This website contains the art of Ty Grenier, including digital and traditional full illustrations, sketches, works in progress, and anything else he deems cool enough to show to everybody.
I've been trying to record one big tutorial finishing up the Overwatch piece with Mercy and Reinhardt, but given a lot of different factors I decided to split it into two or three videos. Here's the first. Learn how to use gradient maps to speed up the process of making backgrounds!
Currently about 2 hours of work away from being able to start the tutorial parts of this piece. That's why it looks slightly weird, with different pieces in different styles: I'm setting it up specifically to make tutorials for 3 different things. It will all come together nicely in the end.
Tutorial parts I want to cover:
Overwatch fanart: Mercy and Reinhardt on Watchpoint Gibraltar. Soon to be finished.
Here's where the Mercy piece stands as of right now. I'm going out of town for a few days for RTX in Austin, so I won't be able to work on this. BUT, I'll be trying to talk to the art department people and see what they're looking for in an artist that maybe I haven't shown yet. Let them know I'm serious about trying to work there and whatnot.
An Overwatch scene: Mercy helping Reinhardt protect his flank with a cool and calm demeanor. #battleangel
Here's another two days' worth of 10-min studies from movie stills. A couple actually went over the 10 minutes by a little because my timer got messed up. I bet you can't guess what movie!
Studies don't have to be finished drawings...they don't even have to look good at all. The point is that you're focusing on one or two things, and isolating those thing. As soon as you start worrying about what the picture looks like (like I have to fight myself about) you impede your progress on the things you actually need to work on.
Just keep drawing, drawing, drawing!
Got some very useful advice and a game plan from an illustrator I look up to, Dan Warren. It's going to mean any work you see for a while will be slower to update, but after a few months the life in my drawings and speed should be much better.
The basic rundown: PER DAY
6 ten-minute drawings from movie still or pictures, something with natural poses and movement
-focus on getting an accurate representation in ten minutes. It's not going to look "good" but it will improve speed
1 hour-long rendering session
-set up a still life with interesting lighting, or copy a master painting. Again, it's not going to look fantastic. The goal is to be easily recognizable, and learn to make big artistic decisions more quickly
Then of course continue working on personal work, applying the things I learn from studies. This plan should help me quicken my art a lot, and also keep my pieces from being too stiff. If I can do it, you freaking can too.
Here are the first set of ten minute drawings. See how bad they are? But they are going to be helping me get faster with my work, so...not ashamed to post them, if people want to see them.
So, I work a "normal" job to pay bills: night audit at a hotel front desk. While I'm there, I am allowed to use my personal computer. I'm not sure if the internet will be good enough to pull it off, but tonight I'll try streaming there. If it works, it will give me a few more hours per night for circadian-challenged people like myself to pop in and say hi.
Here's progress on the Mercy piece. All other non-art projects that have been taking up so much time lately are finished, so I'll be working on finishing this within the next week.
I also changed around my Patreon: all content is now free, and any contributions are optional. I'm going to be making videos anyway, since I enjoy it, and the one dollar minimum contribution to see my content seemed like a silly thing for me to ask for that just potentially kept people away.
I'm really going to be making a push to draw and stream every day, even if it's only for an hour (or whatever amount of time I end up having). Due to my normal job, I'll usually be streaming between 4pm and 9:30pm MST. Here's my channel, follow my Facebook art page and/or Twitter to get a notification when I go live.
Tonight was about two hours, during which I started this drawing of Mercy from Overwatch. I absolutely love the characters. And the environment design. And...well, I have yet to find something about the game that isn't visually appealing.
I've been working on some commissions, one of which I posted here (the beer growler logo) and another that's not illustration related. Money has been TIGHT trying to deal with car maintenance and whatnot. I'm trying to plan how I'm going to pay for my trip to Austin, Texas for RTX in July, so I've been taking whatever jobs I can.
Any way, I was able to work on Yrel a little bit more today between the other projects. I want to speed up my process a lot, but this one is taking me a while. Lots of nitpicky redrawing and fidgeting. I finally got her face looking less broken, so I've gotta knock out the rest of her armor, spiff up the background to have a little more interest, a few other things... and then I'll probably call it good.
In June I plan to do some more RWBY characters, and attempt to follow the style and process of "Artgerm" Stanley Lau.
More progress on Yrel from World of Warcraft's Warlords of Draenor expansion. I like the Vindicator armor a little better than her Exarch armor, with its moving bits.
I was recently commissioned to create a logo for use on beer growlers and other merchandise at a store back home in Alaska. It needed to be vector.
After suppressing the urge to vomit over using Illustrator, I sat down and did a large chunk of the work in Photoshop. Once I had it laid out as well as I could in Photoshop with a large resolution and separate layers, I moved it over to Illustrator, converted it to vector, and then spent another large chunk of time fixing what the conversion process couldn't do correctly.
All in all, I'm happy with it. I think it will look nice on the brown glass. Here I just laid the image over a picture of a growler to get the right color behind. Let me know what you think!
Yep, I've joined the masses in starting a Patreon page! This website will still be a good way to keep up on what I've got going on, but for regular tutorials, PSD's, and more it's gonna cost you, punks!
If your wallet is as empty as mine, don't worry...I've got everything lumped into one 1$/month tier. Of course, sending more money is always an option. I can promise it will go towards getting out of my current job sitting at a hotel desk all night, and spending more time creating MORE content for everybody. That's a stinkin' win-win if ever I heard one.
Oh, here have a look at what I'm messing with right now. When she's done I'll be gently animating it like a fancy splash screen.
Yrel (AKA Female Maraad) from World of Warcraft
After WAY more revisions than what should have been necessary, and many hours figuring out how After Effects works, I give you the intro to my future art videos!
Also, be on the lookout for a big announcement coming soon.
This used to be a black and white image without a background. I tweaked quite a bit, added a lot, and I'm calling it done. For some reason my website won't let me upload this to my finished gallery right now, so hopefully it will work here...
Pyrrha Nikos, from the show RWBY
So for reasons that will shortly be revealed, I've spent all day today learning the basics of After Effects. Here is my little practice video, which I am WAY to excited about for what it is.
It's always nice to take a break from what you're working on, go do something else, and come back and see the hundreds of problems with your work. Some people work for an hour and take a 15 minute break, adjusting as they go. This is probably smarter, as it keeps you from wandering too far from the end goal; it's also what I want to start doing. Other people, like myself right now, work for hours and then have to take a lot longer of a break before looking at that piece again AT ALL.
So here's some progress I've made to the cute little character I've been making. I fixed and softened some anatomy, worked up some values, and generally made her less...demonic, and more cute. She still kicks some butt, though.
I've been working on getting my characters figured out in my head: who they are, what their backstory is, how they act...what they look like :P I have various levels of early progress on each one, but this one has come together pretty easily so far. That's why I've gone ahead and started a more refined portrait of her, a cropped part of which you can see below. She's going to be a weird mixture of super cute and absolutely savage. She's got a lot of influence from...well, just about every female gnome Ian McConville has ever drawn. If you don't know who that is, find his and Matt Boyd's current webcomic here and their older one from college days here. They're both amazing.
A cropped work in progress for one of my characters
Also I guess I never posted anything about this? It's some Blood Elf mage from World of Warcraft that I was testing out some techniques with. Will it ever get finished? PROBABLY NOT KEK