Tabla de contenidos para May 2023 en ImagineFX

Welcome to the latest issue of ImagineFX. This month we have a vast range of content for you, covering areas from traditional illustration through the digital, and work done for Hollywood blockbusters. We invited community favourite Daryl Mandryk to illustrate our cover, as well as produce a wonderful workshop outlining his process. Head over to page 62 to discover how to paint your own concept characters using Photoshop. If you’ve ever wondered how designs make it to the big screen, then we have you covered. Deak Ferrand shares his thoughts and experiences working on Blade Runner 2049 and Dune among many others, creating some of the most epic and recognisable designs in cinema. Then we also have a fantastic feature, looking at Framestore and how their concept artwork shaped the…

INSTRUCTOR: JON NEIMEISTER STUDENT: ELIJAH BOOR https://visualartspassage.com Visual Arts Passage offers online courses taught by working artists from top studios. The big difference is that rather than having pre-recorded tutorials to work through in your own time, this academy works on a schedule and lessons are live. If you follow one of the Visual Arts Passage mentorship programmes, the idea is that they’ll whip you into shape in just 12 months and you’ll be ready to start work as a professional artist. Courses teach technical skills and the industry know-how you need to win work, and come the end of the programme you'll have a portfolio you can use to start your career. There are three tracks: character design, illustration and commercial gallery art. Once you’ve picked your track, enrolment…

www.proko.com/course/drawing-basics/overview For those at the start of their journey, Proko’s online Drawing Basics course by Stan Prokopenko offers a good grounding in the fundamental principles you’ll need to learn drawing. The course begins with lessons on line quality and looks at breaking objects down into simple shapes, before moving on to perspective, colour values, and study of how the edges in your drawings can make them more dynamic and exciting. Maintaining momentum is always a challenge for beginners, so this course is designed and paced to help you stay motivated and engaged with the exercises. The Proko website has a community section where you can post your drawings to get feedback, and the tutor incorporates critiques of student work into the lessons so you can get a sense of how…

I live and work in Saint-Étienne, France. I bought two little old shops right next to each other, one to live in and one to work in! It’s the best commute ever. The shops are about 200 years old, and I’ve been renovating them myself. My work studio was a little gun engraving workshop in the 1870s, and as I rebuilt it, I found all sorts of rifle and shotgun parts scattered about the place in cracks and crevices. I love that an artisan was also here over 150 years ago, decorating rifles, and now I sit drawing sci-fi laser blasters. I tore all the fake walls and ceilings off my shop and exposed the original stone walls and wooden ceilings, so it became a functional, stripped-down space, and then…

“All of my art starts as a vague idea. I like to improvise while I draw the line-art to keep the freshness of this idea. After finishing the line-art I move to the colouring phase, which is unconstrained as well. I start by painting element by element. For example, in this piece I started with the restaurant, continued with the elements that are near it, then painted the sea and the mountains in the distance. After I change the colour of the line-art from black to light brown and set it to Colour Burn, I use Linear Burn for the shadows. Characters are added in a different layer like in 2D animations, then everything is colour corrected in Adobe Lightroom. My secret to a rich background is just to look…

Artist PROFILE Bernie Walsh LOCATION: Australia Bernie is a design specialist who has worked mainly in the transport industry, designing a host of vehicles for road, rails and the water. He is passionate about digital design, sketching and creative thinking. https://bit.ly/3EuScAj This workshop comes from my entry into the Agorapode AGPContest, which is a monthly car design concept art challenge run mainly on Instagram. The organisers give you three prompt words to create your vehicle from; in this case they were ‘snow’, ‘coupe’ and ‘retro’. The competition is judged on creativity, the design and the final presentation, plus how well you stick to the given themes. And at the end of this one, it was my design that came out the winner! For anyone who wants to work on their…

STUDENT GROUP PROJECT www.pearsoncollegelondon.ac.uk/escape-studios.html Established to address the talent shortage in the entertainment art industry, Escape Studios’ mission is to produce graduates with skill sets tailored for working at top VFX facilities, animation studios and video game companies. The key point about this academy is that they work closely with some of the biggest names within the entertainment business to ensure that their ‘Escapees’ are trained in exactly the skills that are currently required by the industry. The idea is that after completing your course, you can get straight to work in an entry-level role and be of real value to your employer from day one. Escape Studios offers undergraduate, postgraduate and short courses in animation, games, visual effects and motion graphics. The short courses can be studied either full-time…

GRADUATE: DANIEL SANDERS www.southessex.ac.uk/course/digital-animation-ba-hons GRADUATE: DANIEL SANDERS For those looking for a traditional university experience, the Digital Animation degree at University Centre South Essex is a three-year undergraduate course that equips you with a well-rounded skill set for working as an animator. From the outset, this course gives you lots of opportunities to get practical experience via work placements, field trips, and the chance to work on live projects with external clients. You’ll learn core animation principles such as visual grammar, concept development, narrative animation and character performance, as well as how to use the main animation software packages used in the industry today. GRADUATE: DANIEL SANDERS Beyond this, you’ll also learn a host of ancillary abilities that will help you to keep your career options open, such as script and…

Contact the editor, Rob Redman, on mail@imaginefx.com or write to ImagineFX, Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA, England Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/imaginefx Find us on Facebook: facebook.com/imaginefx Share your artwork via #imaginefx: instagram.com/imaginefxmagazine Sketch love Good morning ImagineFX. I’m writing to say well done. Recently you seem to have covered more in the way of sketches and line work, which I truly appreciate. Line work has been a big struggle for me and I have never been confident in this, so being able to look at so many high-quality images in the magazine has been a huge help. Seeing a line-art cover was great too, and really inspired me to push through and keep working on my own projects. Please keep showcasing the sketchbooks and line…

There’s a rich and deep visual tradition for filmmakers to tap into when they approach an adaptation of a comic book. For Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the world of Marvel’s Doctor Strange comic heritage, and the established visual style of the character’s first eponymous feature film (2016) provided opportunities to both honour the legacy and strike out to create new images and forms. A fusion of genres – fantasy, horror, and time travel – as it progresses, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness becomes increasingly Gothic and horror-styled, and has a visual energy that might be familiar from other Sam Raimi movies; notably The Evil Dead and his Spider-Man films. Fundamental to the work required to mount a lavishly resourced comic book movie like Doctor Strange…

Artist PROFILE Olga “AsuRocks” Andriyenko LOCATION: Germany Olga is a freelance story and visual development artist working for games, animation and comics. She loves drawing stories and feelings. https://asurocks.art GET YOUR RESOURCES See page 5 now! There is a lot to consider when drawing a group of characters. But before getting lost within anatomy, character design and fashion choices, I focus on the story that I want to tell. For this illustration I want to picture a lively moment of witches sharing a broom ride. I like to add some humour to my work, so I often look for inspiration in mundane, everyday moments and apply it to magical situations. Who doesn’t have a memory of squeezing into a tiny car with too many people? How would this play out…

“I often start my process by creating a sheet of very loose line drawings in order to get a sense of what may or may not work. From there, I try to visualise which compositions have the potential to become good illustrations, then I develop them a bit further to create some black and white thumbnails. These are the sketches I then send off to the client. Once one of them is approved, I begin to work on more complex line art to serve as a guide for my first brushstrokes. Over time, these are gradually developed into shapes of colour and shadows.” Artist PROFILE Filipe Pagliuso LOCATION: Brazil Filipe is a predominantly self-taught artist with more than 10 years of professional experience to his name as an illustrator. His…

LOCATION: Taiwan MEDIA: Photoshop WEB: www.nnoo007.com Skyfire is a Taiwan-based illustrator and character designer. They are best known for their Taiwan Office Lady series, which depicts the day-to-day lives of white-collar workers on the island. 1 CARROT... “The person on the left is blowing on the hot dumplings, while the person on the right is picking out shredded carrots they don’t want in their noodles.” 2 DOUBLE D-RING BUCKLES “There are loads of scooters on the roads in Taiwan. Those who care about safety use the troublesome double D-ring buckle instead of the plastic alternative.” 3 BORING TIME “Red lights in Taipei hold up motorcyclists for 99 seconds. It’s much more comfortable for the riders to rest their feet on the sidewalk while they wait for them to change.”…

INSTRUCTOR: DAVE DORMAN INSTRUCTOR: APRIL CONNORS INSTRUCTOR: JANA SCHIRMER www.thegnomonworkshop.com Not everyone has the chance to move to a big city to attend a top art school, so it’s a good thing that there are online learning opportunities that can give you a world-class education no matter where you are. The Gnomon Workshop is the online offshoot of the prestigious Hollywood Gnomon School, established in 2000 to offer top-level VFX, games and animation training globally. The Gnomon Workshop operates via a subscription model that can be paid monthly ($54) or annually ($499). Your fee gets you access to more than 300 lectures, or over 1,000 hours of training covering the full animation and VFX pipeline, with project files available for many lessons. You can work through the tutorials at your…

“If I’ve got an intense schedule, I’m up at 6am. Before I can even see, I’m checking emails. My dog is part cattle dog, so she herds me out the front door. I go to Starbucks because I’m a spoiled millennial who will never be able to afford a house due to my coffee intake. Then I stretch because sitting at a desk has destroyed my back. I get all of the un-fun stuff done first – emails, notes, scheduling – then I shift gears. I need the creative equivalent of coffee, so I’ll watch something with choreography like K-pop, check out websites of artists I love, and so on. I try to do lunch at noon. If I’m having a stressful day, I’ll go on a short hike or…

“I need somebody to tell me the story. I want to project the emotion and I believe you can do that if you put yourself in that mood for two days.” Along with the many talents that have seen him employed as a concept artist, matte painter and art director on major projects such as Blade Runner 2049, Dune and The Sandman, Deak Ferrand has developed an interesting workaround when it comes to ZBrush as he literally creates clay sculptures. “For Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, I was asked to design a few creatures and I’m not good at ZBrush. That’s a problem. You have to be good at so many different methods of creating an object. “Artifices are fine but sculpting in ZBrush to the level of other…

“Pillars is a fully 3D scene running in Unreal Engine. It’s built to resemble a traditional painting more than a game environment, so I crafted it with a single viewing angle in mind. This was a big time saver and allowed me to nail the composition and lighting. I opted to not use the Lumen system here, and instead the lighting was achieved with a directional light, fill lights to fake global illumination, and traditional fog cards. The pillars of rock and the terrain are hand-sculpted for maximum control over the shapes, and supported by scanned Heightmaps for a realistic result. I textured the rock features in Substance Painter, but the terrain uses a landscape-style material with tiling textures applied using Vertex Colors.” Artist PROFILE Toivo Huhtaniska LOCATION: Finland Toivo…

My Cosmic Perspective series is about celebrating a meaningful connection to the natural world through science. For A Galaxy Within, I wanted to make an image that conveys the complexity of biology by illustrating that the human brain has about as many neurons as there are stars in a typical galaxy. From the beginning, I knew that I was working with the imagery of galaxies and heads or brains. I decided that the exploded or disintegrating feeling of this configuration was particularly interesting, while also expressing something of the overwhelming exercise that is trying to comprehend large numbers, such as 100 billion stars or neurons. I made sure to use the galaxy to provide a sweeping S-curve that lends a sense of movement to the composition, and went to work…