For those who enjoy taking a look at how some books are illustrated here´s an example of one from some years ago.
Usually I don´t storyboard much but sometimes when a narrative is based on details that visually need to be constructed with abstract items like splatters for stars, the visual composition needs to be cinematic and work from page to page, etc, I tend to plan the book ahead shot by shot as if it was a movie.
This is a good example of what I do. It´s all about the narrative and what a narrative needs and so each book presents it´s own challenges and needs different construction approaches so there´s not just one single method for me.
What follows is just an example of how was done for this one.
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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK
If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.
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luisperesillustrator@gmail.com
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My transition from traditional acrylics, watercolor and ink illustration into digital was realy difficult. A nightmare actually. For years I thought I was never going to be able to do it and I was condemned to work traditionally forever.
Many times I´ve tried to adapt to digital art with no sucess whatsoever as I worked in traditional illustration for more than a decade before and perhaps because of that, somehow I had tremendous dificulty in converting my original style to the digital age.
I tried many softwares and failed at all of them. Several times.
One day I became part of a project for an History book and I forced myself to do it entirely in digital, even though I had no clue of what I was doing or how I was going to do it. Fortunately I was working with an author friend of mine and so the whole thing was more like and experiment for me where “failure” was an option.
The result was a mismash of mixed results and the book looked different from page to page, as if many illustrators had worked on it and failed to some or many degrees. It got published nevertheless, it sold really well and it´s even now out of print which meant some readers out there must have liked it. Even though nowadays I find 99% of those illustrations almost embaracing as it´s still clear that I had no clue about what I was doing at that time and was just trying to paint digitaly out of fear of not being able to complete the task more than anything else.
For me in the end, it was an interesting project to learn how -not to illustrate- in digital. Nevertheless the end result, looking back now, still has some beginners charm in that -so bad , it´s good (?) – category.
You be the judge…
This book became something special in my own personal artistic evolution as it was from this “failed” experience I decided that I needed to really get the grasp with this digital thing even if it was the last thing I was going to do. Understanding –what not to do- in digital painting by forcing myself to illustrate “A Batalha do Arade” book, set me on the right path to finally learn how to do it properly; taking advantage of all the digital options out there that at the time I had no clue that existed in the digital realm. From this project I started to go online looking for places to learn and came across the fantastic youtube channel from the FZDSCHOOL which actually saved my life and set me on the right path. I totally recommend that channel to all the people who want to learn how to draw and paint in digitial but not only.
As for my failed “A Batalha do Arade” book project, I just thought it was fun to share this here as the blog should also be about my failures and not just about the stuff that I get right. 😉
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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK
If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.
***
luisperesillustrator@gmail.com
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CONTACT
Not exactly my usual theme (I hate chickens) , but here´s a chicken pic I illustrated for a marketing studio sometime ago. This is the current campaign for an egg farm company here in Portugal using one of the images I did for their – Happy Chicken – brand.
I don´t have the image version they picked here with me , which was the second version I did for them but it was all based on this original below.
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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK
If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.
***
luisperesillustrator@gmail.com
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CONTACT
First animatics test I ever created for a company project I was working for several years ago. It´s just an extremely rough-draft type thing/animated storyboard animatics to plan an intro animation for a children book interactive educational product at the time.
This was done for the “Afonsinho Explica” (“Learn with Afonsinho”) Project for the Eixo Filosófico portuguese publishing company and it was Test 000 before we started on the actual animation.
The whole thing was created in Blender at the time, but the project ended up going into another direction and so I never got to refine anything of what you see here above in this initial test.
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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK
If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.
***
luisperesillustrator@gmail.com
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CONTACT
This is a peculiar old project. Although I tend to work mostly in traditional illustration even when it´s done in digital, now and then someone asks me to do a more graphic project, based on mixed techniques such as this one which is a blend of photobashing and digital painting. I don´t have the final images anymore as I lost a few of my old archives but I discover these on my facebook today and I thought it would be interesting to share it here also. Some are from a work in progress, others not ( a bunch of fonts were naturally replaced for the final images ) ; but this is a good depiction of my illustration when I´m given more graphic material to create, although I haven´t done a project like this in ages.
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I apologise for the lack of updates on this blog with recent projects but when I´m silent that means I´ve been busy and so as most stuff I´m doing at the moment needs to be kept confidential for some time for contractual reasons this means I tend to only have old work to post here for a while. 😉
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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK
If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.
***
luisperesillustrator@gmail.com
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CONTACT
These are a few images out of a children book project I did last year. This was a fun one because it allowed me to do a bunch of scenery and background artwork as those are my favorite things when it comes to illustration.
And here are a few vertical variations for the same project. As this was done for Ipad, I had to create horizontal and vertical versions of the paintings; also to be used on Iphone and such. So here´s some of the vertical versions for the pics above.
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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK
If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.
***
luisperesillustrator@gmail.com
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“GAMBYS” – 1993/95 – THE FIRST PROFESSIONALLY PRODUCED PORTUGUESE PC GAME – Video Games History / Retro Gaming : A look back in time.
A long, long time ago…
In the year 1993, a couple years before the Internet really took off as we know it, in a time where 486 PCs at 66MHZ where the rule, the first PC Portuguese Video game was planned by a little group of people who didn´t knew any better.
Windows 95 was yet to be ( yes kids, no (real) windows either back then ), the DOS operating system drove people crazy with all those written commands that most no one had any clue about what they meant and 3D-STUDIO had just been released and was heading for version 2.0; in DOS of course. Yes, you read it well, 3D Studio 2.0 for DOS.
3D modelling, rendering and animation were still very limited back then if you tried to create something “home-made style” but nevertheless we went through with the project despite that sometimes a single frame could take more than 48 hours to render on an old 486 PC at 33MHZ back then. Now imagine my task of having to create about 20 animations with about 15 seconds ! You don´t wanna know…
GAMBYS took about three years to make also because of this. Nowadays we could do it in a couple of months.
Here´s a gallery with some of the frames taken out of the animations I did back then; crap by today´s standarts but at the time getting this out of the hardware we had back then was an achievment because no one was using 3D images as we were trying to do. We soon learn why too.
We tried to use 3D Studio to create the most we could although the in game graphics were done pixel by pixel in DPaint by me also…frame by frame, pixel by pixel.
It was a small team, just me for the graphics, concept art, animation, graphic design, about three or four programmers and a few in-house beta-testers.
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Back then, no online videos, no facebook, no social media, no internet.
Just PC computers that a couple years back only had those pre-historic green screens but back in 1993 they were starting to handle 256 colors ! Wow ! A PC computer with a color screen ! How crazy was that !!
And we even had CD Roms and everything !!
Games on CDs ! Damn !!
Photoshop was just a name as the software was less known than Deluxe Paint for DOS, no Instagram, no Facebook, no World of Warcraft, no game consoles and not even a third wheel on the pc mouse yet. Yes, a mouse with two buttons only !
In short…pre-history.
I joined the team for the Gambys project, but I had played many of these ZX Spectrum games without ever knowing they had been made not only in Portugal but in my own hometown. Mainly, games like Krall and Alien Evolution.
But by 1993/94, ZX Spectrum had been dead for a while, PCs were starting to emerge as game machines and Lemmings the videogame was the latest craze in 256 colors.
2D puzzle games were about what PCs could technicaly handle and so the natural idea within our group as to create something like that as the first Portuguese PC Videogame.
Getting professional with GAMBYS
So ©Gambys was the first serious and 100% professional attempt by friends who invented games in Portugal, to create computer video games that could compare to the best that was coming from England in the PC Puzzle area at the time; mainly from Psygnosis and Virgin Games. The objective was to make the most professional game we could do with the little resources we had and not a great amount of money from the company wich was investing on the project to work with.
It was also a technical challenge because, at the time GAMBYS was aiming to be the first, or one of the first games in the world of PC gaming, to display 65.000 colors on screen, as the norm was still the old 256 colors. And it did that in the end.
The game was going to be released outside Portugal , either by Virgin Games or Psygnosis at the time, as we had several meetings with people the companies sent to check out our work in-house but unffortunely we completed the game right at the time that WINDOWS 95 came out and suddenly nobody wanted to release DOS Games anymore as there was that new thing called Windows and so we ended up releasing the game only in Portugal and Spain. Good reviews though, got to be game of the month in several magazines and all that but Windows was really a big proble for us.
The game made its money back but the company went into hospitality software for the next years as bussiness software was easier to do and a lot more immediate when it comes to money results and so GAMBYS ended up becoming not only the first Portuguese PC game ever produced professionally in Portugal but also the only game we did at the time.
Also the Internet was still in the begining and so no social media to promote games, and for a small independent company really far from Lisbon the Portuguese capital it was almost impossible to promote a project like this.
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What is GAMBYS ?
©GAMBYS, looks like a puzzle video game at first glance, but it´s really an arcade game where the puzzle bit is just what makes things move in the gameplay.
A gameplay unique up to this day.
Many puzzle games have appeared before and after but, I never found anything similar to what we´ve achieved here with GAMBYS on the many years of gaming around.
Also by reading the many emails I still get about this project to this day, ( a few dozens a year sometimes ) it seems the opinion remains a generalized one among those who have played and to this day people still blog about it (Pt).
It´s dificult to explain what´s this game about. Here are the main characters:
Gamby Wizard
(watch video)
Can be considered the leader of the Gambys as its the character wich can give you the most effective help when you need to uncover all the puzzle pieces in the game.
Depending on the color combination of magic potions you can grab with your mouse and give to him, this Gamby Wizard will cast a different spell wich will help you to complete each stage.
Gamby Mover
(watch video)
Once you get a piece of a puzzle by clicking on your right mouse button, you can click on Gamby Mover with the left one and he will take your puzzle piece and he´ll place it at the exact right spot for you.
Gamby Finder
(watch video)
It´s not as easy as it seems because, remember you still have to deal with all the other stuff that happens in the same time in the game, but it helps.
Gamby Defuser
(watch video)
first place. So this Gamby, defuses these bombs when point him to one of those.
Gamby Knight
(watch video)
There are three Gamby fighters that will help you to remove the evil characters out of screen. Each warrior Gamby has its own strenght and fighting skill.
Gamby Knight is the strong one and the one who causes more damage on the evil dudes.
You use this Gambys to defend the life of the ones who help you to solve the puzzle.
Gamby Rocky
(watch video)
Not too strong but enough to prevent the evil dudes from attacking the other Gambys that are there to help you with the puzzle pieces. Click on Gamby Rocky and then click on a bad guy and this dude will punch it away.
Gamby Robin
(watch video)
Gamby Girl
(watch video)
This gamby female is considered a sort of a neutral character in the game.It won´t help you in solving the puzzles or attack the evil character, but each time she passes by and a male Gamby sees her, he might forget what he was doing for you in the first place and go crazy for a couple of seconds wich ususaly ends up in him forgeting the last command.
If you haven´t played it or never got at least past the intro levels which are just there to help you understand what each character does, you probably won´t believe GAMBYS is trully an addictive arcade video game lost in video game history.
Despite the excelent video game reviews it got in its 1995 release, it´s not one of those games that is reflected well on a video. You have to play it to really grasp it.
Watching videos without having played GAMBYS probably will leave you confused and believing this to have some sort of random empty gameplay.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
As many people who have played it can testify, you have to really play it past the first few tutorial levels to get hooked, but once you´re caught you´re doomed and you find yourself having to play just one more level of this insane unknown classic arcade video game.
Actually…
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Still ALIVE !
Myself and the game programmers, were convinced that GAMBYS was technicaly a dead old DOS used video game and was never to be seen moving on the screen ever again. But then…
In this little “secluded Gambys fan club” that generated spontaneously over the years, there were people wich actualy have put togheter “new” old 486 just to play ©GAMBYS again if you can believe that because up untill now no DOS Box (or similar video game emulators) could run GAMBYS on modern computers. Among those, there were a couple of computer video games Gamby fans who didn´t gave up on trying to bring the game back to life on new machines and so now, thanks to “Haruka Tavares“, with the use of “Virtual Machine” I can announce that today GAMBYS, can still be played on your laptop if you´re searching to download old video games.
Many thanks also to Nelson/”Chaos” (who designed the game levels), for providing me with all the stuff to be able to also run the video game in an alternate way, based on the technical original info sent to us by Haruka.
I´ll be providing a download link for the game as soon as I can find a server to host the three zip files. Also in the future I´ll post all the instructions on how to run the game when I make it available of course.
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Stay tuned. GAMBYS news soon.
There will be news about this in the near future but don´t tell anyone yet. 😉
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/gambys/
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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK
If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.
***
luisperesillustrator@gmail.com
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CONTACT
Just a glimpse of what I can show out of an old project for what was to be an upcoming new publishing company years ago but which I never got to ear from anymore. They had a bunch of titles to release but somehow things seem to have been halted until now. Less uncommon than people tend to think actually.
So anyway, here´s a few sample pages from what I can show you of this one project I did for them at the time.
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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK
If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.
***
luisperesillustrator@gmail.com
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CONTACT
POETRY BOOK ILLUSTRATION – MIX MEDIA – Traditional / Digital… and more….
These are a few images I created several years ago for a poetry book which is something that does not come my way often. Poetry is the most difficult thing in the world to illustrate because the original source material is always so personal that when it comes to translate the poet emotions into something visual the end result ends up becoming very subjective.
Because of that, I knew I simply could not just do a regular drawing as that would be the easy way out and what most everyone does in this cases. Also because I knew that if I did it fully digital that would turn everything a bit artificial which contrasted too much with the poetry so the solution was to go with a crazy mix between : traditional pencil drawing / digital painting / digital texture work / photoshop “shapes” / photoshop “watercolor” brushes / clipart items ( like some silhouetes for example ) and then scan and mix everything in Photoshop, painting on top of that to give the final touch.
Book available here at the publisher : https://www.arandiseditora.pt/products/cenas-maradas/
Poetry by Fátima Peres ( non related Radio Host personality at Rádio Foia / Algarve-Portugal ) 🙂
Art and graphic design by Luis Peres, regular dude and starving artist.
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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK
If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.
***
luisperesillustrator@gmail.com
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CONTACT
Secondary concept art / sketchbook tests or illustrations I didn´t used.
When you work fulltime in illustration you end up doing a ton of stuff you never show anyone. Either test pics, speedpainting images, illustration experiments or just loose sketches created for fun, each illustrator has plenty of stuff like which mostly never gets to see the light of day.
In this batch now, there´s some test pics, illustration I didn´t liked, illustration I like but didn´t used because I want to create better versions, or early color tests, pics I did just to illustrate video tutorials, sketchbook color stuff, etc.
Some people out there are of the opinion that an artist should never reveal his inferior artwork or –making of– test pieces because that can give a wrong impression of his work quality in general to potential clients out there. I do not agree.
I´ve always showcased my best and my worst stuff all over the places and I never got less clients or commissions because of that. In fact people like to see that illustrators are not those magic crafters that can come up with imaginary worlds out of thin air when they want and so I like to let people see that I have plenty of stuff done which is just as bad or regular as any other person out there.
I have a lot more regular pieces like this spread around my “failed pics” folders through out my hardrives and so now and then I´ll show you more, for now hope you have enjoyed these.
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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK
If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for an affordable children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work on a pod project ( I do not descriminate print on demand material for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.
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luisperesillustrator@gmail.com
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CONTACT
Very Old Doodles and Sketches and stuff 1…
Sketches I did back on my army days or earlier back in the late 80s early 90s perhaps…
I found an old folder with some small scans of a few images of mine done more than 25 years ago most of them. I was trying to find the old pics to do a better scan but I don´t have time right now. Nevertheless I wanted to showcase here this stuff as it´s a good depiction of not only my love for fantasy landscapes and for creating fantasy worlds either related to children book material or simply as concept art doodles and color tests.
Some of these images go way back before 1992 of course at the time I was with the army and many of these “epic” landscapes were sketched in small sheets of paper I had around at my HQ back then, some on the back of anything I could find.
Here it goes, sorry about the image sizes but it´s what I could find.
Of course a lot of these was way before digital; ( yes kids, no phones, apps, social media or wifi ); at the time the most advanced computer had been the Sinclair ZX SPECTRUM a few years back and so when I created most of these images I never even could dream that one day I would be sharing them with the world in a sci-fi thing called THE INTERNET.
So here they go. I have a lot more in my physical paper archives but I need to find and scan them. Maybe one of these days I´l start remaking some of these landscapes just for fun.
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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK
If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for a children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work no a pod project even ( I do not descriminate print on demand for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.
***
luisperesillustrator@gmail.com
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CONTACT
“THE ADVENTURES OF DEWI TRIDWR” : Old Book Illustration project.
This is another old one. It´s actually one of the first books I did in digital when I was transitioning from traditional illustration.
This book ( with the exception of one pic ) was entirely finger painted on IPad2, using one of my favorite painting apps there, and old version of ArtRage. I did about 80 pics for the project and so here´s some of them.
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AVAILABLE FOR ILLUSTRATION WORK
If you are a potential illustration client, if you are looking for a children book artist , concept illustrator or need a freelance artist to work no a pod project even ( I do not descriminate print on demand for sure; I love it ); do not forget to take a look at my illustration portfolio (Fantasy or Childrens Book art ) and I´m always available to discuss future work.
If you have a dream, no matter what your budget is don´t hesitate to contact me and let´s see what we can do.
***
luisperesillustrator@gmail.com
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CONTACT
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