Character Dichotomy, modelling and textures

As I chose to go for low tri budgets with my characters I decided to skip drawing up orthographics and began box modelling my characters by eye, working directly from the concepts. It took around 2 days to model each character, including testing out rigs and refining the topology so that the models would deform well when the final rig was made. I also picked up a few tips on low poly modelling from the low poly project blog, such as using planes for fingers to save tri's.

The overall detail in the models was very basic. I was going to rely on the old school method of hand painted diffuse textures in order to create the illusion of depth and paint in fake ambient occlusion shadows. When rendering and viewing the models in the viewport I also switched to using the 'consistent colors' shader. This meant that the models would be lit as 'flat' and any illusion of lighting would come mostly from the painted textures. This is a pretty common way of working with textures for ultra low poly modelling.

Rigging for these characters as fairly easy going due to the low try count, however the low tri count meant that the characters were limited in how extreme there movements could be before deforming too much. Posed within reason I think the rigs work very well, and the characters can handle most basic maneuvers without any deformation issues.

When texturing I needed to use a texture size that was in line with the kind of tri budget I was using, so I went with the same low resolution 128x128 textures that Tommy Tallion used for his TF2 models. I painted them at a slightly bigger, but still very small size of 512x512. If I had painted them any bigger then by the time I resized much of the pixels would bleed into other areas of the UV map.
Each of the weapons also got their own 64x64 textures.

UVW sheets and painted textures at 512x512

Even though the textures are very blurred at this size the important thing was that the designs could still be read well from afar. I imagined these characters to be inhabitants of some kind of isometric style game world, and such would be viewed from afar and very small on screen.

here are some final renders of my characters with textures applied -

Ranger sheet

Brawler sheet

..and some basic poses -

As a quick conclusion, I'm pretty pleased with how these two turned out. Personally I feel that I achieved the goal of creating a dichotomous duo, with a consistent style and strong silhouettes. While at first I wanted to create a very high poly model, there was a lot to learn from creating characters under these kinds of technical restraints. It forced me to think solely about the strength of their overall design, and how I could best utilize my tri and texture budgets in order to convey their designs as best I could.

Character Dichotomy

Our final project of this term was a character dichotomy project. If you're unfamiliar, that basically means two characters that work together harmoniously, yet have distinct and contrasting characteristics that set them apart.

Some popular video game classics that come to my mind are Ratchet and Clank, Jack and Daxter, Mario and Luigi and even Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us. In terms of Movies or television you could point towards Hellboy and Abe, Arya and the Hound in Game of Thrones or Rocket and Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy. Asterix and Obelix or Calvin and Hobbes are also some perfect examples of dichotomous characters from cartoons/comics.

There are literally endless examples of dichotomous characters throughout video game, cartoon, writing and movie history.

Talking about the brief for this project, we were given exactly 3 weeks to design two dichotomous characters of our own. As a minimum, we had to model and texture at least one of these characters, however stretch goals included modelling both characters, as well as adding rigs and animation.There was no given tri budget for this project either, which meant we could go wild. However, I will talk briefly about how this wasn't necessarily the best idea.

As there were no style guides or technical restrictions I thought that this character project would be the perfect opportunity for me to learn about high poly baking and Zbrush, so when I began concepting I designed characters with the idea of having some level of realism in mind, and with the idea that I would have one very detailed character modeled and textured by the end. My idea was two characters. One a burly brawling type, and the other an agile ranger style character.

First concepts

In fact, the tutors advised avoiding Zbrush all together for this project. The emphasis was on strong overall design, and the dichotomy of two characters. Not having a single character with a lot of surface detail.

During the first presentation to the tutors, I was given feedback to change their designs. The tutors pointed out that these characters were too similar, and didn't necessarily create visual unity. They were right, and I had designed the characters with little thought towards dichotomy as I had only planned to model one. I decided to go back to the drawing board and take a very different angle.

Since the emphasis of this project was having two characters that worked together visually, I decided that I would model both in the end. I had to think of a way I could realistically model, texture and rig two characters before the deadline.

While thinking of ways I could create both characters in this time frame I remembered 3D artist Tommy Tallians' rendition of the Team Fortress 2 characters. He created the entire cast of Team Fortress 2 as ultra low poly 500 tri characters. This illustrates that the strongest designs will read well and still work at the most basic level. I decided that I would try to create both my characters with the same budgets and low resolution textures.

Team Fortress 2 cast, by Tommy Tallian

Team Fortress 2 cast, Valve

I began by re concepting the male character, based of an earlier silhouette that people liked. I also pushed for some level of stylization too, as it lends itself well to low poly modeling.

This led onto some re-concepting of the girl too, in order to fit in with the new style I was aiming for.

After some thought and sketch overs, what I ended up with was the same two character archetypes that I began with, but with a totally different style and stronger silhouettes.

Modeling in the next post...

turret post mortem

As mentioned in my last post, there are a couple of things that I'd like to have done differently about my turret project.

My turret worked perfectly with the blueprints in UE4, turning 360° and pitching up and down without any issues or clipping, and while it looked good, it didn't really make sense. I had designed my turret with the idea of it being manned by a person, however the blueprint was designed with the idea of an automated turret.

Even if my design is a 16th/17th century inspired cannon, I think it would have looked a lot cooler if I were to have found ways of making the turret appear automated. Too late in the project I had a few ideas of how the cannon could hold and load extra cannonballs, such as integrating some kind of snooker-like rail onto the side of the cannon.

Any of these could have been integrated into the design

In terms of how the cannon would realistically be able to detect people or even pitch and rotate by itself isn't really important by now, as at this point the design would be heading into the realm of fantasy anyway, so it doesn't necessarily need to be accurate or realistic.

From a video game standpoint, most of the time having a design that is actually functional isn't as important as having something that looks believable. There are a lot of fantasy games with repeating flintlocks and automated fantasy turrets, such as this-

Warhammer- Engineers turret

Any old looking turning mechanism and a bit more bulk to the design could have worked to help the design appear 'automated'. However, there are other things I would certainly have to change about the design too. A less realistic and more cartoon art style such as the above would be more appropriate for an 'automated pirate cannon'.

So, in and of itself I think my design works, and certainly wouldn't look out of place in a realistic game universe if it were being manually controlled. However in terms of following the blueprint to look better as an automated design, I would definitely have to go back to the drawing board.

sentry turret

Week five of year two. This week, our brief asked that we design and model a sentry turret. The idea was that the turret would be imported into UE4 and would be applied to a pre made blueprint that would allow it to follow the player and fire projectiles in their direction.

In terms of design, this was a very open brief. We were given 5000 tri's to do with as we pleased, the only restraints, if you could call them that, was that the turret had to have a pitch and yaw, in order to turn 360° and look up and down.

Starting out, I had no idea what I wanted to create. I began collecting a lot of images of turrets and different forms of artillery throughout various era's. I mostly enjoyed looking at the 16th and 17th century cannons and other old artillery so by the end of the moodboard I had pretty much decided that I wanted to create something along the lines of a turret for a pirate.

I created concepts by photobashing various elements of my moodboard together. Because of the nature of the design I was going for, it was hard to imagine an old 16th/17th century cannon that could reload and repeat by itself. The designs along the top looked cool but were impractical for a more realistic design that I was heading towards. I decided to go with something waist height, that could be manned and reloaded by a person/pirate. Thinking about what the cannon could be mounted on, I looked at old coat racks and camera tripods.

As much as I love painting and 2d, it was far more practical for a design like this to begin concepting in 3d as soon as possible. I created multiple iterations in Max, and narrowed down from there before reaching a final model.

Despite the fact we were given a large budget of 5000 triangles my final model landed around 2800. It felt very unnecessary to add pointless edge loops or more tri's than was needed to convey the design effectively. I decided to use as many tris as I thought reasonable.

Final model

I thought the platforms of the stand created a cool opportunity to add some accessories, so I modeled a linstock, some gunpowder cartridges and cannonballs.

This turret belongs on the deck of a pirate ship, and appears to be rigged together from a few other things. When thinking about textures, I imagined something that looked worn out, battered and weathered. I used the albedo and roughness maps in conjunction to create rust, and included a lot of dents and scratches on the rough/height maps. I also wanted the wood areas to appear somewhat bleached by the salty sea and sun.

This is the final model in unreal with textures applied, I was pretty happy with how it turned out and definitely got what I was looking for with most of the textures. The model also worked perfectly with the blueprint, and I had just enough time to apply some sound and particle effects too.

textures applied in UE4

Mid way through this project we were suddenly given the task to create a poster that would be used to advertise our turrets. This was a fun challenge, I decided to take a more comic approach-

As usual, there's certainly a few things I would like to have done differently during this project, however I will save that for my next post.

Film room project, the post mortem

I'll be honest, I'm quite pleased with our final outcome, not necessarily in terms of how much it matches up to the original shot. In and of itself, I feel that our scene definitely holds something of its own, even if we lost a lot of the Pixar magic the original has.

Pixar's Toy Story 3

 

DMU game art students attempt Toy Story

With exception of the characters, who were not part of the brief, it's pretty obvious to anyone comparing the two what the main difference is here. However, its not the case that we couldn't see where the differences were. The problem lay within our technical understanding of a, how to use lighting, and b, our knowledge of how to use Unreal engine. We just couldn't get it to match.

Here's a crude breakdown of the lighting in their scene:

Warm sunlight beams through the window, hits the boxes & floor directly. Warm light bounces from the floor to other areas of the room, lighting it indirectly. Bounced light is picked up by inlays on the doors, the handles on the drawers and other things. Diffused light from outside also enters the room from window behind camera. It gets pretty technical.

Even if we could see what was going on, we just couldn't work out how they did it. We dissected their scene, and it took all kinds of trial and error and faking all kinds of lighting to get as close as we did. There were so many factors that effected the lighting that it usually ended up being a trade off. We would adjust the lighting to make one area of the room match closely, but in turn another area would change completely. This was the same when colour grading the shot.

Throughout the engine part of the project, we felt as though the whole scene was held together by tooth picks, except we weren't sure where the tooth picks were. We encountered a lot of technical difficulties and spent a lot of time looking things up. Things would fall apart for reasons we couldn't find, we'd apply a decal to the wall, and the lighting would break. Life's mysteries!

Knowing what we know now, if we were to do this project again we would probably budget more time towards working within the engine and lighting the scene, as well as take the time to do some learning on lighting. 

On the other side of all this, we considered that Pixar is composed of some of the best artists in the entertainment industry. They would've had a huge budget, more time, many artists and more than likely separate departments dedicated solely to things such as lighting alone. As four students, we think we did an alright job in the end.

Either way, this project was a highly enjoyable and huge learning experience which definitely opened us up to things we can work to improve for future projects. I gained a much better understanding of physically based rendering as well as working in Unreal 4 and had a good experience working within a group.

Film room project, production

In my last post, I talked about our choice of room. Here I am going to talk briefly about how we developed and built the room.

Work on the room began by applying our chosen shot to the Max viewport background, and using perspective match tools to align the viewport grid and begin creating a proxy mesh; a rough 3d block in of the entire scene. This served as a scale reference when creating the actual assets. We each created our own, and as a group decided on the most accurate to work from.

perspective match

Before we dove into any 'final' modelling we were basically tasked with analyzing the scene, and documenting this via studies and/or paint overs. I produced a simple study, focusing on entirely on readability and the colour palette in Andy's room.

As much as I enjoy painting and believe that it is very important to analyze, there were some things about this stage that I personally thought to be unnecessary. This stage was constantly referred to as the 'concept stage' A concept is an idea, and in this project we were already working from a fully realized idea. Andy's room has already been taken through an entire design process from by artists at Pixar, and the concept was already there. Here, we are duplicating the scene as a means to study.

Once the proxy had been made we divided the assets between members of the group and started on the models. We had to really plan our timing as we needed to allow plenty time for texturing and also dealing with technical work in Unreal.

When creating the models, I gathered as many references of the asset in the scene at different angles and used those to draw up some orthographs. I used these as a basis for my model, but eventually deviated away and constantly referred back to the original source material. Despite the chest of drawers being the most complex I actually spent most of my time trying to optimize the boxes, allowing for a good amount of detail without using an excessive amount of tri's.

assets in max

For the floor of Andy's room I used a photo of my own bathroom floor and created a tileable texture from that. The floor was very important to the entire scene, and had to have just the right amount of reflectivity without being too noticeable from a distance.

testing the floor in Unreal

We constantly checked our textures in Unreal, there was a lot of trial and error with creating the maps and seeing how they appeared under different lighting conditions in engine. One of the hardest parts of creating the chest of drawers for example was getting the subtle wear and tear just right.
 

chest of drawers within the final scene

Once everyone had finished their models I imported everything into a single max scene. Even with the proxy as a scale reference certain assets had gone somewhat out of proportion as we worked on them. Using perspective match again I matched each asset to the scene and rescaled everything accordingly before redistributing the resized models which would go on to be used in the final scene.

second proxy

Below is our final shot in engine, with some subtle post process colour grading. I'm going to save my thoughts on the final shot, and in my next post I'll spend some good time talking about what went wrong, what went right and where we could improve.

final shot, Andy's room

Film room project, choosing a room.

Our second project of the year briefed us to recreate as accurately as possible an iconic room from any film or TV series of our choice. Even with a group of four this was an extremely challenging project and had to be completed in three weeks. I can honestly say that in the last four weeks I've already spent more time in the universities labs than I ever did during the whole of last year.

So far, I'm feeling much better about the course and the new course structure this year as opposed to last year. It makes me much happier that there's no longer numerous unrelated and overlapping projects from the different modules. Instead, the visual design and game production modules now seem to interrelate and work seamlessly together. Overall, the course feels a lot more refined and gives you a lot of time for each project. Because of this, I'm personally feeling more motivation to work much harder on each individual project and have it looking the best I can make it, as opposed to juggling time and quality between projects like last year.

To begin our project, we started out by creating mood boards of shots from all of our favourite films or television series with rooms that we'd like to recreate. Here's one of mine-

GoT- The Eyrie

   
At first, we all agreed as a group that the Eyrie's throne room would be an awesome choice. We all love Game of Thrones, and felt pretty excited about the idea of re-creating this room. This was our first mistake. The focus of the project was on colour, lighting and mood. Even though Game of Thrones has a lot of that, we'd basically chosen this room almost entirely on the basis that we enjoyed game of thrones and the fantasy genre, as opposed to considering other factors of the project. In order to progress, we had to distance ourselves from the films/series and any personal attachment we had to them, and consider the individual shots for what they were in terms of colour, light and composition.

Our tutors definitely thought we had chosen something cliché, and encouraged us to choose another film. Max, a member of our team, put together another mood-board with a lot of variety.

Max's moodboard

Gathering other opinions from peers and tutors we found that the shots from Pixar movies were a particularly popular choice. This led to us finding and deciding upon a particular shot from Toy Story 3 that the team all loved, this decision also had positive responses from tutors during presentation.

Moving out, Toy Story 3

What was cool about the final decision to do Andy's room was that even though we all liked the scene, it was a scene we would probably have never concluded upon by ourselves. There was a lot here that appealed to us, particularly the light of the sun hitting the box and floor, and bouncing to other areas of the room. Also, while the scene appears to be relatively simple if compared to some grittier live action films, there is actually a lot of subtle things going on. The reflectivity of the floor, slight wear and tear on furniture and the darker areas of wallpaper where Andy's posters had been and prevented any bleaching from the sun were all things we were going to have to consider when re-creating this shot.

year two, first week roundup

After a long summer spent drawing and painting I've now begun year two on game art design here at uni.  Last year I basically neglected this blog. But this time around its got to be a weekly thing.

Our first project of the year was only a week long and doubled up not only as an introduction to working with PBR (physically based rendering) in the new unreal engine 4, but also as an introduction to working as a team to create assets before exporting them into a scene.

The project was called 'asset swap' and involved creating assets such as a trestle table, bench and a shield for a small viking banquet. It began by assigning one different asset to each person in the group, once that person had developed concepts for the asset, the concept was then given to the next person to begin modelling, and the model passed on again for texturing and so forth. This process of basically meant that everyone in the group worked on every asset at some stage.

Personally I thought this process came with some drawbacks, for instance, when it came to texturing you had to hope that the person before you had made a good job of unwrapping the model efficiently, otherwise you were going to have a harder time texturing. For the most part though, I thought this process helped to achieve a consistent style throughout each asset, as opposed to if people had worked on assets individually.

The hardest part of this project for me was getting my head around the new physically based rendering in UE4. This is a new way of texturing that does away with specular and diffuse maps, replacing them with albedo, metalness and roughness maps.With the old way the amount of reflectivity and shine of a material was defined by the levels of specularity in the specular map, whether this was metal, plastic or skin. Now you can define whether or not a material is a metal, and then you can define the roughness/smoothness of a material, which will dictate how much light information is picked up by that surface. Traditionally you might also paint 'fake' light information such as ambient occlusion on the diffuse texture, with an albedo map however you use purely flat colour information as all the light is defined by other maps and scene lighting. Its an easy concept to understand and actually quite simple in practice, but still something I have yet to grasp properly.

Ideal Job role

I've pretty much always wanted to make a career as a concept artist. As I said in my last post, I made it my goal when I was around 13 or so after being inspired by some awesome concept art for video games and I knew then what I wanted. Video games had always been inspiring me to draw anyway, but at that age it never really occurred to me that I could actually make a career out of art, back then, I didn't even realize that such a job existed in the games industry. To me, it seemed like the coolest thing at the time, the idea of being able to draw the things you love for a living while getting paid for it was really ideal, and to be honest, it still is now.

It's safe to say that 6 years on, I think I still want to be a concept artist. Well, not entirely. The idea that you get draw whatever you like or enjoy isn't entirely true. There's always going to be those specific jobs or projects that you don't enjoy doing, just like certain projects here at university, and the same can be said for most areas of work. But something that has occurred to me after years of drawing and moving towards my goals is that you could not survive in this industry if you treat it like some kind of ordinary day job. It has to be something you are genuinely passionate about if you hope to succeed and move forward.

Usually, I try not to think about money when assessing the direction I take my art. I don't want thoughts of money or financial stability dictating the direction that I take. Sometimes I feel as though I ought to be doing things differently, painting this way rather than that, just satisfy some kind of criteria that will perhaps improve my chances of me get me a job as a concept artist. For me, there is always an internal conflict between moving in a direction that will help me land a job, or moving towards my own personal goals. Honestly, I think money should be a bi-product of doing what you love, especially with art.

While studying at university I have come to the conclusion that having a job in the games industry is not the be all and end all. Since I started, I have less of an idea of what I'd like to be doing when I finish, as the idea of working as a concept artist is much less appealing to me than before I came to university. Personally I feel that even if I never land a job in the games industry, I'll always be satisfied so long as I'm in a position where I can create art and improve. Right now though, I just want to get better at painting. My current goal is aiming to improve the work I do from imagination by applying all the fundamentals I have been learning from producing studies. I think that with time, and as I become more confident in my abilities to create good art, I will have a better idea of what I would like to do post graduation.

To conclude, I think that rather than narrow down what I would like to do as a career, my experiences at university have instead forced me to question how I would really feel about working in the games industry as an artist. In some ways, it would be nice to have an income from creating art, however I have to remember that if I want to be successful as an artist then money cannot be the top priority. I feel that if I were to get a job in the games industry for the sake of having a job and income, that I would not necessarily be happy, and for this reason I think it would be best for me to have more time on improving my art and thinking about what I would like to do before I come to any conclusions on an ideal job role. At this present time, I am focusing on the fundamentals.

Personal enquiry: My own interests

As with some of the last post, I finally feel as though I can talk more freely from a first hand point of view about my own experiences with video games. Looking back at parts one and two, It seems like I pretty much wrote those posts like they were some kind of formal essay, most likely because I knew little about what I was writing, couldn't find much of interest to me and also because I didn't live through those periods. This personal enquiry task will allow me to talk more easily about the things that interest me personally.

Admittedly, I've never been much of a heavy gamer, but without having played some of the games that inspired me I probably wouldn't be here studying a game art design course. A lot of my peers are gamers, but personally I've just always had a deep interest in concept art, and art in general. Perhaps its just the subject matter that I like about games and concept art? I've always liked fantasy clichés and archetypes for instance, but I tend to take a lot of notice of the execution of work and paintings too. I like the work of a lot of traditional oil painters such as Anders Zorn and John Sargent, but specifically I enjoy seeing how concept artists or digital painters in general have been employing those traditional painting methods within a new digital medium. 

Besides just the art however, there are definitely a few games I can name that have inspired me from an artistic standpoint too, as they should. After all, most games are full of art aren't they? They are visually stimulating, full of things to look at. One of my personal favorites is Shadow of the Colossus, for its dark and gritty world full of earthy green and black tones. Its a very artistically driven game and games have become ever more oriented towards visuals. Even if I already had an interest in drawing before hand, I don't think I would have discovered concept art before playing video games. To stop myself from rambling on any further, the topic I'm basically going to talk about is concept art, artists in the industry and what it is that inspires me so much about these.

So what is concept art? Well, first I'll take a dictionary definition of the word concept:

con·cept  (kŏn′sĕpt′)n.

1. A general idea derived or inferred from specific instances or occurrences.

2. Something formed in the mind; a thought or notion.

3. A scheme; a plan:

Basically, concept art refers to any art that presents an idea. In the case of video games that is typically anything varying from character design, environments and levels, weapons, Armour and vehicles. Just take a look at these for instance.

Lord of the Rings Online Archer concepts, Wes Burt

Early 'Bayonetta' concepts, Wes Burt

These are some awesome examples of character concept art by Wesley Burt. The characters are stood in a neutral posture that is easy to read, they have cool silhouettes, and they are painted in a way that clearly shows the different materials and details in their armour designs. Basically, you could make a 3D model from these concepts. A lot of the time, I think the concept art looks a lot better than the final in-game product. Just look at those Bayonetta concepts for instance, personally I think any one of those looks way more aesthetically pleasing than the final product that ended up in the game. But then again,  these concepts didn't fit in with the overall style of the game, which has a more anime style vibe. In my opinion, these still look cooler though.

Lord of the Rings Online, Horse Lord concepts -Wes Burt

Something else I love about character concept art is how easily you can begin to visualize a back story for these characters. There's a whole other universe surrounding them, and this is frequently shown in their armour or costumes, which can often contain cultural references from our world too. This is important because fictional characters and worlds, to an extent, still need to be somehow relatable to our world and the familiar in order to make sense to the player. Just look at the Lord of the Rings Online concepts for instance, they might be inhabitants of a fantasy world however they still have designs that hold true to a medieval period from our timeline. Their attire are ornate and glorified versions of clothes and armour akin to that seen in the middle ages. Science and Fantasy fiction draw parallels and take inspiration from reality, and this makes sense; You need to draw from what already exists in order to create something new. Tolkien himself even did this when writing the Lord of the Rings.

Besides all this, I just love the overall aesthetics of the character concepts. The silhouette, forms, lighting, values and other fundamental things. This brings onto another thing in digital painting and concept art, fundamentals and execution. My first endeavors into concept art started when I was around 13, my dad had bought me the Art book featuring all the concept art done for World of Warcraft. I was pretty blown away, and spent long hours staring at the pages wondering how they made it look so awesome. Of course back then I didn't really know that fundamentals in art were a thing in the process of improving your work, I just kept on drawing whatever for fun. But a few years later after exploring different art forums online I discovered various ways to improve my fundamentals.

It was from here I started to produce studies that would help me improve, I also discovered literally hundreds of contemporary concept artists that have inspired me to this day. One of those in question is Craig Mullins.

portrait by Craig Mullins

untitled - Craig Mullins

Mullins is a perfect example of an artist that takes a very traditional approach to digital painting. I love his work for its painterly and loose style, focusing on an abstract and suggestive approach to creating work, as opposed to being very methodical and building up from lines etc. To me, his work shows that you don't need to over render in order to get your idea across, his paintings read well straight away without the need for minor details. He's always looking at the bigger picture and blocking in the main values of a painting. This is a thought process and style of painting that I have gradually come to pursue with my own work, I love it not only for its painterly look and broad strokes, but also because the process of creating a painting this way allows me to focus purely on
value, light and forms without the need for over-doing a painting.

To summarise, I guess I've always had some kind of affinity for art, however video games have aided me in narrowing down what it is that I like in particular, both in terms of subject matter and style. Discovering concept art via video games has introduced me to an ever growing amount of awesome artists who work in this industry, which in turn has inspired me to pursue my own goals to work in this field as an artist. At the end of the day though, I don't think it really means that much whether or not I actually land a job in the games industry, as it's far from being my 'end goal'. For instance, I don't think I would feel an ounce of satisfaction with a job in the games industry if I wasn't creating art that I enjoyed. Personally, I'm always going to be focused on improving my art wherever I am as it's something I will always enjoy as a hobby. To me, the career would be the bonus.



References 

Wesley Burt art:  http://wburtconcept.blogspot.co.uk/ and http://wesleyburt.tumblr.com/page/10

Craig mullins art: http://www.emptykingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Picture-7.jpg and http://www.goodbrush.com/