Matthew Nellis

So I’ve been getting myself into digital painting and illustrating recently, and bought myself a copy of Derek Lea’s Creative Photoshop CS4. The above painting was done working from his sketch, and then following his various tips and workflow advice. I’m pretty pleased with the outcome, and learned a lot from this style of digital painting.

I’m currently working on improving my general sketching technique, which quite frankly is pretty awful. However, working from a sketch I’m already feeling pretty comfortable painting in this multi-layered way. More to come shortly folks!

A couple of weeks ago I spent an evening at the London Trocadero arcade, with the sole purpose of marvelling at the diverse and eclectic group of people who spend time there. Everyone from your uber cool Japanese kids, to middle aged white men, through to families and kids.

The most heavily populated area always seems to be around the dance games, with upwards of 30 people hanging out, taking turns to have a go. I was there for about an hour just watching the incedible scenes; the people who play seem to know the moves off by heart as they barely even have to look at the screen. Many of them even have dance routines rehearsed, making it less of a game, and more of a performance. It really is something to behold.

Anyway I took a bunch of photos, most of which turned out not as good as I hoped but I guess thats all part of learning to work in low light conditions. Lesson learned.

More of practice with Adobe Illustrator rather than a design piece. I wanted to have a go at vector drawing and practice using the pen tool which I’m not too familiar with.

Hit the jump for a bit more insight and a link to the high-res version.

You can view the high-res version here

It was a nice challenge, and as a first time vector illustration I’m reasonably happy. I found shading to be the hardest part; it took quite a while to get my head around some basic techniques.

It’s strange, I’ve read comics all my life, mostly webcomics nowadays, but never have I studied the art of them. Looking at Mike Krahulik’s work over at Penny Arcade helped me a lot in terms of basic form and shading, something I have never studied up until now.

I’ve got a couple of ideas for further design pieces, the next one will probably be in After Effects, so keep an eye out.

I thought it’d be a good idea to post some of my older work so I have something to compare to now that I am getting back into motion graphics etc.

This is an ident I created for BBC’s Big Screen in Birmingham using Combustion 3 when I didn’t really know what I was doing to be honest!

Co-designed by Matthew Hamer and Andrew Morland.