Here we are, starting out summer right. It’s been a productive year so far, artistically and professionally. As I demand more detail in my own artwork, it also demands more time, so I have fewer pieces to show, but the pieces I have worked on I am very proud of. Check out the gallery for updates and the pieces that I have worked on thus far!
My newest Orbicular piece, soon to be available as a print!
This is all besides the fact that I am not an artist alone, but rather an artist, a musician, a father and husband, a writer, and a damn good home cook. I see growth in any of these fields as growth in all of these fields. It’s the holistic approach that works for me. It also staves off burnout, since I am not dedicating myself to any one thing for too long. The flip side of this is that it can make it harder to work on larger projects and maintain laser focus; this does not bother me as much, since on this front I am my own boss and I am very generous with my deadlines. As long as things are getting done, I’m happy.
Artistically, I have learned more about shading, workflow, animation, and the overall business side of it. Musically, I have learned how to better use loops to make songs, and I feel more confident than ever playing live on stream. Speaking of my stream, I have added gaming to the lineup. My setup is getting closer and closer to what I would consider “professional”, so I can add more and more content and feel like I’m contributing something meaningful. Mondays I stream animation and artwork, Thursdays I play keyboard and work on music loops, and every other day (and nights, usually very late) I can play some games! Lately I have been playing a Dark Souls 1 randomizer run, and I want stream more interesting mods of popular games in the future. It’s a challenge in every sense… but I don’t know how to stop creating.
Oh and I have a new mic! A Yeti Blue! Makes me sound so much better than the microphone I was using before, which was actually part of my headset. I even have a pop screen. That makes it so I can draw and play piano and most of that white noise just disappears. I listen to myself on the stream recordings afterwards and you can really tell there is a great deal of improvement. Makes it easier to do everything!
Thanks for coming by. Godrod Studios is still active and happy. Here’s a sketch of Domo to keep you warm at night until next time!
Hi everyone. Time for another minor update before I go HAM on a larger one.
Reeling from the news from yesterday about the school shooting. I’m not just tired of the killings, I am tired of the overwhelming inaction, the tacit acceptance of death. We saw it with the (still ongoing) pandemic, we see it with gun violence, and soon we will see it as climate disaster grows more and more dire. People my age and younger have never seen a functional Congress or judiciary, and it is very obvious to most of us that there is no incentive for them to improve the lives of the general population.
I wish I knew the answers to all of our problems. I don’t. I know the addiction to infinite growth on a finite planet will kill us all. Personally, I have stopped eating beef and I am cutting down considerably on other meats, I only drive when there is no other option, and I minimize water and electricity use. I took the pandemic seriously and did everything I could to assure that I would not unintentionally kill others, by getting vaccinated and wearing masks and staying out of enclosed public places. That is what I can do personally, in my small sphere. It is so, so hard to think that I am making any difference, and I know I am not alone in that feeling.
With all this in mind, I had to refuse a few commission ideas recently because they wanted to portray suicide. Light hearted, jokey suicide, but that still sat wrong with me. And I have been working on things that are actually rather violent and grim! It’s a personal line that I cannot cross anymore. Long ago I had a character I would draw called Dex, and he had a friend named Suicidal Vinny who would perpetually have a pistol pointed at his own head as he went about his day. Vinny would take any opportunity to end it all by firing the gun, but some twist of fate always intervened to save his life. That was high school and in retrospect, it was coming from a very dark place. As an adult I would rather not feed these sorts of thoughts, and I certainly do not want to create a looping animation of graphic self-harm. My current limit for what I will do is “Looney Tunes but with optional gore”.
Lastly, things I would like to get done on this site:
Update the PixelArt page. I have done more pixel art animation than anything lately and I need to showcase that more clearly
Facelift the site completely? This is one of those things that is both more and less work than it sounds.
Update my Commissions Page to be more beautiful and user-friendly
Hi everyone, I’m writing again! The piece has been completed, and I can now go into all the details about the process! Just like last time, I will speak about the progression, my thought process, and what details I chose to add or omit. Let’s take a look!
v10. 2022 godrod studios, Ben Sutter
We left on version 9, and version 10 is not all that different from afar. However, this is the point where the placement and coloration was more or less set. I decided begin the long process of inking the piece. I went to my sloppy rough draft inks that I used to block the piece out, set them to a lower opacity (20-50% depending on the colors beneath it) and went in with a finer brush. All that mattered at this point was getting in the fine lines. I would go by my original inks, while looking at a photo reference. In some cases, I would literally plop the reference on the piece and trace over portions of it. I did that for maybe 15% of the linework, but most of it was done by hand.
The strip was one of the first areas where I started inking in. I also did the Casino signs to help me lock in the style I was looking for.
v11, godrod studios, Ben Sutter 2022
I moved up and around, inking in all the areas in their final positions. In version 11 I completed the rest of the Strip, REPCONN, some of Goodsprings, and more. I blocked in a little color on the strip to make sure my dark areas were not disruptive. These next few versions look like tiny changes, but it was the backbone of everything that was yet to come. If we zoom in on the REPCONN facility, we can see the differences that an hour of linework can make:
The rough inks, to establish scale and color
Final inks. Much finer lines, much cleaner presentation.
Once we hit v12, the colors help define edges, and reduce the need for thick outlines
See the difference between the rough and final drafts? It’s pretty major. I think I could save myself time in the future by keeping my rough drafts even rougher. You can see in the third image above that the established palette was paying dividends, allowing me to quickly describe the space without having to rely heavily on references for colors.
v12, godrod studios, Ben Sutter 2022.
Step 5: Giving New Vegas Weight
Now we are starting to see some leaps and bounds in terms of settling on detail! At this point, most all of the linework has been completed. This includes the solar panels (but not the guns) in the foreground. Clockwise from the Strip, I have completed the major locations except the Fort, Nipton, Primm, and Quarry Junction. I also realized around this time that the white cross in the center of the piece was in the wrong location; in the end it was cut from the piece, since moving it would create too much interest smashed into the right side of the piece.
I inked and colored all of this area at once. Note the unfinished town by the dinosaur statue
v13, godrod studios, Ben Sutter 2022
There was, at this point, what I like to call the “work” part of “artwork”. There was lots of linework that took place in very small spaces, so progress felt very slow. I would take a break on one area and work on another if I got restless. Often during the hop from version 13 to 15, I would find myself contouring the land, trying to make each town feel like an attractive space of its own. At some point I picked up all of Goodsprings and shifted it to the left, and I used that time to cut the Yangtze memorial cross out of the piece. I also shifted the brown bottle in the foreground into the frame a little bit, since it was interesting and recognizable.
In this period of time, I did a great deal of work on the Fort, the foreground elements, and in tightening up my colors. We decided to add a little bit of flavor to Red Rock Canyon, which was not an original plan. The addition of the red color was welcome though, and it let us add a little more Fallout flavor to the piece. What was once intended to be just a red cliff turned into a very neat visual element, that also steers us through the piece via colors (more on that at the end!) I thought I was almost done at this point, but I had 5 more versions left!
v15, godrod studios, Ben Sutter 2022
Step 6: One Million Finishing Touches, and a discussion on Palette
By this point I had been working on the piece for several weeks. Deciding that I needed to wrap this up, I started to add details. It was time to add characters populating the world, shade and light. Throughout all of it, I was happy I had the foresight to start a palette early, as it greatly reduced friction. I didn’t have to stop and think about every new city or landscape portion; I looked at the palette and applied it as needed. There are, of course, a few off-label colors, primarily in signage and the strip, but for the most part the entire final drawing is limited to the 28 colors you see here:
12 in the “brown-yellow” group 6 in the “red” group 3 in the green group 7 in the blue group
The brown yellows were the most diverse color group since they had so much to describe. They are used for buildings, the desert, the mountains, and more. I chose the colors to be moderately desaturated, for two reasons. One, I think that it reflects the mood and the actual darkness of the game itself. Two, bright yellows can appear gaudy and bright if they are not mixed with some gray, especially when they are printed! In addition, the desaturated colors will mix well into browns as you add more and more black into the mix. As a result, the piece has a harmony to it from the continuous spread of colors from the bright white-yellow to the darkest browns.
The reds I called “Sloan reds”, since I came up with the colors while working on the rusted and painted metal that made up that small town. Red was sparsely used in this piece, but when we look at the finished piece we can see that it had an impact in the way it draws attention across the piece diagonally.
The blues were vital for shading the mountain, New Vegas Strip, and the foreground. Most of the linework was done in the darkest blue color. I try to avoid using straight-up black lines, since they end up standing out too much. I ended up using blue for anything that I needed to describe as glass, metal, or water.
v16, godrod studios, Ben Sutter 2022
v18, godrod studios, Ben Sutter 2022
The versions look really close to one another now, so I will skip ahead from v16 to v18. The big differences are in the landscape near the statues in the back, the glow-up of the Lucky 38 tower (the big blue one), and making the Strip look more lived-in and full of life. I also was going in, adding additional shadows and linework. You can see that I started adding hatchwork into the landscape, blending areas together and making the piece look more unified. It can be a struggle to take so many disparate elements and make a single composition with them.
v20, Ben Sutter 2022, godrod studios. This is the final!
All of that work got us to here! While I am excited to speak about the final, I think this article is already very long. I will follow up soon with a short discussion about the color choices, and my goals in getting the eye to wander over the piece. Thanks for reading! Please check out the rest of my work, send me a message, leave a comment, order a drawing for yourself!
That means adding another gallery page, uploading some recent content, and this, me writing more about art.
Sometime in November I was approached by a friend who wanted a large-scale piece done for a game we both love. Fallout: New Vegas is the best Fallout game, and in my book is one of the best games period. It hit that sweet spot for me: That sickly sweet nostalgia for an America that never existed, the barren world populated by lively characters who were making ends meet, the morally grey choices that had a measurable impact on the world. And the ENDING! That ending is impossible top for me. It’s the most replayable RPG ever made if only for the staggering array of different outcomes of your various factions and allies. A true masterpiece, the “Fury Road” of Fallouts, you could say.
The Fallout: new Vegas Steam page banner.
Step 1: Concept
We started with a seemingly simple and humble idea: a landscape drawing of the New Vegas, highlighting a few important places within the game world and acting as an attractive piece of wall art. After making the crucial decision of the final size and resolution of the piece, I started with this very simple concept:
version 0 of the piece, one step beyond just *thinking* about the idea
version 1 of the piece, once we decided on more specifics
I then got some feedback from the client, and we starting thinking about how this would look, and what details were important (and which could be left out completely). What colors would be used? How much detail should be added?
v2. You can see where some more contrast and coloring choices were made at this point.
Step 2: Blocking Out Space and Making a Color Plan
Alright! Now we had more than an idea: there was a PLAN. And thus began the long process of getting a rough draft completed. I call v2 a ‘color draft’, something intended to guide the overall look of the piece. At this point you can step back from the piece and do a “squint test”: narrow your eyes and take in the overall shape of the piece. Ask questions like: where is the focal point? Does my eye want to carry through and look at the whole piece? Do any parts stand out as being out of place, or too bright, or disruptive to the pieces flow? Now is the time to correct issues like that!
v3, the beginnings of the rough draft. The colors were temporarily muted to make tracing shapes easier.
So now in v3 we can see that we are deciding less on color choice and more on *placement*. Even though I am laying down inks, this is still a rough draft. In retrospect, I could have directly went in with references and drawn everything ‘perfectly’ the first time around. This was a learning experience, and I could save myself many hours in the future by referencing up first.
Speaking on color choice, you can see in v3 the first instance of the color palette. It really pays to lock in an attractive palette early, as it will prevent you from encountering garish or sloppy color clashes after you have already spent hours on a piece! My graphic design instincts say “You can always color correct afterwards”, my illustration instincts instead say “Pick the colors consciously and people will notice that choice”. In the end, you are free to do both (color correction AND thoughtful palette choice)
v5, getting more advanced now!
By this version, you can see most of the locations are blocked out. I was still deciding on the most attracting topography for the area, and working on the “final colors” layer. The “final colors” layer was my topmost layer of pixels that would actually be seen in the final piece. In v5 you can see those sorts of inks in the casino in front of the Black Mountain region, and in Helios One. I did the Kings as well!
Step 3: Additional Research Required
At this point I should mention the power of REFERENCES. A project like this could be done from memory if some savant got a hold of a lot of time and a copy of FO:NV, but for everyone else it makes sense to have the best reference available. So, dutifully, and because I believe that once should live and breath their art, I starting playing some more Fallout with the intention of taking lots of pictures.
Vegas, from outside Vegas, at ground level
I took a few screenshots. I told myself “It’s going to be hard to get an overhead angle of every building and landscape element, but I am creative and smart and I will be able to figure it out”. For a single building, that may be true, but as I continued my tour I realized that simply playing Fallout and taking pictures like this was not going to get me where I wanted to be in this piece.
This was the photo I took where I realized that this type of photo reference would not work.
I had high standards, here! I need to know what it looks like from a fantastic vista, not my lowly human frame of reference! I searched around and I found a mod that let you fly the camera around. Here it is for those of you with that very specific interest. It was perfect for my purposes! I could see the Fallout: New Vegas landscape from angles I had never dreamed. True, that means that I saw a lot of developer shortcuts and other jank that was never intended to be seen, but I did not care. The important part is now i had a great sense of scale, placement, and context that I never had before.
Now THAT’S an overhead view of a dinosaur!
Shots like this are AMAZING. It would have been nearly impossible for me to capture how solid and imposing these statues are without a reference such as this.
So I spent an hour or so jumping from location to location, taking a few pictures of each area. In retrospect, I should have taken WAY TOO MANY PHOTOS because I almost invariably went back to get more details, or better angles. By the end of the project, I have 317 screenshots from this game. I referenced nearly every single one.
Step 4: Ink on Paper
v6, working on inks
A majority of the preliminary inks are finished in this drawing. At this point some of the art is final (like the dinosaur and the statues, and some of the Strip) and most of it is the rough draft inks from earlier. This is *almost* the final layout of the piece. At this point it is a great time to move stuff around and play with placements and flow. Those colors are not in so you have all the freedom you want to move things around within the visual window, but once you begin to block in color and render it gets harder and harder to move assets around.
v7, more color blocking, locking in placements and inks
v8, fruits of the labor of color blocking.
Note the color updates for a majority of the piece. It pays to work on the WHOLE piece until it gets to a certain level, then narrow in on details afterwards. Try to keep working in this broad stages and that will prevent you from getting too detailed on a portion of the piece while the rest lingers behind.
The palette has been expanding to accommodate the increased complexity. The closer I get to the end, the more I expand it. Watch to see these palettes multiply, I tended to copy them and plop them down all over the piece. Make sure to keep your palette in IT’S OWN LAYER, so you can easily remove it once you are done with the piece.
v9, in my opinion where it finally starts to shape up
The next few versions we start getting more detail oriented. I will make a part 2 for this series, so I can spend more time talking about how I handled these smaller details in a HUGE piece that has many such points of detail. Try scrolling back and seeing how huge of a change occurred. The road to a completed drawing is fraught with changes and tough choices, and the additive effect is that you end up doing a lot of the “work” part of artwork.
Thank you for reading so far. Look out for the second part coming soon! This piece is NOT complete at the time of this writing, but it is so close i can taste it. Check out my streams and I may be working on this very piece, or something equally cool!
Hi everyone, guess what? Stopping now is out of the question. Isn’t that great?
Growth in two ways: One, growing better technically as an artist. Two, growing to love your work and appreciating the works that have gotten you to where you are now.
Growing is a process that is so baked in to human character, that you do not always feel it happen. Progress is often incremental, and time often passes quickly. When I compare my new work to the old, I see the refinement of my style. Like a piece of land eroded by millions of years of water and tectonics, my mental palette of design choices had settled into something that I can call my own. There are limitations, and there are strengths.
So great, how did I develop that style and why am I so happy with myself all of the sudden? Iterations! Practice! Discipline! And lots of sacrifice. Sacrifice of game nights, of sleep, of time spent with friends.
I am working on my Fallout: New Vegas landscape diligently, and it is looking fantasmic if you ask me.
Work in progress, 2021 by Ben Sutter
My next post will be detailing my process, looking at this drawing from its fuzzy beginnings to a stellar finish. In the mean time, thanks for checking in!
There are pieces of art I have been working on, feverishly! And what is more, they look really cool and I wish I was able to share them. The pain I feel is the pain of having to keep it to myself.
There is good news, and that news is that there are more commission slots open now. And your work does not have to stay unstreamt unless you have some wild tastes. I still stream, not as often as I could, but just as often as I am able.
I have been messing with NeuralBlender lately, to make all sorts of wacky designs. Lots of these are ripe for iteration and background work. You take a prompt, write it down, and the network iterates it over and over again until you end up with something nightmarish.
Besides this, I have been working on pixel-art, working on the website, setting up an INSTAGRAM like some sort of instagrammer. You may notice that navigation is a little different now and that is because you are a very observant critter! I will be adding a Merch option to the menu soon. Not in love with the way the menu is on mobile but that is a minor quib.
Upcoming improvements:
-A banner for the merch store -Better Commision page, with more options and updated prices -Finish more art I can show off. Here is a little horror poster done in a pixelart style (80×120 pixels, 8 colors:)
It’s been a couple of months. My garden got big and I ate lots of tomatoes. Then the shade and heat won, and I was left with withering stalks. Still, the season was alright, with cucumbers and herbs overwhelming. We even had a few decent melons.
School started for my daughter. She is learning to manage her expectations of humanity… after a year of being home-schooled she is out in the thrashing waters of humanity and she wants to know if people ever calm down and act smart in groups. I really hated to tell her that no, this is the way it is. You can control yourself, and what you think and do (up to a point), but you cannot control everyone else.
Anyway, the title, why do I write things like this? I love creating, and I just want to make piles and piles of things to exist forever until I cannot anymore, whether that be a song or a drawing or an emotion. i have opened up my commissions page for the first time in a very long time and it represents me creating for others as well, sharing and creating things that have depth in their meaning. By doing this I am overcoming a fear of sacrificing more of my time, and part of that is feeling that it is NOT really a sacrifice, but a step forward, and a concrete way to help me continue to create.
Hopefully all of that will give me a deeper bond with my fellow humanity, that is really what my end-goal is here. Making things for people to love, the way that I love making them.
So in other news, I have fallen deep into making pixel artwork. Imagine picking up a program and it changes your creative course! I am speaking of Aseprite, a program that allows me to make animations with some pixel art with amazing ease! Look forward to my pixel art gallery coming soon!
Some of the animations I have been working on in September.
UPCOMING UPDATES: I will be making a new gallery for my pixel art, and a new easier link to the commissions page. Thanks for checking me out, kind reader. I will never get less weird, that is my promise to you.
It’s taken me years and years to learn that sometimes, it’s my allergies that are doing the driving. This time of year seems to always sap my creativity a little, as I have to medicate my insane seasonal allergies away. Even if I do medicate, bad enough days in the lustful Miami Valley can literally incapacitate me. One day in April I sneezed probably 50 times, each one a whiplash-inducing explosion (my sneezes are unfortunately very strong and dramatic). This kind of thing will cause me extremely bad headaches, an inability to concentrate, and generally result in SLOPPY WORK. Oh man I hate it when I do sloppy work!
Anyway I am working through that and I am making good art again. I have held off on doing commissions for now since I really do not have the bandwidth for it yet. It took me working on music to realize that I was just stacking on projects until I had too many; I want controlled growth since that it what I can handle, being a single human and all. In the last year I’ve already done plenty of drawing and style development. I’ve opened a TeePublic storefront so you can order shirts and magnets and stickers with my designs RIGHT ON THEM. I own a few of their high-quality tees and they are really comfy, so thus far I have no qualms about their products!
Fauntleroy Jonkens appears to have some various fans outside of my direct circle so that’s nice.
I am working on getting more designs onto the shop, at least monthly, so check that out! They sell prints as well, and you can order prints through them, but I am currently exploring alternative options to that. Now that I have my vaccinations all done, I feel a lot better about getting out into the world and finding a local printer. I will do a few test prints and then we will sell those myself, probably with it’s own navigation page.
TO DO: I need to update my gallery again. I have been posting everything to my discord but I don’t want ALL of that to end up on the site here. It’s all curated, the gallery here.
TO DO: My commission agreement language is almost finished. It’s lack of bandwidth, but I need to finish that.
I am working on a piece with Jimi Hendrix in it now. Hopefully I will finish soon! Thanks for the support, everyone. Do it for Fauntleroy.
Hey everyone, thanks for visiting the site. Check out the galleries for neat art, check out my Twitch stream for live art and music, and check out my commissions page to see if I can draw something for YOU!
In March I finally got a music stream going. Now I can play my MIDI piano on my stream which is pretty nice. I have been doing tons of drawings, which has also been nice. But something has been looming on the horizon, less sinister than burnout but almost as damaging: it’s the Maze!
Comic I did early March 2021 on my attitude
Life has not always been easy. I was pushed very hard to be a concert pianist and that got really old really quickly (not to mention that nothing in my upbringing really screamed ‘classical’). As a teenager I did not know what the future would bring but I knew I wanted to CREATE things. Home was not a safe place though, and most of what I made was lost or destroyed in various eras of my families negligence and rage.
Life DID get better. My grades in college (design school) were far better than my grades in high school, but I still felt like I was not making progress in life. I had more skills but nothing that really made me enough money to live on, so I went back to college in an attempt to be a pharmacist. Back I went to Sinclair Community College, which was great, to learn chemistry. And I love chemistry! I felt smart, like I was learning something IMPORTANT. My grades were even better; I put in tons of effort. Then off to WSU which was also nice, for a college that dedicated practically no money or effort to their chemistry department. I got a bachelors in Chemistry and here I am! I learned that I didn’t want to be a pharmacist, but I lucked out and got a great job supporting water quality equipment.
And yet all this time I knew that I really wanted to MAKE things, to inspire and entertain. What was I doing? I wanted to draw so I went to design school; I wanted to play music so I did, but in private. I started learning chemistry and saw a whole other WORLD that opened up via mathematics and physics. What was I doing? I felt that I knew things, that I understood something about art and music and science. I attacked projects but it was in every direction, all at once. If I hit too much resistance, I stopped.
What was I doing? I was wondering the Maze. Looking for that path that meant the most, that felt the best, that was calling my name. And I don’t know where the maze ENDS. If there is a goal to life I don’t know in what direction it lies. Maybe the maze is the goal? If life were not about the endless accumulation of wealth, I think life would be so much happier. If I could afford a home, if I could contribute in small ways all over the place instead of grinding a job in a big way, if I was amazing at one single thing, then I could just throw myself into it. But I never know where I am in the maze; if I persue one interest and move headlong in that direction, I get lost.
The worst part is feeling left behind. Seeing friends and colleagues excel at something they are great at and move forward. Designers, artists, musicians, scientists; I am all of these things and yet I am not 100% dedicated to any of it. What does that make me? A jack-of-all-trades? A pretender? A has-been, or a never-will?
Here’s to another month of wandering the maze. Thanks to the guides and well-wishers in that maze who have offered me advice. Here’s to leaving those behind in the maze who have chosen to let me wander alone. And here’s to finding a new part of the maze that looks like peace.
What’s in the pipeline for 2021? What little nuggets can I send your way? All I have to offer is words and pixels, at least until they are printed on a shirt or a mug or something. Oh speaking of that:
I am still working on A Thousand Miles of Dust, although it has been slower. I need to do some of the less-fun aspects of it so I can playtest, like making real character sheets for cars.
Streaming is still going strong! Name change upcoming, should be slightly more professional and it will look slick too!
Thanks for reading, those who do. I’m small-time now but I keep working on those dreams. -Ben
