Gravitation

45 minutes.

How Has It Come To This?

More work on The INVOKED.

See more at http://crashnexus.blogspot.com.

There's No Avoiding It...

More work on The INVOKED.

See more over at CRASHNEXUS.

http://crashnexus.blogspot.com

You can see a larger version of this on my DeviantArt page.

The Sparkpoint of the Cataclysm...

Some more work on The INVOKED - one of the upcoming CRASHNEXUS projects.

We'd undoubtedly have a greater output rate if some of you kindly donated a few quid as you can - so go over and plop a tip in our box at http://crashnexus.blogspot.com

A Postcard from The ZONE

A SNIPPET AND IMAGE FROM OUR UPCOMING S.TA.L.K.E.R. GRAPHIC NOVEL SERIAL AT CRASHNEXUS WHERE WE ALSO CURRENTLY HAVE A FREE, ILLUSTRATED SHORT-FICTION DOWNLOAD
LINK

I can see the Zone’s perimeter fence approaching quickly – the old barbed wire stretches around a vast area that holds things I can’t even imagine from the safety of the civilized world I am about to leave behind me. The area around it doesn’t look as abnormal as the rumors about the constantly-changing landscape would suggest; fields of tall grass and rolling hills lead all the way to the perimeter, giving off a peaceful calm as they wave blissfully in the breeze. But there is a change in the air; an overwhelming sense of dread passes over me as I begin to make out small details beyond the barbed wire. Old, abandoned houses, a long, abandoned road whose faded lines and cracks remind me that no vehicles have traveled it on over two decades, and an overgrowth of plants that conceal the rest of the area in mystery.

I can already sense the voice in my head telling me to turn back now or be prepared to never return. The feeling of death and decay is strong around me; even though visually the landscape is lush and overgrown with new plant life since the removal of mankind. But my primal instincts are telling me that this place is death and that I’m walking willingly towards my doom.

Weekend Workshop: Sierra Forlorn

the latest CRASHNEXUS weekend workshop is up / out / in your face. go see by clicking the banner or image below...

character sketches - 1st from reference in alchemy, 2nd a freehand in artrage

building up the piece from the background. quite difficult as i dont normally start with colour, or the background for stuff like this

Weekend Workshop 1st May 2011. “My Own Private Hell”.

Okay, so this week we were going to focus on environmental concepts. What I got as my challenge was a little different, but served the purpose just as well.

“Time for World War 8, soldier! You mission should take no longer the 90 minutes, in that time you will be required to complete the following objectives:


Theme: Dark, contemporary
* Cityscape with ominous undertones
* The Invoked will be manifested in the scene somehow, whether it's hiding in shadows or hallucinated in the sky or building windows.
* The focus will be on the main character and/or what he is doing. The city revolves around him because it is his hell; nobody sees it through his eyes.


That should be enough for parameters, focus on making this a quality piece that might be used over and over for things like, oh say... a comic book cover for instance. ;);)”

I found it surprisingly hard however - after several basic thumbnail sketches, I was finding the idea of drawing a ;’contemporary’ cityscape with detail and a main character to focus on a bit much for 90s minutes work. Possibly just my mindset - who knows. Everything fell into place however when I went onto DeviantArt searching for a stock image to inspire me. I types ‘a quiet street’ into the engine, and lo and beho0ls, the first image I see is a picture I’m all to familiar with - one I would have gone and taken myself had my camera been working: it was a photo of  Stonegate in York. Not only is my one time favourite drinking haunt on the street, but its also a major tourist zone due to the fact it’s the main path to the Minster and its  filled with all sorts of small businesses.

The final image isn't quite what it should be - i ran out of time fiddling with ways to get the right feel of 'night lighting' so it's more of a base concept to build upon later - but I do still rather like it and I know ill be working on it soon.

Let us know yer criticisms if ye can be arsed..



Untitled from Cyrus Crashtest on Vimeo.

see the full image at http://crashnexus.tk

Don’t forget to watch the video, goto the CRASHNEXUS blog to see the final piece and Psynexus’ attached story. LINK
...and also visit Psynexus' own blog to see how the machinations of his mind worked whilst writing the accompanying tale LINK.

ALSO - HERES THE STOCK IMAGE I USED FOR REFERENCE...


A suprisingly quiet street by *ED-resources on deviantART

Weekend Workshop - Easter 2011. The Dark Visitor.

this was a fairly simple affair to begin with - though thanks to tech problems and a little drunken stupidity on my part, it has not been uploaded until now. see the previous posts for details.

anwyays. for this particular challenge, i figured ti would be beneficial for both psynexus and myself to endulge in some character concepting.
he came up with three characters within my given boundaries, i sketched each loosely and rolled with the one i preffered.
you can see what he gave me to work with here LINK

i decided to go with his final idea as it seemed like the most fun to play with, although now i wish id actually gone with the first character on offer as after a week of drawing nothing but shadowy figures, i feel my design here lacks a little lustre. regardless, i hope you enjoy it and the steps in progress for the final piece. ive also included two small thumbnails i threw away in the early stages as they show another direction it may have taken. feel free to comment your thoughts.

The INVOKED 4...

Yet another teaser for a forthcoming treat from myself and Psynexus for our blog visitors.

More news to follow soon. If you are interested in knowing more, make sure to 'follow' the blog - through the variety of means in the sidebar, but also click the facebook 'like' button at the bottom of the post so I know.

The INVOKED 3

Another teaser for a forthcoming treat from myself and Psynexus for our blog visitors.

More news to follow soon. If you are interested in knowing more, make sure to 'follow' the blog - through the variety of means in the sidebar, but also click the facebook 'like' button at the bottom of the post so I know.

The INVOKED 2nd Teaser Poster

Another teaser for a forthcoming treat from myself and Psynexus for our blog visitors.

More news to follow soon. If you are interested in knowing more, make sure to 'follow' the blog - through the variety of means in the sidebar, but also click the facebook 'like' button at the bottom of the post so I know.

The INVOKED...

...a working title for THAT little extra special project I mentioned in a post a few days back. Here's the teaser-poster.
Working in collaberation with Psynexus - LINK
More news to follow soon. If you are interested in knowing more, make sure to 'follow' the blog - through the variety of means in the sidebar, but also click the facebook 'like' button at the bottom of the post so I know.

Weekend Workshop - 10/04/2011 - 'SkyPirates'

okay, so last weekends workshop didnt quite work out - initially because the only way i could implement the initial challenge given to me by psynexus would be to spend a few days piecing together a mighty, intricate and epic utopian deal. after a little haggling, we settled on an alien civilisation amidst their own 'bronze age'. sadly, due to overworking on the computer for about a week, my eyes packed in until midweek and my flow was lost. youll have to see that piece as and when i finish it.

this week, i challenged him to write a piece about skypirates. ive never been much a fan of yer usual pirate affairs - but as a long time miyazaki and final fantasy fan, the idea of swashbuckling from some crazy airship / flying contraption really appeals.
after sending him some source material, relevant screens etc, he got going and sent me something tasty to work with. - you cans see it at his blog; LINK

so, here we have the steps - including all my preliminary drawings. i sourced turner, miyazaki, koijima and plenty photos of old tall ships and world war two aircraft to get the style i wanted for the focal point of the airship.

the tower features brushes by SHIFTY J

and the final piece - its not perfect, but im happy with the composition and basic desing lements - enough that im going to revisit the piece and do a full version when i have time.
full view version available HERE.

Weekend Workshop #3; Next Genesis

heres the results of the 3rd weekend workshop.
i think psynexus definately did better than me this time - this piece needs at least another hours work on it to truly work. still, i did waste an hour looking for a decent reference image of parliament, and in the end ref'd from a bottle of HP SAUCE of all things as it was the only one i could find on the correct angle.

see the story that inspired this at LINK 


features brushes by Shifty J LINK

Weekend Workshop Challenge #2

When I was younger, I never did any form of prep work for anything - I even managed to pass all my exams with only one or two short revision sessions for a single subject - but artwork was something in particular that I wouldn’t make effort to make preliminary sketches etc towards a final piece.

Recently (and partially due to me working almost purely in digital media these days), I have found that I no longer have such a thing as a ‘final piece’. So many unfinished works will later be cut up and reused as a part of another - or returned to with  different eyes following a long hiatus in the belief I had run out of steam.

The recent ‘Weekend Workshop’ challenges I have begun in conjunction with a talented young writer (Psynexus) have confirmed this.  Each week in turn, one of us will suggest a theme and some pinpoint details (enough to allow the other a relatively free reign over the outcome of their work) and then the recipient must produce a piece in around 90 minutes using that as a start point. Next, the other one of us must produce a companion piece based upon the outcome of that. Last week I asked him for something with a medieval setting, and I produced a piece of artwork inspired by his words. This week, it was up to him to suggest to me a theme for artwork, and he would produce some creative writing based upon my artwork.

The original challenge he laid out for me this week, was far too detailed to allow the sporadic nature of the challenges to flow (although I did like his idea a great deal! - an epic scene of alien invasion!), so he gave me another (a more claustrophobic scene of a firefight upon an alien vessel).

It started out great - but I soon realised that this too was to be too complicated  as well, not because of any perimeters he had given me, but because my own lust to create a grand  piece had taken over! I actually began to combine portions of his original suggestion with the second and created a monster! I am still preparing elements towards the beginning of this artwork and hope to complete it in the near future.

So, yet again we were at the beginning… I asked for a fresh start - something of a more scenic based suggestion (rather than action or character driven) and he gave me this:

Earth, 3000 AD. Humanity is dead or dying and all that's left of civilization are the skeletons of major cities that died out hundreds of years ago. Skies are overcast and nature has reclaimed the planet. The moon is fragmented and cracked and the dying sun is a sickly orange as it sets on the dying planet.

...So I quickly got to work. From last weeks challenge, I still had plenty of unused bits and pieces of landscape left over from my sessions on Al:Chemy from last weeks challenge. This really reduced the time I had to use getting a base together for my end of the challenge -90 minutes is not a great deal of time to produce something specific in! In the image below, I grabbed figure #1 from a session last week. I quickly did figure #2 in Al:Chemy in about five minutes, and meshed it together with #1 to produce several variations until I got # 3 and #4. Due to the flow of the lines, I rolled with #4 and managed to piece together  two quick variations of an idea using a couple of simple colour washes, and a photographic texture overlay.

I went for a final upon the second one. I spent ages wasting time trying to figure out where to go with it as I genuinely preferred the black and white crispness of the originals. It didn’t occur to me to just go with a black and white piece!

DUH!

Anyways, I eventually pieced together the broken moon and all that (the moon alone took twenty minutes) leaving me with nearly no time left. AHAH! - this is where yet again the validity of old prep work comes to hand. I dug out an old alchemy session and grabbed some random shapes to create some blowing leaves, and an old space piece for the starry sky. Within minutes it was done - or as near as could be . Basically, this time around, a good amount of old prep work saved me!

Have a look, post a comment, and go see what Psynexus came up with in response at his blog: LINK

I may soon also upload the brushes for the moon etc if anyone is interested - if so, please drop a comment!


FINAL PIECE:

Broken Moon by ~cyrus-crashtest on deviantART

Workshop Weekend Challenge #1

Okay, so here's the deal...

I was thinking of a way to improve my various techniques, including speedpainting. Nobody ever seems to want a game of 'photoshop tennis' with me, so instead I hit upon the idea of giving Psynexus a challenge to expand and exercise his writing skills.

I asked him for 300 words depicting a medieval scene (with a few perimeters to ensure I didn't end up having to stray too much from what I wanted to do) and to use descriptive language without dialogue. To open up things for him, I also maintained that 'medieval' could even be some post-apocalytpic world or other planet - as long as the tech was real low-end.

Heres what he gave me:

The Shifting Sea. 

The main character, a Persian-looking man in white cloth and a turban stands at the edge of a cliff over-looking a shining city surrounded by a sea of sand as the sun sets before him. A scimitar hangs at his hip and his pockets and garb are lined with trinkets from his adventures. A few rogue strands of black hair escape beneath the bottom of his turban, the exposed area on his neck glisten with sweat from the long journey he has just endured.

The city sits in a valley with mountains behind it and endless dunes around it. In the distance, and closer to the foreground, rocky hills hint at ancient ruins carved out of sandstone, waiting to be explored by any who would dare risk their undoubtedly treacherous halls. Conical yellow towers reflect the light of the setting sun, the most prominent belonging to the large palace at the center of the city – which is encircled by a sandstone wall which protects the exposed thee sides of the city and connects to the mountain behind.

The atmosphere is warm and calm, though the shadow cast by the setting sun warns of the onset of a cold, restless night ahead, filled with the cries of hungry beasts who call the desert home. Subtle traces of pink and other exotic colors line the sky like a maiden waving her knight’s colors as he nears his goal. Though there is still much treacherous land to cross before the sun sets, the shining city stands as a beacon of hope for our hero as his adventure for the day comes to a fruitful end.


My part of the challenge from here was to illustrate it as completely as I could in 90 minutes - including preparatory work. I'm used to working quickly, but this would be different.

I can't say I'm massively happy with my end results, there are many flaws, but this is the first of what may be many challenges to come. Next time itshis trun to choose the theme... and I guess I'll be doing a freeform illustration, that he will then have to write about.

You can see more on this from his point of view on his blog! LINK

The Shifting Sea by ~cyrus-crashtest on deviantART

I actually preffered stage 3 of my progress saves, so here it is for you to check!