So I'm posting this knowing full well  no one cares, but I think its cool so whatever...  :D   

We had a long weekend for Memorial day and I pretty much spent the whole thing painting these "deathguard" kill team models.  Did most of what you see here over the last 3 days.  I'm not expert miniature painter, just figuring this out and having fun doing it so now I'm sharing the work.

For those that know about deathguard, I'm not a fan of the tentacles and stuff, I like the idea of them being more like zombies.  So I intentionally removed most of the tentacle bits of models and resculpted with green stuff where needed.  Also used this "Soulblight Gravelord Deadwalker Zombie" models from age of Sigmar as a substitute for poxwalkers. (My version of poxwalkers and more representative of how I think they should look).

Taking a stab at painting a stylized portrait here.  Painted with clip studio paint on my ipad.

These are a few of the paintings I did over the holiday break.  All done with clipstudio paint and my ipad, mostly on trains and airplanes and waiting for said trains and airplanes.  I travel overseas a bunch and there is a lot of down time.  The holiday trip was from Seattle, to New York, then to Finland and back again.  I mentioned a few times previously, but I'm trying to paint most of the game of thrones characters as digital portraits to improve my painting abilities.  I've actually started painting stuff traditionally as well with oil paint which has been a lot of fun.  Hopefully later this year I'll feel confident enough to share some oil painting portraits (I'm still learning to use that material at this point).  

Thanks for looking!

Decided to post up on the Blog one more time for my own records before I finish this off.  It sorta helps me to find areas to improve by doing this.  Right now my to do list is getting pretty reasonable.  I want to re-texture the gun entirely and add blood sweat/dirt to everything similar to how Ryan looked like in the movie. I need to add those tiny facial hairs that go everywhere. Lastly I need to do some general polish and material tweaks.  But everything is in place finally in Unreal 5 which is a relief because its my first time doing this.  I love how performant Unreal is, its pretty crazy... I have a beefy machine but its almost like its not even rendering anything with how fast this runs and its doing real time raytracing and stuff with complex hair systems.  This will def. be my main workflow moving forward.  These are all just "high resolution screenshots" btw.  I had a hell of a time figuring out how to get offline renders to work, but I finally managed to do it with the help of console commands.  There is a really great tutorial on it incase anyone is interested I can link.  Anyway, last time posting wip on this... I know I've said it a million times now but this time I'm determined. ;)  haha.  Its time to call this quits finally.  Thanks to anyone that's been following along here, its been a long journey.  Next post is beauty renders and stuff with final textures etc. on the old portfolio.  cheers!

Finally getting into Unreal 5 to make some attempts at realistic rendering.  Also taking some time to put the finishing touches on my Ryan Gosling Likeness sculpt.  The hair is undoubtedly much better in Unreal over Marmoset, and since I can use the xgen hair systems its a lot lighter performance wise.  I'm also liking the skin shader here also.  Lots of challenges I faced along the way getting to this point in Unreal.  I STILL can't for the life of me figure out why offline Unreal renders look WORSE then just real time screen grabs.  So these are all just real-time "High Resolution Screenshots".  If I can figure out the offline renderer I guess the hair might come in a bit better.  

Anyway, need to do another texture pass on everything as well as a bit more polish on the sculpt here and there, but feeling like I'm finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel with this project here.  Oh yea, and I haven't imported his clothes/jacket and gun yet, but that will be there also.  Starting to look forward to the next project as well which I'm positive will go a hundred times faster since so much of my time here was learning stuff.  Thanks for looking, next update I'm calling it quits!

Doing a talk tomorrow about Getting into The Games Industry and Sticking it to the Man!  Well.... Not so much about Sticking it to the Man, but it'll be fun anyway, you should join!    
@9:00 pm pdt time zone... 9/6/22 

Just a few more painting studies I did on my Ipad this past month:  Couple more game of thrones portraits, a john singer sargent master copy, Chani from Dune, and a super quick skull study after watching a tutorial from Ryan Lang.

Quick Painting/Study inspired by the style of oil painter Casey Baugh. (see last image).  I could have def been a bit more bold with the impressionism look but didn't want to get to hungup on that and keep this quick.  Plus, I know you all prefer pretty ladies over lord of the rings Orks. :D

More painting practice.  This time I decided to try my own take on Lurtz (the main ork villain) from Lord of the rings "Fellowship of the rings".  

More Comic Style here: 

Inspired by Master painters Sargents light setup here:  (Painting not by me, its just my reference:)

Finally got a chance to go thru this tutorial by Greg Rutkowski (which I purchased ages ago on gum road).  Tried to simulate his style using his brushes without doing an exact 1 to 1 of his painting (I drew stuff differently intentionally). Mine isn't nearly as good as his, its too stiff and now that I look at it way overboard with the texture quality of the brush strokes.  But anyway, was a good learning experience and I'm sure I'll get better with some more practice. This is all done in photoshop, from scratch with Greg's Brush pack.

Side note: I've been sorta all over the place lately with my art... but I think I'm going to try to commit a little bit of time every day to drawing and painting (cause drawing especially I need to improve on) and see if I can get back into some of my 3d projects again like Ryan Gosling likeness.  I recently moved and started a new job so its been pretty challenging lately.  Anyway here it is!

Greg Rutkowski Tutorial: 

https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/JlK/desert-dragon-demo?utm_source=artstation&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=homepage&utm_term=marketplace

Gregs Final result for reference: (not mine)