guys like it.
I might get back to it sooner but we'll see :]

Thanks for stopping by,

J



Sunday, September 13, 2015

Long time No see

Holy shit, where to begin\\
I's been a while since I posted here, about 3 years I believe and damn a lot has changed.
I am going to try and continue where I left off.

About 2 months after the last blogpost I left for Prague to join the ranks of 2K Czech in Prague, had an amazing time there and met a lot of great people who I will remember for the rest of my life.
Prague is a beautiful city with and amazing night life, I heard people calling it Disney land for grown ups and I don't think I could find any better description.

But everything has to come to an end and so did that adventure.
At some point they closed down the studio and people had to move to either Brno (another city in Czech) or Novato, CA (a city bit north of San Francisco).
This was around February/March 2014.
I had the opportunity to move to California and I took it.

This decision ended up starting one of the hardest and shittiest but luckily rather short chapter of my life.

Although the job at the new studio here was an absolute dream I moved into a small shithole called San Rafael.


I spend a few hard months here, just passing the bland pile of shitdays waiting for it to end.
Luckely one of my college friends and ex colleagues got an offer at our studio, moved to California and stayed at my place for the last 2-3 months of the SR life.
The timing couldn't almost 've been better, the period of my rent lease was almost over and since we would be able to afford a better place together we had a chance to get the hell out of there.




This was the beginning of a new chapter.
Geert (the college buddy) and I moved to San Francisco and this place has been great so far.
There's always stuff to do in San Francisco.
The life here feels very vivid and fast paced, I like it, it makes me feel alive and inspired.

Enough about the personal life stuff, don't think anyone is waiting for me to continue blabbering on about.

Art is where it's at.

During my time in Prague work offered us to take sculpting classes and drawing classes in an academy/atelier.
Although I did some drawing classes first I really wanted to learn sculpting with clay.
I enrolled in classes with the very talented Magdalena Poplawska and had a great time making some of the plaster sculptures below.


        


Hope you like it.
There's a lot more art I did in the last 3 years but I feel like this post is getting absurdly long so I'm going to keep it at this for now :]

Expect more soon.

Cheers, J