Post summer Update!

Just as an introductory note, I got my Deviantart back up and running at PRASTSHACKER.

Also, Tourism Vancouver or uh, Inside Vancouver did an interview of me and that's up right now.

Over the summer I went to work on producing some stickers to give away at Vancouver's Anime Evolution. The ones I produced were from Valve Software's popular videogame, Team Fortress 2. The whole set was completed as of last August on the eve of the convention. The series of images were a style I discovered when I started producing them in my spare time from mid 2008, the first of which after socializing with a friend over a videogame imageboard.

The style I originally had in mind with was similar to the sort of MSPaint comics that imageboard is known for. I made the first image in 2008 with MSPaint based on the Scout. I felt like making it deliberately messy and with a very rigid and blocky shape to reference the swift and sharp wit of the character with the dynamic perspective of the image to showcase his agility. However I found the outcome in colouring awfully time consuming so instead I decided to finish it in photoshop.

Which was pretty cool and alot of people really liked it. Originally it was just the Scout but people wanted to see more and so, a few months later i produced the spy, with his pose similar to a photo of that of W.T. Snacks as an in joke. This time going for a more darker image in contrast to the scout because the spy IS MYSTERY.

While this was really good in its own right, I later on felt the relative realism in the face didnt really fit the context of the characters. Yet in May 2009, I completed the Pyro. This time, opting to leave much of the preliminary sketches on the image to replicate the chaotic nature of the character themself.

Another big change was the colouring, which was full on produced in photoshop CS4 with Gradients and some liberal application of brushwork.
After that, it wasn't really until this past June did begin work on producing the next ones, actually starting with the Demoman in July.

Which I decided to impliment a cleaner lineart form in Sai instead of MSPaint, ofcourse losing the aesthetic appeal of being made in the program, but really who cares lol. On top of that, I expanded on the precedent of the pyro and made the colouring more painterly to complement the gradients. This was also the first to use a dramatic background which I felt needed the flair as the character had no "words" in the background, only the smug expression of drunken godliness. Then in July I produced the Heavy

Keeping it largely gradient-work to stay in line with the older works. Several revisions were made to create a believable stance from this perspective and even now I feel I could've done better. Live and learn, I suppose. I placed him on a capture point eating a sandvich, really to play up some of the cartoony aspects of the game.

One of the most recent and favoured of the classes that I've produced is the Sniper. At Anime Evolution, it was the only sticker that sold out. That says alot to aspects in the image which I need to replicate in the future for aesthetic and business reasons.

The image combined many of the characteristics of prior images in the series. I gave it a slight background to tone down the whiteness of it (drowning out the image) and produced props for the image as well, borrowing from the heavy as setting produces a narrative that can evoke humour or in this image, tension. I feel it was the addition of narrative that made it so desirable and eyecatching, it seemed like something greater outside of the sticker was going on.
In my opinion, the process in creating the stickers shows a pretty distinct growth in my technical abilities between 2008 and this summer. Given the success my friends had selling fanart material based off of various game franchises, I decided to continue producing stickers for various franchises for art events and conventions to come.

In that, seeing how a bright and cartoony palatte was used for the Team Fortress 2 series, I figured that perhaps I'd produce the stickers with colouring schemes that fit the aethestic of the source material best. The first work I've produced since Anime Evolution in light of that is for the Ukrainian Survival Action title, S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl.


Featured is a Bloodsucker, an iconic monster from the title. Not only is this relatively more detailed, but i feel it represents the feel of the game I derived it from. Entirely made in Sai.

Other than that, that's been one of the larger projects I've personally undertaken/continued over the summer. At this moment I'm beginning classes again on the path to recieving a 2nd bachelors degree from Emily Carr and should be done with that by mid 2012.

Making the NOT★COPS poster

I've been really busy these past few months and thus I haven't really the time I'd like to have to update this blog, haha. For now I'll just post about how I made the official poster for NOTCOPS. One of the key inspirations for it, as it is a film poster, was how hollywood movie posters would advertise their products and attract attention. It was the works of Drew Struzan that appealed to me in how they framed their main characters and plot devices in the image.













So with that in mind I attempted my first experiments in the poster last March. They all lacked a sort of impact that really made the viewer explore the image or get excited over. More over it was flat.

With the help of some colleagues and friends I had identified several things I must do to create a visually arresting poster including using the colour pallete to establish depth and bring focus to the characters and to avoid making things too "centred" because it creates a static image and takes away from the dynamism that my film embodies. Things that I had realized in the process of making the posters was that I needed to communicate the relationships between the characters in the film. One thing Chris Williams (Glago's Guest, Bolt) once told me was that it was to crucial to establish the conflicts and relationships between the characters in the film.
Even though Officer Lee is a critical "Zenigata" styled character in the grander story, He doesn't fill an large enough role in the debut NOT★COPS film to feature in the poster as he departs early in the film without having his character as fleshed out as the others are. As both Inspector Prat and Officer Goodson are as obsessed with their image and more intent on making their "real" cop personas into reality, they don't acknowledge the robot's existence until it gets the way of their hotdog snack-a-thon. To make a point in the fact they are actually not cops, Prat is shown without his revolver, instead fashioning his hand as a pistol much like a kid playing cops and robbers would do. Because of this, in the poster, they are intentionally shown in centre stage posing in a manner that would indicate their inflated egos with their backs to the robot, which is shown in the far background in the upper left corner (its back turned too as it's more intent on destroying the city until it identifies the NOT COPS as a viable threat later in the short) bleeding over the edges of the poster creating a visual tension while blending into the scenery of a near-future Yaletown. The creation of the city of Vanhattan, as it's a future vision of Vancouver crossed with the density and size of New York, involved much research into the future developments in the city of Vancouver. Not only are there buildings to have yet be built in the film, but also historic ones that were demolished or proposals that never were approved. Featured in this poster in particular are two buildings that have yet to be built in Vancouver: The Mark and The Rolston






















Shown below is a visual guide to the character relationships (in green).

Also, in this image I've highlighted the NOTCOPS, logo in red and everything else in blue. Following on prior advice, I had first started painting the image by doing a red wash on the characters and a blue wash on the robot and background to establish the depth before going on to finish the painting. I was careful to make sure the characters stay relatively warm to bring them to the forefront and thus be the first thing the viewer focuses on and leave the background relatively cool so that the detail in the city does not make the image confusing. Eventually I landed with the image as you see at the top of this blog entry (also note the intended blue space around the logo to accommodate additional text and logos). Either way, that's that and to cap it all off, i'll finish with the inking, inking being my favourite and more time consuming part of the process.

New life drawing + art from this past fall, winter.

Did a sketchbook warm-up and had this handily available. Perhaps headed to the Leonardo Da Vinci show at the Vancouver Art Gallery today or tomorrow. Below are a collection of works I've done in the latter half of 2009. Including two digital paintings and a an ink drawing of a "Land Shark", a set of creatures/species created by Jessie Niessink that inspired me to create my own. One of the two paintings include a creature I created to fit into the nuclear post-apocalyptic environment of Pripyat, the abandoned Soviet city nearby the Chernobyl accident site.

Life Drawing - I

1:Lawrence
Watercolour
60 minutes

2:Single line contour - right
6B Pencil
30 minutes
&
Woman with sphere - left
HB Pencil
20 minutes

3:Woman on stool
Conte
10 minutes



4:Woman standing
Chalk Pastel
5 minutes

5:Woman laying
HB Pencil
30 minutes

A comic

One thing I've always wanted to do was publish a comic series based on a zombie apocalypse, not entirely based on gore and typical tropes of the genre but really focusing on the collapse of society. I dunno, it was a thought and i have full intentions to one day actually do something like that. If you are wondering about the dialog, well:

Dr. Konstantin Raudive published a book titled Breakthrough (1971) which was the collection of his works into EVP (electronic voice phenomena). What he did was leave a microphone in a soundless room and hit record. He later came back, picked up the microphone and analyzed the tape where upon review, revealed sporadic and faintly perceptible auditory events that, once slowed down and scrutinized, revealed themselves to be messages from the realm of the dead. Over a four-year period he recorded over 72,000 voices speaking in various European languages making blunt, imperative statements alluding frequently, repetitiously to sleeping and believing and reporting on the mundane conditions of the afterlife. The transcripts read as a series of non-sequiturs with little insight, information or visual description of the ethereal. What the characters above are saying is dialog recorded from Raudive's research.

A NEW PAGE

I feel it's probably fitting to start this off on three parts of a 6 image series I made on the Aztec creation myth. As this is sort of a new chapter in a way. These images, albeit of my own design and drawings were made with the inking assistance of Jessica Niessink.




Either way
I figure it's about time I made a serious art blog or something since Emily Carr will shut off support to my directory/website on their database once I graduate. lol

Here it is: http://www.ecuad.ca/~srichter/