ndhill

Thanks for the feedback. I'm a third year fine arts major at a state University. All can say about art education in general is that the quality of it is directly proportional to the time and effort you invest. Where I attend, nobody knows a thing about digital art or conceptual illustration and as far as my fellow students and most of my professors are concerned, I'm the kid who doodles monsters in his spare time. Honestly though, I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm there to learn traditional principles and methods And believe me, those are absolutely essential. Life drawing alone is one of the most important disciplines an artist can practice. I'm not saying that an art education is essential because there are plenty of people out there who don't have one and do better than a lot of us but an art education is a great experience that will broaden your perception if you let it. It'll also help you get an idea of how others might view your own work.You have a nice little site there. You're already on a good path just by having it up and exposing your work. If I were you, I'd showing it in every online art forum I could think of. There are tons of great resources for artists on the net. Especially ones who choose our medium and genres. Check out sijun.com, cgtalk.com, conceptart.org and gfxartist.com for starters. I guess if I were to offer you some personal advice, I'd say that you should draw from life more. This is a great skill building discipline for any artist and is indispensable as far as artist development is concerned. It's not just to learn realism but it's to train your eye how to interpret what it sees and train your hand how to control it's medium. People have a natural tendency to draw or paint what they think something should look like rather than what it actually would look like. The goal is to gradually shrink the gap between those two conflicting aspects so you can create content that is entirely your own and make it convincing.Good luck man. And get your stuff out there.-Noel

Thanks. NilsC actually pointed this stuff out to me the other day. I'm no webdesigner so stuff like this has always been a difficulty for me. I'm doing all this html with an ancient freeware copy of Adobe Pagemill. But after he sent me a sample of my own source code for my index page, figuring it out was pretty easy. Right before you posted actually, I just uploaded a new index page complete with a title. I was however still wondering as to how I might go about adding content that search engines and spiders would be attracted to. For the most part, webdesign is still a complete mystery to me. Thanks again for the feedback. -Noel

Thanks. There tons of places where one can find great tutorials that blow mine out of the water. It's usually just a matter of finding the sites of individual artists who make them. One that I can think of right off is David Levy, the (former?) art director for Acclaim entertainment (which went bankrupt). He even has sreen captured movie files. http://vyle-art.com/frontpage/painter.htm Again, thanks for the kind words, man.

Seriously, I think the biggest problem is that there seems to be a very wide spread misconception that tablets are expensive and that only graphic design professionals have access to them. They may not be sold on Best Buy shelves next the the trackballs or fancy 3-button mice, but they're just as cheep. It's only a matter of figuring out what size you need and finding an affordable tablet. For beginners, I suggest a graphire. That's the 4X5 inch low-end model. It's actually what use to this day. Even though I'm at the point where I need to invest in a bigger one, I can't say that my old graphire hasn't been good to me.

"soon" being now... 6. There were a few things I didn't like and they needed to be fixed. I got rid of the little insect limbs as they were more of an ugly distraction than a supporting element. I'm also rendering the facial features more to tighten up what I do like. 7. Now it's time to lower the contrast a bit and darken it up in preparation for the addition of more dynamic lighting and eventually color. Like I said, this is a quickie for me. Normally I'd just plan this stuff out a little better. I've also decided to reintroduce the insect legs back into the piece only this time I'm actually giving some thought as to where I place them. The canvas just seemed weird with just a floating head coming from the upper corner. 8. Now I'm adding some more directional lighting in on a second, somewhat transparent layer. Just general airbrushed white over the flatter areas and some finer highlights with the camel hair. 9. Now it's time to introduce some color. Keep in mind, normally I'd just paint in color if I intend for something to be in color but that's when I at least have some sort of color scheme in mind when I first start. This is all spontaneous and so is the color choice. I'm just experimenting with flat colors (I settled on a crimsonish maroon) to put on a new "colorize" layer and then airbrushing in some orange highlights on to that same layer... Hopefully by now, you've realized how chaotic and inefficient my process is and you no longer have any desire to try and emulate it. 10. I collapse everything back on to one layer and put in the finishing touches. I add some proper gold-orange highlights where they need to go and clean up what needs to be cleaned up. Here's the final image. Feel free to ask any questions you may have.

Hey everyone. I just completed this tutorial for my website. It's sort of a documentation of how I completed this specific piece. It might be helpfull for those who are curious about using the computer as means for digital art. This is all done with Corel Painter and a Wacom tablet. 1. I start pretty simple with what I like to call a base coat. It's just something to establish a bit of texture. I'm getting ready to start one of my quick (by quick I mean 30-45 minute) self-portraits. 2. Originally this piece started as a normal self portrait. I used a variation of the loaded pallet knife to just define some quick forms and some lights and darks. 3. Because it had started to look like one I had already done, I decided to have some fun with it rather than start over. I changed some of the features so they'd look more skeletal. 4. Now, I'm just sketching with a camel hair brush. I'm keeping everything one one layer and I'm really just doing this all on the fly. 5. I'm now starting to smooth out some of my strokes in order to make my forms more coherent. I'm using some larger camel hair brushes and the pallet knife. The second part will come soon.

I remember the first warcraft well. I remember getting detention because me and freind tried using the school's little mac-lab network to play eachother and the teachers were horrified by the violence and the bloody little corpses... Heh heh. Good times.

My top 10:MarathonSuper MetroidMetroid PrimeMetroid Prime 2: EchoesSoul Calibur IIStarcraft (and broodwars)Myth II: SoulblighterDeus ExAVPThe Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

Okay. My site has moved to a new location. You can now find it at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ ...Notice that my last name is spelled correctly.

Yeah but Metroid was always a single player exploration based game. Prime 2 has multiplayer but it's nothing we haven't already seen before and I personally think it's a waste of disc-space. I think a lot of FPS fans have misconceptions about the metroid games because they're expecting Halflife or Halo when Matroid Prime is really just a 3-D version of your classic Metroid games.

You guys are right. I have the original and the expansion and just for the heck of it, I thought I'd install them again and when I signed on to battle.net, I was very surprised to see it as active as ever. Really, when you compare SC to WCIII, WIII is mostly just a graphic improvement. Even then, the SC sprites still retain their charm.

That's a tough one. There are too many out there that I love. It's hard for me two judge them. Too many FPS games fit a very specific mold while others really stray from the pack and distinguish themselves. I'll always love Half-life, Deus Ex and Metroid Prime the most. Not only because of the how fun the combat is but also how emmersive their settings and stories are. FPS games for me are also about placing yourself in situation and then doing what you need to do to stay alive. For multiplayer, I gotta say that I'm a big fan of Unreal Tournament and Goldeneye.

I'm a long time Mac junky. I'm on an older G4 tower right now that's running Panther. I've never had any problems with it. It does what I need it do and with minimal complications and that's why I'm happy with it. I don't like computers enough to spend too much time trying to fix things or learn a new OS.

cool. The quality is not bad either. thanks for the link.

What would make you not like it after playing it once? And, if you didn't like the first one, you probably shouldn't waste your money on the second one.

cryptonx: Thanks. I've never been too worried about monitor resolutions. There was a time when others who also had art sites would really try to impress on you the importance of comfortable viewing on small resolutions but now people viewing at such small resolutions are becoming increasingly rare. I always figured that if my target audience is interested in digital art and computer imaging, than they'd probably use monitors with at least 1024 by 768 resolutions. I know I personally don't like things scaled down dramatically when I'm viewing someone else's art online, so I try to create a better experience for those users.-=Wrighty=-: Thanks man.hasan: Thanks. I do post there occasionally. Most of those guys there are insanely skilled and very humbling. A few of my favorites are Francis Tsai, Craig Mullins, Feng Zhu, but there are to many awesome people over there for me to possibly remember.

Yes, they will. I known that a MacOSX native application is also in the works for all three games. Basically it would play like the classic versions and read the same maps, shapes, music, etc files. Also, if you have the first Unreal Tournament, they've releases a mod package called 'Marathon: Resurrection' which is a remake of the first game with the Unreal graphics engine.

Definitely. I know everything about it may seem dated when compared to todays standards but those games really created a cool experience that was comparable to halflife in my oppinion.

Thanks, I'll do that. Again, I apologise. It really was an honest mistake.

After a very confusing and comedic (in retrospect) day of trying to figure out why my site at ndhill.astahost.com wouldn't load, I finally figured out why... I don't have a site at ndhill.astahost.com. I miss-spelled my own subdomain in the registration process so the whole time we were trying to figure out this mess, every thing's been working perfectly at ndhilll.astahost.comAnyway, I was wondering if it would be possible to have my subdomain name changed from ndhilll.astahost.com to ndhill.astahost.comI'm sorry for the trouble guys. I suffer from a serious affliction called chronic-newbitis. The symptoms include but are not limited to; hassling tech support reps, losing passwords, not understanding AIM acronyms, and typing without realizing that capls-lock is on, etc.Thanks yet again.-Noel

Thanks again. Do you want a logo? I can whip one up for ya. It's that least I could do for your troubles. PM me with a discription of what you want and I'll get on it.

All right. Thanks to NilsC, my site is finally up! check out http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

Excellent! Thanks a ton bro! What did you do anyway?

Thanks. I'll give that a try. Edit: Hmm. It still doesn't want to load. I put everything in the public_html folder and deleted the index page it had previously contained and replaced it with mine. I wonder if it's my browser. someone give this a click, to see if it works on their end. thanks. -Noel

I always thought the idea behind Onimusha was cool. I love the concept of taking real historical figures like Yagyu Jubai and Oda Nobunaga and placing them in a fantasy interpretation of the events they both had actual roles in. It reminds of a Peter Chung animated series called Reign: The Conquerer. It was a sci-fi interpretation of the life of Alexander the Great.I'm a little off topic, so anyway...