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, 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!
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!
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.
I went through some of my more productive sketchbooks from years back, and those are turning out to be a good bit of fun. I have no compunction about getting into a half-completed drawing and finishing it off. There were tons of these pieces that were 80%, 90% completed. It’s extreme data-mining from my youth’s creativity, but a lot of it was pretty good so I inked them and ran!
Anywhayy, I’m just getting phelchy over here. I have nothing to post until later, although I will probably stream an ink job later. I know that I have a long way to go, so I forge ahead, through the thick foliage of 2019. Maybe a better artist is on the other side?
At the start of this year I said I would draw 52 drawings. This is despite some unfortunate wrist pain, a 4-year old, and an erratic work ethic. It was my choice and I made it. Now the field looks different: Have I over-promised? Overestimated? Only me can find out.
I’m sure to some, 52 drawings would be considered paltry output. I think of comic book artists and what they must have to go through to finish anything, and that adds up to hundreds and hundreds of drawings a year. That’s a lot, but it’s also what they do for a living so I can cut myself a little slack there.
But you have to start somewhere, and there is nothing to spur creativity like limitations! I imagine that what I consider to be a “drawing” will be stretched to the limit by December 31st, 2020. My standards are pretty simple, so I could always spit out a few quick sketches when the deadline looms, I suppose. I don’t draw as regular as I should, and my art schedule is as regular as I am. I didn’t do “Inktober” because that’s too corporate. I write that but frankly, if I’m anywhere close to 52 drawings by the end of the year then I will start counting rooms I’ve painted as a ‘drawing’ to pad the count.
I’ll post more as I photograph them. If I get to 52 then I will throw a party to everyone that reads this and can make it down.
