The good folks at RAW Natural Born Artists have invited me to showcase my artwork at their next show, Sensory. The event takes place at The MET in the Valley, Brisbane, on Thursday 28th May, and will feature a couple dozen other local creatives from fields as wide-ranging as fashion, photography and performing art.
If you’re interested, click on the link below to purchase tickets, and be sure to select Nick Smith as the artist you are there to see. I can’t wait to see your smiling faces!
Over on facebook, there’s an art challenge going on… Thanks to Barret Thomson for nominating me for this five-day Art challenge. The rules are you should post 3 pieces of art everyday and nominate another artist each day. Today’s theme is Hand of Fate concept art, and I’ll be nominating Johnny Rampant. Show us yer wares, Johnny! (Nick Smith – Art Nuggets facebook page) 
Having just finished the first batch of card art images for the basic version of Rule & Make’s Rise to Power, I thought it’d be nice to present them as a set. These have been as much fun to create as the game is to play. I’ll post the rest of the art (which was part of the stretch goals for the Kickstarter campaign) when they are complete. Click on the thumbnails for larger images.
I’ve recently had the pleasure of creating card art for Rise to Power, an up and coming board game by Allen Chang and Alistair Kearney of Rule & Make . They are currently running a Kickstarter campaign to help get the game finished and made. If you’re an avid board gamer, head on over and help support the project. It’s certainly been a lot of fun to work on.
This weekend I will be in attendance at Supanova at the Brisbane RNA Showgrounds, so come on down if you’re in the area and pick up some of this sweet loot. I have postcards, prints, posters and t-shirts for sale, as well as the chance to win some of the more exclusive images.
I can be found, along with my cohort Pete Yong, at Pete & Nick’s Art Nuggets in Artist’s Alley, Booth L2. Below I have provided a helpful map, so as to remove all possible impediments to people attending. I’m excited to be taking part and hope to see many friendly faces as well as make new acquaintances. Should be fun.
Having not attended a Q & A session for my online class all semester, I finally made it to one at the ungodly hour of 4:30am. I had to attend at least one and it was good to be able to be there and communicate with James and to be able to thank him. I have come on leaps and bounds having taken the class. It has given me a lot of confidence in tackling environments and more ambitious concept pieces than I thought it would. Well worth it.
So here are the final pieces. With the top one I added a few more dragons in front of the mountain side so they would look as if they were swarming over it more. I also pushed the castle back a bit by adding a little haze to the upper reaches. The bottom pic went through a more drastic overhaul since the last update. I implemented the advice that was given, sharpened up a lot of areas and included the seagulls which gives the whole piece more depth.
Week’s six and seven of the Environment Design 1 course focused on refining a one design each from week 5’s thumbnails. The use of photographs, to help not only texture the image, but also as a way of creating new shapes and designs was explored.
The top image is Week 7’s effort. I felt I owed the course a real solid effort, since last Week 6’s image (bottom) coincided with my trip back to Australia from the UK and I wasn’t able to give it the attention it deserved. I went with a more fantasy style image, with a castle stretching out to the sea being marched on by an army. I took the thumbnail and pretty much painted it again from scratch, making use of the painting on top of photos idea.
The bottom image is Week 6’s effort. This was probably the most successful of the thumbnails from Week 5, and certainly the most intriguing point of view. I used photos in this one to enrich the mechanics of the water mills design. This image was going in the right direction, but I was unable to give it the attention it needed to really make it look finished. Perhaps I will return to it and finish it off in the coming days.
Week 5 of Environment Design 1 centered on using textures within the designs, both to add character to the image, as well as inspire new shapes and ideas. Our assignment was to create 4 or more thumbnails around one theme. I chose as my motif buildings built on rocks protruding from the sea.
Following on from last week, I once again enjoyed creating these images. I’m finding it easier and quicker to get an image looking pleasing to my eye, which has a snowballing effect, as the confidence gained from one image feeds into the next. Next week we are to take one of these images and take it to final quality, so stay tuned.
This week we started to use colour. I’m afraid I only got three of the five images done this week. It seems to take me ages to get the image to a point where I feel like I’m liking it. Added to this is the fact that when I had to rush an image a couple of weeks ago just to fill out the assignment, the critique centered on the rushed image, rather than the two more finished pieces, thus covering a lot of things I might have attended to, had I given the image equal time. For this reason I have only submitted images that I have given fair attention to.
However, I did really enjoy this week’s assignments a lot more than weeks 1 to 3, which were a real chore, if I’m honest. I think this is because I started to use the lasso. I liked what I got out of it on the first image so much that by the third image I was using it for a lot of the image making, and doing very little actual painting. As you can probably tell, I’ve been looking at Robh Ruppel’s blog a lot recently.
There is a definite progression through the three images, the first being quite basic, while the last is comparatively rich. I’m learning a lot from the class, but what is becoming most apparent to me is less about the technique and skills, and more about my attitude towards environment design. When creating environments before I would get frustrated that the image wasn’t looking decent from a fairly early stage, and as a result I would get disheartened and this would put me off. Now I am forcing myself to get environments done and to a state where I’m happy with them, in the process learning that it takes time, but also proving to myself that I can do it.
The fine work of one Mr Robh Ruppel has been brought to my attention during my Environment Design class, as mentioned in my last post.
He has a great sense of style, and his compositions and colour use are phenomenal. I’ve inserted a couple of examples below. Hit the link to see more on the blog. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. This stuff is a real inspiration, as you will see in my next Environment Design 1 update.
Art Nuggets 