Heavy Gandalf (Lord of the Rings)

Ghibli Pixel Characters

Yesterday evening I had some fun with this lovely pixel characters.
Do you know them all?

Preview: My next post will be about 'material design'... I got up that early today just because of this idea :D Stay tuned if you wanna know what this will be!

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!

Celebrity Fridays - Ragnar Lodbrok (Vikings)

Today I will show you something very special I made for someone special. This is Ragnar Lodbrok from a TV series called Vikings which I just started to watch! You should have a look it's worth a try!

Girl loves Pizza

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

Celebrity Fridays - Michonne - The Walking Dead

A friend said he wants me to illustrate Michonne from The Walking Dead. And here she is!

Skiing sketch

While watching the snow falling outside I was sketching how people look like the first time skiing :D

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Phil Fruitfly 2D Animation

Some of you know this guy, some of you not. I found this old character animation somewhere in my data backups and I want to share it with all of you!

Merry Christmas

I wish you all a very merry christmas time! Hope your presents will come in like this one in my illustration. Wouldn't it be great? :D

Sherlock Holmes inspired illustration

I tried to get a 'modern-old-sherlock-holmes' atmosphere with flat vector graphics and colors of movies like Jack the ripper. This is the result!

St Nicholas' Day

Nicholas' doing a selfie in front of the children's boots - it's St Nicholas' Day in germany!
Hope you all have had some sweets in front of the door? ;-)

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!

Celebrity Mondays - Sleeping Beauty

Today I want to show you one of my favourite fables - Sleeping Beauty. But not the way everyone thinks she looks like - in my illustration she's just a natural woman. Sleeping.

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!

How to create an autumn atmosphere

Today it is a really dismal Saturday. Perfect to create a beautiful illustration with the positive sides of autumn. 

Prepare yourself for gaussian blurs. And gaussian blurs. And gaussian blurs...

This is the image which will get an autumn atmosphere.

 

Duplicate this image in photoshop and use filter>blur>gaussian blur. Set this layers settings to soft light. 

Create a colored layer - for example #f2cc8a - and erase the objects in the shadow. In my image it's the tree, the ground and the bench. This layer should have an opacity about 40%.

 

Add a nice vignette with a dark autumn brown color like #381706 and set the opacity to 63%.

 

For more drama I darkened the bottom of my image again.
My next step was to brighten the objects a little bit where the sun brightens them. Take a soft brush and color the edges white. Make sure that this is really smooth with another gaussian blur effect!
To get more red colors in my picture I added an adjustment layer with the option selective color. Check out the settings in the following image.

Now we have to generate atmosphere. COLORS!!! Add another adjustment layer with the option color balance. Settings are shown in the next image.

 

It looks lovely now but we want more! Group all what we've done and merge this group to one layer.
Duplicate this one and use another gaussian blur. Deselect the objects which have to me sharp with a mask like the child oder the bench oder the tree.
Create another adjustment layer which depends on your gaussian layer with the option hue/saturation and use the following settings.

 

Last but not least add another adjustment layer with the option exposure to get a bit more light.

 

That's it, have a look at my final image. I love it :)

Celebrity Mondays - Wolverine

Have fun with my new celebrity: Wolverine.  

Jon Snow and Ygritte

Because I love Game of Thrones you can have a look at another fanart now.

Today morning i woke up and started creating a video. 4 Hours later - which means now - I got a really cool result. Hope you like it :)

How to draw Sir Manfried #1

This is my first time drawing a digital character and I want to share my experiences, tips and hints.

A few days ago I saw a great artwork of Hearthstone and I just wanted to draw like this! I know nothing about drawing characters digitally but I want to get to know.
Therefore I started to scribble my new character Sir Manfried in Adobe Photoshop. After that I added more details and created the final outlines.

Tips & Hints:

• Start with a really rough concept and get more detailed by adding multiple layers and drawing above your scribbles. Picture 1
• Mirror your drawing. This will help to see unbeautiful areas which you didn't notice before. Picture 2
• Draw your final lines quickly. Don't try to trace your scribbles slowly and exactly because you'll get blurred lines *dance* - just erase the overcoming line-endings. Picture 3
• There is a great tool called "rotate view tool" in Photoshop which you can activate with "R". With this you can rotate your drawing instead of your tablet or body or head or whatever you tried before :D Picture 4

Before I forget...:
I used my Wacom Bamboo Pen and there are no special brushes except for the standard brush with pressure sensitivity.
Next time I'll add the basic colours and shadows to Sir Manfried. Stay tuned!

How to animate Khaleesi in 3 Steps: #3 Animate Khaleesi

As a beginner it is not easy to animate a human character. There are some important things which make a human walk cycle human like a delay of the hand while swinging the arm.

Look for an example in the web to get some help. Just search for "runcycle" with google images and take the one which you like most. 

This is the example I use for Khaleesi:

As a result I get 13 steps. 1-7 is the first step with the first foot and 8-13 the second step with the second foot. There are not 14 steps because the 14th and the first are the same.

How exactly do I animate with After Effects?

I'm not doing anything special I just take my prepared Khaleesi and rotate every part of her body to look like the first pose in the image. Than I set a keyframe on every part of the body and position the parts of her body like the second pose and so on.

I know from experience that it is not bad to do a kind of loop while animating.

1. My first loop is to position arms and legs.
2. Second loop is to give the character the correct vertical position in every step.
3. Last loop is to do some details like delays of hands or the swinging braid of Khaleesi.

Here you can see my animation process with some hints. 

And here you can see my final run cycle of Khaleesi. 

One last thing which I mentioned in the last posts: 

If you have some ugly edges like the one in the following images you can simply retouch it. Just duplicate the object which troubles you. Use it as a mask and mask your object at the poses it doesn't look good. 

Links:

Part 1: Creating Khaleesi

Part 2: Preparing Khaleesi for animation

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.