Lunch-Break Portrait Studies #1

I'm trying to make use of every spare moment I have to try and push my artwork just a bit more. So during the end of my lunch-breaks I've dedicated about 30 minutes a day to just trying to work on portraits as rendering faces is something of a weak area.

And because I had some spare screenshots I also made a quick progress GIF in case people would like to see the process.

I'll definitely be doing more, but I may just post a select few on here. You can be sure to see them all as I make them over on my Twitter: HERE

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Spanish Conquistador

After doing some fantasy based character design for other IP's I decided I wanted to do something that was more grounded in reality. I chose to do some sort of historical character, and after looking up the history of Spanish Conquistadors I found something I really wanted to work on. See, with Conquistadors a lot of them were just poor spaniards who didn't have a full set of armour, but didn't really need it either. they had been fighting the native South Americans for decades and found that much of a 'full' set of armour was essentially useless, what with the highest technological weapon the natives had being clubs. Metal armour was just too strong for the natives, and too heavy for the invaders. And so I conceived a character that had been fighting for many, many years to conquer these foreign lands, but had just grown tired of it. I didn't want him to have much armour, maybe just a breastplate, and for them to look confident, but perhaps also tired. I b...

Creating the Donkestra.

I decided it had been a while since I created a ' Monster Hunter ' creature, and an accompanying armour set. And with Monster Hunter: Worlds recent release and success, I figured now would be a good time to begin work on a creature design I had had in my head for a while. (For this blog post I will be focusing entirely on the Donkestra creature design. If you'd like to see how the armour was made you can find the joint blog post here: Donkestra Armour Blog ) So before we begin, let's start at the end. Here is the final design: The Donkestra is a gliding reptile with heavy influences from mammals and birds. It uses skin flaps to glide across the land, whilst its spines and reinforced skull help defend it from predators and hunt down prey. Its hooked tail allows it to both hang upside down as it rests, and to quickly adjust its course mid-flight But originally I had not inteded the creature to work in this manner at all. I had begun work on this thinking...

Armour Studies & Material Spheres

I decided to spend some of my spare time the last few weeks doing some armour studies. This had initially started as just a bit of practice on the side, but after some really positive feedback and some requests for a tutorial I ended up making an entire collection of texture spheres and cleaned up a lot of the studies so people could better understand how to paint these types of things too. Firstly we have the finished studies themselves. I had tried gathering a few different types of armour specifically to understand both their design, and their material properties, so we have things from clean plate mail to tanned leather and rusted metal. These took some time on their own, but I then decided to create material spheres for as select few textures. For those of you who haven't come across material spheres before, they are used as a way of studying and showing how light works on various types of textures, it gives you all the variables of having a strong focal li...

Sam Santala - Concept Artist | Illustrator

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