Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Chapter 2, Milestone 4 reached!

(little Lucas is busy learning to stand on his feet these days)

We are getting close! I can almost see the finish line and we are not even close to December yet! It's pretty save to assume that the artwork of Chapter 2 will be finished in early December. 

It's interesting how, at least up to now, all the individual milestones took nearly exactly 40 hours to accomplish. The space I'm covering in each milestone is the same but the amount of panels differs vastly. Milestone 1 and 2 both had 14 panels. Milestone 3 had 23 panels and Milestone 4 even had 29 panels. I really thought that the more dialog heavy milestones (with more and smaller panels) would take much more time but that doesn't seem to be true. I think that is due to the fact that I'm able to reuse backgrounds in dialogs where the camera switches back and forth between the characters. 

Well, and another thing is amazing: when I add another 40 hours (for the last milestone) to the total sum of hours that I've already worked on Chapter 2, I land at 200 hours. This is 10 hours less than I needed to paint Chapter 1! So, although Chapter 2 will be 25% longer than Chapter 1, I will probably spend less time on painting it, which really is amazing. And I can assure you that I'm not rushing things here. I would definitely say that the quality of artwork even has improved. 

Alright, I'll stop boring you with numbers now. Instead, here's the preview panel from Milestone 4:


And this is in fact the only panel of this milestone that I can share without giving away too much of the story. 

On a sidenote:

Video2Brain has finally published the last of the video workshops that I have recorded in July. It's the German version of the "Focus on Digital Painting" workshop:


On the product page you'll again find 25 minutes of preview videos! Enjoy! 

All workshops I have recorded this year are now available in German and English language.

9 comments:

  1. How are you counting your time?
    Do you use some kind of a software for that?
    I'm asking because I often can not decide if I'm working fast enough and I know that it is probably a matter fo discipline. I can write the numbers on a paper or doc file but at the end it is more time wasted in counting rather than drawing.
    Beatiful illustration as ever. (thumbs up)

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  2. I'm using ToDoList from Abstract Spoon. Here's a link:

    http://www.abstractspoon.com/tdl_resources.html

    It's very uncomplicated and doesn't take any considerable time to maintain. I only have to define the tasks before every milestone but this takes only five minutes or so. After that it's just clicking a button and the time is counted and summed up.

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  3. That panel is amazing! How many layers does your artwork typically have?

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  4. Superschön! Ich bin sehr gespannt und amüsiere mich derweil damit, das Bild in der rechten Spalte gründlich zu erkunden :)

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  5. Looking forward to a nice Christmas present of Chapter 2 delivered straight to my iPad!

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  6. @ Anonymous:

    When I started with Chapter 1 I tried to work with very few layers in order to keep the workflow more intuitive. Right at the moment I'm using layers to block in the different shapes (in this case for example the sky, the house, the trees, the ground) and I also use layers to seperate elements inside the shapes (like the roof, the walls, the windows). But I put a lot of attention into not letting the artwork get too clean. Generally I tend to work with less layers when I'm painting nature scenes. Chapter 2 has a lot of interior scenes and I use a lot of layers to paint furniture and stuff like that.

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  7. Cant wait! it looks great :D I'll always admire your color and creative ability Daniel. keep up the great work!

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  8. Very much looking forward to chapter 2! Lovely to see that Lucas is standing by your side ^^ soon you'll have to run after him.

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  9. OMG 80% - eeeeee very good news.

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