Thursday, November 7, 2013

Isometric Landscape Painting

I wanted to do a landscape painting of some kind and couldn't really decide how to go about doing it. After doing some searching on DeviantArt, I found some tutorials on how to do certain maps in an isometric style. I figured that the maps also could be a very high altitude landscape perceptive and could still considered to be a landscape painting.

http://torstan.deviantart.com/art/How-to-draw-isometric-mountains-287677011

This is how hand drawn isometric mountains can look like with no coloring. They look very natural and the have depth to them with the line work. I've already got my mountains inked out with a little color to them but I'll hold off to really work on them until I get the rest of the landscape layout in place first.

http://torstan.deviantart.com/art/How-to-Draw-Forests-295836612

Isometric forests are also really useful to get done right and usually are around water sources and the bases of mountains. I do plan on spending a great deal of time working on the forest part since it requires a lot of finessing of line work to make the forests look just right. Luckily this tutorial will help with that since it looks really cool.

http://torstan.deviantart.com/art/Isometric-Rivers-355148811

Rivers were something that I was able to do with my more overview mapping style that I figured out how to do on my own. However, this method gives a lot of sense of depth to the landscape and can really push out the geographical features. They can also act as a road for the viewer to follow throughout the painting to see everything it has.

http://fxevo.deviantart.com/art/Environment-Studies-316044150?q=favby%3Aobsidianentity%2F46561970&qo=13

I originally got a rock painting technique from him that I tried out and so far I don't really like it but I need to practice more with the technique first before I really cast judgment on it. Anyways, these two paintings this guy did was for environmental studying purposes and I can see a lot of the coloring in both of them is something I'll need to take a look at further when it comes down to the details of my painting. The water crashing against the rocks in the bottom one might be something I can explore later when I get to do finer details.

http://grosnez.deviantart.com/art/Landscape-258641884?q=favby%3Aobsidianentity%2F46561970&qo=56

The line work for the edges, ridges, and spaces between sections of the rock give a lot of depth to the rock surfaces. The grass and moss areas are also something I might have to look at further when doing detail work on coast lines, mountains, hills, and forests to give everything that finished look.

http://joakimolofsson.deviantart.com/art/Landscape-306859402?q=favby%3Aobsidianentity%2F46561970&qo=58

This painting looks sort of isometric in style because of the nature of the mountains, the perception along the ground towards the city and mountains. It looks sort of isometric in that regards so it's a good reference piece for that.

http://joakimolofsson.deviantart.com/art/Landscape-306859461?q=favby%3Aobsidianentity%2F46561970&qo=57

Another isometric-like painting. The rivers move left and right while going towards the center of the painting and towards the mountains. The mountains don't look isometric but it still gives me ideas with colors and is possible that I could grab colors from this painting and from all the above stuff that I've talked about.

All in all, even if I don't have a highly refined or polished up painting to turn in, I will definitely continue working on it long after the class is over. I want to master this style of landscape painting and map creation to further my own goals, such as selling mats to card game players or maps to D&D players.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Great Companies

http://www.valvesoftware.com/

Co-founder Gabe Newell is one of the leading industry's visionaries that puts standards on innovation in gaming and software technology. Valve is a corporation that uses more bandwidth than some entire countries do and is considered to be the 4th largest bandwidth consumer in the world. They are known for their Counter Strike, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, and Portal game series and for their video game distribution software client, that has over 25 different applications on it,called Steam. They are always looking for highly productive and talented individuals to bring innovative ideas to the table. Their corporate business structure is a flat hierarchy horizontally across all departments.

 http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/

Blizzard Entertainment is a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard and has created hit video game series Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft. They were originally did development work in the company's early operation days in game ports for other studios until in 1993 they were able to start developing their own software, acquire other companies, and grow in size to the mega giant corporation that they are today and one of the leading video game developers and publishers in the industry. The latest game that they've created and currently is being tested within closed doors is Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, which I was given an invite to yesterday night, that I would love to create innovative ideas for as a card designer and game tester on behalf of Blizzard Entertainment.