Tutorial: Patterned Wallpaper

Today I'm gonna show you a quick random wallpaper which you can reproduce very easy.

Time: 20min  
Software: Adobe Illustrator (& Photoshop if you want)
Textures: cgtextures.com

Maybe you remember my isometric landscape tutorial. This is the same pattern and I used it because of the interesting result you get when you use it with colors!

For those who didn't open the link above: how to create the bricks?

1. Draw a square and rotate it to 45 degrees. 
2. Scale it to the half size of the original square. Don't scale it evenly - compress it like in the image below. 
3. Duplicate it to get the basement and pull it down until the lower angle meets the upper angle of those two squares (the lower one is just for orientation you can delete it later like me). 
4. From here you can draw rectangles for the side walls like in the first part of the image below.

Now it's time to choose colors. I wanted to have some bright and crazy colors:
Dark Blue: #000AD4 ; Bright Blue #00E9C4 ; Pink #FF3FC6.

Time to duplicate your brick. Make sure you selected view>snap to point or better view>snap to grid to not to get some distances between your bricks.

If not there is a trick to get your points exactly on the others:
Switch to outline view with pressing strg+y. Mark all points you wanna merge with the anchor tool (press A). Right click an choose average>both. All points are on the same now!

Duplicate groups of bricks and you will get a very nice pattern which you could use as a wallpaper or as a 'material design' like me on a snowboard.
I used this wooden texture to get a bit more structure in my wallpaper. Just play around with the photoshop blending modes of the wooden texture to let it shine through!

How to create a Ghibli Background - Marens way

After a long time posting about my redesign I'll show you a new tutorial!

Time: 4hours  
Software: Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop  
Textures: cgtextures.com

It's about the famous Ghibli House of "Spirited Away" which I recreated in a vintage vector style. Here's the way you can do it on your own:

1. Look for a picture which you want to recreate and build the basic shapes in illustrator.

2. Create the basic shadows and some basic details like windows, doors or stones.

3. Now you have to get more into detail. It is up to you how much time you spend in this part. You can create an abstract background or you can do an absolutely realistic artwork which would look great! For me it is something in between. More abstract than realistic because I am not that patient :-P

4. Let's switch to photoshop for some nice effects and finalization: I decided to give my ghibli background a vintage/wooden look which means some wooden image as an overlay and a vignette are a must have. 

First I was looking for some textures here: www.cgtextures.com and added some grass structure exactly on the grassy part (where you can use the Magic Wand Tool). Cut out the grass where it should be and set the layer blending mode to "hard light".

5. Then I added a wooden texture all above the image and set the layer blending mode to "overlay" as well as the vignette which I painted with a smooth brush at the corners.

That`s it!
You can easily customize this tutorial by using some other textures or more details.
But what you really should keep in mind is to spend time in details when creating a background. You will need a lot of time for this but this is what makes your artwork more professional and beautiful!

Celebrity Fridays - Tyrion Lannister with Background

Do you remember my illustration of Tyrion Lannister (Game of Thrones)?
I pimped him up with a battlefield in the background to give the whole artwork a little bit more life!

Girl loves Pizza

This is an illustration I did for a twitch streamer - she loves pizza...

Beach Wallpaper

After days of storm and rain here in europe some summer holidays would be nice...

Brick Landscape - Guild Wars 2: Mount Maelstrom

I'm playing Guild Wars 2 since release and I made a brick landscape of one of my favourite locations: Mount Maelstrom!

I captured my work - here you can see it in a time lapse.

Basecap girl

Today I was inspired by some really nice comic sketches. I tried to give one of my characters some more comic details, too! This is the result!

Khaleesi and Drogon

It is Saturday again and I've got some time to illustrate one of my favourite characters: Daenerys Targaryen.

Here you can see Khaleesi and her dragon Drogon on a battlefield. Hope you like it!

Lion King inspired tree

I just found this drawing where I tried out my Bamboo Pen & Touch some time ago.

African brick landscape

I had some fun while building another brick landscape!

Friday the 13th Photoshop Experiments

Here you can see some photoshop experiments of my Friday the 13th and Fullmoon artwork. Which one do you like most?

Brick Landscape Tutorial - Minecraft style

In this tutorial I'll show you how to create a brick landscape fast and easy.

First step: Create the bricks.

1. Draw a square and rotate it to 45 degrees. 
2. Scale it to the half size of the original square. Don't scale it evenly - compress it like in the images. 
3. Duplicate it to get the basement and pull it to the lower angle of your first square.
4. Create some rectangles for the side walls.

This is your brick which will be your initial object for everything else you create. 

Second Step: Make the bricks unique.

1. Add some details like little stones or grass.
2. Create 3-4 different bricks of a kind to make your final landscape look random.
3. Add some shadows. Your final image will look more 3-dimensional.

That's it! Now you can start to build your landscape. My landscape will be a snowy mountain with a vale full of fir trees. 

It will take a time until you can copy a group of bricks to another place to go on faster. It's a bit like building with lego bricks or building in Minecraft - I like it!

Here you can see my final landscape. I did some photoshop actions later to get some more atmosphere!

How to animate Khaleesi in 3 Steps: #2 Preparing Khaleesi for animation

Before we are able to animate Khaleesi we have to do some arrangements.

This step is very important: If you prepare her well you will have a more beautiful animation and the procedure will take less time - If you work unclean in this step it will take much time to balance it in the next step.

First thing to do is to import our character separations into an animation tool ( In this case I use Adobe After Effects. It includes all things I need and it's an easy and fast tool. ). Then we have to order the separations from back to front in the layer section - the arm in the back shouldn't be in front of the head ( I think that's clear ).

Please name your layers and separations it will save time for the next steps because you don't lose track of it!

When we finished ordering we have to subordinate all parts of the body. Braid depends on head - lower arm depends on upper arm and so on. If you use After Effects you can drag this little spiral from the hand object to the lower arm object. It is really easy and fast and you don't need any bone tools.

Now we are ready for the last step of preparing Khaleesi: All the pivot points have to be moved to their correct position. We will rotate the lower arm around the elbow and not around the center. So look at my example and try out which pivot point positions will work for you.
While rotating make sure that there are don't appear any edges or something. If you try out you will see what I mean! If it isn't possible to get a perfect rotation with no ugly edges don't panic. I will show you how to retouch this in the next step. 

If you're done you are ready to animate Khaleesi! So stay tuned for the next part: Animate Khaleesi.

El Don Fail mit Hintergrund

"Gib deinen Figuren mal etwas Hintergrund, das würde sicher viel ausmachen!" - Et voilà! :)

Tyrion Lannister

Mein erster Versuch einen Menschen nachzubauen: Tyrion Lannister!

In meinem vorhergehenden Post findet ihr das Making-Of!