1 Year of Altar Stone

While I haven’t been doing my weekly art practice while on vacation, there has still been a lot of projects on the go as well as our 1 year anniversary of Altar Stone.

I haven’t posted all of the art I’ve done for Altar Stone as it’s split between multiple iPads and computers at this point. But the anniversary feels like a good time to put in the effort to gather them into a post.

It was also Drawclass week last week so I’ll share my progress of trying to follow along to portrait painting.

A year in review

Our first Altar Stone video went up on August 23rd 2023. I believe I’ve mentioned in the past that this was just going to be a static image until my wife took a shot at animating the sword in the octopus’s arm. That launched the animation project that Altar Stone has become for me. We’ve gone from PowerPoint, to multiple different animation apps to now learning the Godot game engine to try out different animation flows.

In the last year we’ve published 13 videos, some of which reused assets as alternate themes of a song released. Putting us at a little more than 1 video per month. We both have art and music in the pipeline waiting to be paired so I’d say our real total is closer to 15 videos.

We’ve been brainstorming ways to make Altar Stone into a product and have some ideas for the next year. We’ve already started by adding some homebrew magic items paired to each song. We’re going to wrap up Songs in the Key of Sea as our first album / completed playlist, and we’ll start packaging that either on our own site or somewhere people can purchase it to have .mp3 versions of the songs to use outside of YouTube. Maybe we’ll entertain the idea of commissioned work, but pricing a whole thing. We’ve even set up a Ko-fi for people to support the project, which was first motivated by people asking what to get us as wedding gifts, we encouraged them to support our project.

For my own artistic goals with the project, I’m hoping to learn more Godot for the videos. Our first pixel art/Godot video got nearly 100 views in the first 24 hours, with us only sharing it with our friends. So the algorithm liked something about it to suggest it to other viewers. Easily the largest day 1 response we’ve seen to a video. But I also feel like if I can get the fundamentals of Godot down I can create videos faster as it’s often much easier than animating my ideas by hand.

I’m also considering doing some still backgrounds. I’ve been learning a lot of animation for the last few months, which has led to practising different artistic skills. Non-animated backgrounds will give me a chance to play around with more ambitious paintings and scenes that are beyond my ability to animate in a month.

So one year into this project and it feels like we’re still gathering steam. Last month we even started a Trello board to better track the pieces that are in the works. The 2nd year of Altar Stone should be an exciting one.

Latest Altar Stone release

We released a new Altar Stone video a few days ago. Sophie’s approach to mermaid music as I had finished the art a few months before she started to work on the music so she had some imply direction already.

I’m happy with a lot of this piece. I spent a lot of time trying to make a convincing stone texture on the walls and on the mermaid statue. Did some research into options for the water flowing from the pot and I feel like it sells really well for one of the simpler approaches to moving water. Feeling like the falling water, the drops, and the surface water wasn’t enough for a scene I then added the little crab to practise some frame by frame animation (where you draw each iteration of the thing moving each frame).

Portraits with Julia Drawclass

The monthly Drawfee Drawclass was portraits this month. I almost didn’t attend because portraits have never been my thing and I was in the middle of making tater tots when the class started. But Sophie encouraged me to go sit down and I ended up enjoying it a lot.

Julia covered some of the main things to keep in mind and how to approach a portrait, emphasising the importance of your sketch and having good, high quality reference photos. Julia was using a version of this still from Glass Onion and I Googled my own version for following along but suspect I didn’t get a high quality one as I didn’t want to spend too much time searching.

There wasn’t enough time to get through the whole process, she covered all the blocking in and then started to blend/paint the skin. This is how far I got:

I’m honestly surprised at how well it came together with just blending the blocks together, it’s already starting to look like a face.

I returned to it a little bit in the days after the class. We didn’t cover eyes, hair, or lips during the class so I was afraid to get to those. First attempt on lips feels bad, first pass on hair also felt bad. To the point where I felt like I was starting to lose Daniel Craig’s face. But the eyes! I feel like the eyes came out super well on the first try, not even taking that much time.

This went smoothly enough that I would consider doing other portraits from reference in the future. But I still don’t feel like I know how to approach hair which will hold me back for a bit.

Art talk by Aleksander Rostov

Aleksander Rostov was the Art Director on Disco Elysium, a game that has some extremely beautiful and messed up art in it. His talk focuses on the piece of composition and design, going over how they are the pieces that you use, alter, change, or ignore, to create your own style. I had hoped he’d spend some time talking about his personal workflow or how things came together in the game but the talk was fairly focused on understanding the board fundamentals. But Rostov is a pretty interesting speaker, so it made for an entertaining talk even when being familiar with the concepts.

Conclusion

Next week I’m back to weekly art practice now that life is returning to a regular pace. But I’m breaking from the classic format once again, this time to do a week of material / texture studies.