"Krugg" - The Witcher - Fanart

"Krugg"

The Witcher - Fanart

"Krugg is an elder witcher preferring the solitary life in the woods, well camouflaged and close to nature - typically seen wielding his massive homemade sniper-crossbow. He prefers to carefully and calmly plan out his attacks from atop, selecting his targets from long range before striking his target. Should he end up in close-combat, a silver sword, his dagger and the wildness of his nature makes sure his prey goes down. "

Process:

First of all, I felt it was time to do something thoroughly - and like really thoroughly. Also I wanted to do a full-figure character, practise poses and study materials more in-depth, and really render something to completion, since most of my works are loose and quicker.
 

Since there hasn't been a witcher from the Cat and  Gryphon-school seen in The Witcher-universe, I thought that was an interesting starting-point. Designwise I wanted to incorporate a lot of things that would resemble the qualities of a gryphon (lion/eagle): The beak-shaped headpiece, feathers, lion fur, eagle-details on knee pads and sword, arm guards and the gryphon medallion hanging from the crossbow.

So this is what happened in the actual process:

I did preliminary sketches for three weeks to really nail a good pose. Ultimately I ended up having a friend take a picture of me in the pose and use that - but the whole sketching process definitely made me loosen up, and was not in vain. Finally I had the good pose, moved onto some quick value/colortests and then I was ready to separate everything into masks. This is something I typically never do - I merge my things all the time - but this time I tried being super strict in my layers, keep them organized, colorcode them - and paint within each mask (see process pictures). 

Anyways, everything was ready and setup to ACTUALLY render the picture - and then I procrastinated. Postphoned. Got scared. It's pretty typical - you start having these conversations with yourself, wondering if the piece will actually ever get as good as you imagined and set yourself up to. For this piece I insisted that it had to be GREAT in every aspect - and that's high ambitions to set oneself up to. In the end I thought "Well it's gonna get as good as it gets" - and just began taking the painting piece by piece, step by step - spending 2 hours where I'm totally okay with only having rendered an arm and a bit of a chestpiece. Complete patience. I think that have been a good lesson for me, not rushing it to completion too early.

Towards the end I had rendered out everything in the individual layers, but it still felt a little "not lit", a bit flat, and a bit not fully pulled together as a piece. I got some feedback from people and let the piece rest for a week over christmas. When I came back, I had energy to finish up the last. Yay!

And here a picture of the process:

Finally, thanks to all those who've helped me with critique and ideas along the way!

And merry xmas and happy new year to all of you, my readers!

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Trailer Project: The Big Lebowski

In school, I've been working on The Trailer Project - and it has been a great experience! I had the role of Art Director, tying together the style and overseeing that it stylisticly came together as a whole. In addition to this, I was being a CG-generalist and was working on lighting, composition etc.
 on several shots. Hope you like it!

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"Avalanche"

"Avalanche"



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"Zone Transition"

Was seeing a friend play Wildstar beta, where I found these transitions from one kind of land to another to be quite extraordinary and fascinating. I felt the urge to crunch out a new personal piece over a few days - so here goes. Enjoy!

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Speedpaints/Spitpaints

Hello there sweet reader. I haven't been updating too often for a while, mostly because I've been having two dif. freelance-projects going on, so I have a few unfinished things lying around that will be posted in the upcoming time! Until then, here's a few 30 min. paintings I've been doing throughout the last months - aswell as arranging a live digital painting-event, called "The Roberto Challenge". You can check it out HERE - it's a daily painting challenge.

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I like mixing colors

Fun little exploratory sketch today.

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Trailer project - wip

Work in progress of a character I'm working on for the time being. A chinese ninja-assassin!



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Evening sketch - traditional medium look

Simulating traditional medium-feel digitally. Mixer brush tool, grungy brushes and a lot of fun.
Oh, and recently I've gotten into the habit of doing quick 30 min. paintings according to themes - see the challenge we got going at my school here - feel free to join in. Perhaps I'll post some of those 30 min. experiments in the future. For now, I'll just enjoy the loose non-attachment of them.



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"Meditative"

"Meditative"



Sometimes there's forces within you that tells you what picture to paint. This is such one. Being occupied with clearing and relaxing the mind, I somehow ended up imagining some kind of meditative resting place visually - complete with floating rivers, organic shapes, puffy graphic clouds and pleasant colors - all set in a high-key environment. This is the experimental result of those thoughts and visions.

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Professor Chertavek

Professor Chertavek

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Sketchbook - August 2013

A little collection of some of the better sketches recently. A few of these I'd like to take to a colored more finished stage for sure.

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James Wood sketches

Sketches based on James Wood sketches/artwork. I love the fluidity and cartoony simplifiedness he manages to push into his characters. Wish my own things had some of the same qualities, so I sat down and "redrew" some of his sketches.

Will be doing more of these sketch-another-artists-work pages. Next one will be Cory Loftis and then back to some more Brett Bean.

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Cory Loftis sketches

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Ines - Sweet little girl

"Ines"

 This is Ines! A sweet little 2-year old half spanish/half danish kid I used to take care of, when I was working 10 months in day care/day nursery in Aarhus. She used to fill her mouth up with sand, and I'd attempt to tell her it wasn't the greatest to eat.

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I've realized something about my paintings as of recently. A good friend of mine, Morten Lund, recently pointed out to me that there was one particular picture he'd always look at, when I'm my room - and it would be the one with the most captivating story. That led me to reconsidering my approach when making artwork - very often I just do doodles, studies or things that eventually and randomly become finished paintings - but with very little backstory or idea.

So, returning back to what Peter Chan taught me in my first year of TAW, creating emotional and powerful artworks will be my new pursuit. And I feel like I've got quite a good bunch of ideas up my sleeve that needs visualization.

And sincerely thank you, dear reader, for following my progress here on this blog.

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Project Cream Lake

Hiyo! 

A personal victory has been achieved...I finally completed my self-study! 

http://www.flipsnack.com/7B78897EFB5/fdxkqtt7

It's been an ongoing challenge for me since end-February to complete this self-study project, for several reasons. I realised how difficult it was to put together a story, I realised how a styleguide is great but can also make one feel creatively locked down and I realised that sometimes one just gotta get something done, because it's never going to be perfect. Rather finish up the deal and the goal I set for myself, than give up halfway.

- Last note: I can recommend THIS soundtrack while viewing the art

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Color sketches

Some color-sketches. There's quite a few of these I could easily imagine be taken further and turned into more final pieces. Perhaps I will?



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Summer course-paintings

This summerholiday I was on a painting-course at Kunsthøjskolen Holbæk together with my sister, Emilie Bach (check out her stuff too) and my mother, Christel Bach.

I had the pleasure of having the painter Jesper Palm as my teacher, and it was all in all a really good experience. I've never painted as big before, as I did these weeks, and I felt like I got a good taste of what traditional acrylic painting can offer and be like. Anyways, to the paintings themselves:

"Last Snow" - 120 x 93 cm - acrylic

This one was really fun to create because I would just slash big strokes of measurement in the beginning and establish the forms, designing them - hence adding more and more before arriving at the final piece. However, I struggled with the "redness" in the picture grabbing a lot of attention in the background, especially in the distance. You see from my proces-pictures just below how I introduced a lot of warm brown and red in my picture quite early - hence eliminating and downtoning a lot of it in the final.

Proces:

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"Escaping Her Drawing" - 100 x 79 cm - Acrylic

I've always wondered how something would look if it was half a painting, half a drawing - as the final result, and not with the drawing just being a preliminary stage for the final painting to sit upon. So this is my interpretation of how that would look.

Proces:

Last note: my paintings were photographed by Morten Lund - Big thanks!

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Ebony child - study

Study - 2-3 hours. Looked a lot at Zhang Lu's portraits meanwhile

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Khaleesi

Khaleesi from Game of Thrones
I'm going to dedicate this piece to my friend and roomie Rune who introduced me to this great show!



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Colorful forest study

Quick sketch this evening from a photo



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Creature sci-fi faces

Creature faces drawn this evening and some warm-ups from the day before. Warmups was drawn from Brett Bean-pictures as reference.

Feels like I'm getting more of a decent grip onto this type of playful cartoony line-art after all.

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