Holiday tea time.

It's that time of the year again. The time for good food, good company and quiet reflection. Whether  this time for you is about faith, tradition or fun I wish all of you the joys of the season and the warmth of friendship and love.

More Sugar

Here is another sugar rush racer. This time it's for my good friend Jennie Faber, one of the founders of DMG. Jennie shared with me that she loves carnival treats and that ' the more disturbingly colourful the better'.

As you can all see, I have obliged.

Edit: Decided to give the candy apple a little nibble.

Punny T-Shirts

So I've been doing some t-shirt designs for Tag Apparel. Be sure to read the descriptions. They're pun-tastic. You can buy these masterpieces of apparel at:

http://www.redbubble.com/people/tagapparel/portfolio

This one is entitled 'sasquats'.  Perfect for the gym going folk and mythical creatures.

This one is entitled 'Papa-razzi'. Just did the sketch for this one and Tom cleaned and coloured it. You can see the finished tee here. 

Last but not least we have 'Gundam style'. Will the puns ever stop? No, no they won't. This one was a back and forth in terms of work. I did the sketch and cleanup, then Tom tweaked it a bit and finished it off with colour. 

Open for business.

I had a lot of fun working on my sugar racer and I've decided to open up commissions for you lovely folks.

Get yourself, a friend or a family member turned into your very own adorable little speed devil for $50.

Leave me a comment or email me at yuliya.boublikova@gmail.com if you're interested.

If you'd like to commission me for another project please email me to discuss details and rates.

Suger Racer process

I've been told I don't show my process enough so I forced myself to keep track of my steps for this piece.

                               

 I started off with a rough sketch. At this point I'm not worrying about the details. First I established the the line of action for the body, which is a nice strong c shape. It may be a still image but it still needs to convey a sense of energy and movement. I roughed out the main shapes of the body around the line of action next. I also made sure to look at some reference images for the Wreck-It Ralph suger rush racers to get the style right.

 I'm not doing a background for this character so I've done a medium gray colour fill to avoid working with a white base. Next I went in with a hard and opaque brush on new layer and filled in the base colours, I'm not doing a black outline for this character so I used  darker skin colour to define the various elements on the character such as the eyes, nose, lips etc. 

Next come the shadows because there can be no light without darkness...Right then, I use complimentary colours for the softer shadows and contrasting purples/blues for the darker ones.

I'm also making sure that I blend the different values on the face as I go along. I find that you can be a bit looser with the blending in other parts of the image but the face needs to be polished as it's the first thing the viewer will be looking at.

I found a fantastic high res wafer texture on the the internet that I skewed to match the perspective of the character. I then painted over it to get the right lighting and matching brush strokes.

I did the same thing for the goggles. I found a photo of a winto-o-green lifesaver, skewed it to get the perspective, then painted over it it fix the lighting and colour.

I added a suger texture to the jacket and cuffs and painted in the chocolate buttons. I've also been refining and adding shadows as I go along. 

Almost done. At this point it's a good idea to get some more feedback on your image. A fresh eye can spot mistakes more quickly. I asked Leisha-Marie Riddel to take a look at my image and she made me some visual notes about pushing the value contrasts even further to really make the image 3D. She also shared her photoshop wizardry skills with me along the way. 

Aaaaand done. At this point I'm happy with how everything looks. I could have worked on it more but it felt like a good place to stop. 

Suger Rush

Based on the Suger Rush racers from Wreck-It Ralph. I've seen a lot of artists making these since the movie came out and decided it would be a fun way to practice my character painting skills.

I present to you my suger rush self, Jujulia Bonbonlikova.

Heh?

So you're probably all wondering what I've been up to lately. Lots of things. Can I show you? Not yet, but soon my lovlies. Soon all will be made clear.

In the meantime have some full frontal zombie nudity and a spicy granny that I made for a No Jam game. 

It's a fish! It's a submarine! No, It's Aquaman.

So this was supposed to be for the superhero challenge on a bi-weekly painting blog some classmates and I were part off.  The idea was to take a superhero and make them a high fantasy character.

The Lady

A grayscale painting I did for a daily painting blog. I dislike working in monochrome even though I know it's good for figuring out tones and values. I just love colour too much.

That being said, I'm happy with how this turned out. I was going to go in and add colour but I might just leave it alone this time.

Mobile Game Test

Here is a part from my art test for a mobile game studio. 

Faaaaaace

Just a dude. Staring at you all creepy like.

It's over....for now.

So I finished the first incarnation of my platform game Golden Fall. Sit tight while I figure out how to actually upload it to the interwebs or at least make it playable for non mac users.

To those who do have a mac feel free to download and let me know your thoughts and feels.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4980302/Golden_Fall_update.zip

In the meantime have some more art.

another game asset.

Here's another animation from my upcoming platform game Golden Fall. It's almost done now! Or at least the first incarnation of it is.

Runnin'

This month I've been participating in the Jeuxly incubator for new female game developers at Bento Miso. I'm making a platform video game about a squirrel that steals golden apples from a forbidden tree guarded by robin soldiers and a giant snake.

Excited yet? I know I am.

Here are two animated sprites from my game so far.

More to come soon!

Hot Temper

Dur Hur, you see what I did there with the title?? Get it, get it? Aren't I a clever clogs.

Approx: 1 1/2 hours

Robin Sentinel

I've always thought that robins look like little guards. They way they'll run and then stand really straight with their red chest puffed out proudly. They also have a very mistrustful look in their eyes.

 Robin Sketches from photos and life. Also starting to experiment with making them into characters.

 Closer study of a robins upper body, more experimentation with stylizing them. 

 Character Pose 

 More Poses

 Robin Sentinel in flight 

e-card update

I posted exploration drawings I did for the 'birthday poetry' e-card half a year ago. I've now cleaned it up a bit and added more colour for my portfolio.

 

Kitties

Learning to draw cats properly from photo and video reference. 

Like Ice

Speed paint done while listening to Conjure One's latest album Exilarch

65 min

Another Character Turnaround

This is the companion character to the girl design I posted earlier. His name is Artie. What a scruffy character he is, I wonder where he got that flute.

The flute player

Late night speed paint of a horned nature spirit or goddess of some sort. Inspired by Princess Mononoke and cheesy fries.

Time of completion: 50 min

Master copy

So on my ongoing quest to improve as a digital painter I decided to try a good exercise recommended to me by Leisha. To make a copy of a John Singer Sargent painting.

It was pretty challenging but I think it turned out alright. It's not quite finished or perfect but than again if I could do a perfect copy, I wouldn't need to do this in the first place.

My copy

Orignal 

Character turnaround

Yeaaaay new post and new art!

This is a character design for a story idea I have. Not sure who she is yet as a person but I wanted her to be an unconventional shape for a heroine (chubby) and I'm toying around with a Z name. Zoey? Zina? Hum.