TIGAER-DESIGN.COM_.v5 – Digital Art by Christian Hecker

THE EXPEDITION

Vue is your friend! When you’re not exactly the most talented painter then Vue really helps you to create a base for your idea. The weird rock formations/mountains were quickly modelled in C4d and imported to Vue. Ecosystems added a plantlife quickly and kaboom… it’s rendered. Then the fun can happen in Photoshop. This painting is, again, some sort of training piece. Basically i wanted to create a strangely familiar, yet exotic, looking place. It’s also a different colorpalette. Surely a nice addition to my portfolio. When you check the plate (link beneath the description) you will notice how much work was done in Photoshop. Basically i used digital painting to extend different elements and got me some good photo textures to add the level of detail i wanted. The ships were added late in the process and are completely painting. Now i would love to explore this planet with one of those ships!

Hope you enjoy this world as much as i do!

intuos3 – 10hrs – 3500px wide – photoshop – vue

Vue Plate

Regards

THE GATES

And another starwars inspired try in cityscape environment design. No big story for this one. Just fiddled around with vue and photoshop – just for fun. That’s why the basic look of it is kinda dirty and gritty… concept arty. I kinda like the result that offers a nice depth to the eye. Technically i was messing around with texures and brushes in photoshop. The difference in this painting basically is the perspective that hopefully makes the viewer feel as if we’re flying into the city. So… i hope you enjoy the trip. :)

intuos3 – 8hrs – 3000px wide – photoshop – vue

Vue Plate

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety

Regards

VAN DIEMEN’S RETREAT

Here we have the first painting i did on my new machine. I had the actual cave background plate render on my disk for a while now and used this project to see what the new machine can do. I’m pretty happy with the results i got from this project. Computer speed wise as well as painting result wise. I really used Vue a lot here to render out different elements for the background and foreground. The crystals, ships and trees were implemented with help of multipass rendering. Due to the speed of my new machine i finished the painting in a very good time.

This is a painting that, after lots of storyless pieces, has a story again. Some of you might know that U2 song ‘Van Diemen’s Land’. One of the most beautiful songs ever btw. In fact i listened to it when i was looking for a painting title. I always liked that name ‘Van Diemen’ and used it here. Now lets say this base we see here is some sort of hidden pirate base. Hidden within some sort of planetoid/super asteroid.

The Story

A rock large enough to develop some sort of atmosphere where plants can grow. But only on the inside caves of the asteroid. On the surface you’ll find plain death. Downcrashing asteroids. Deadly subeams. Extreme temperatures. Due to a special magnetic field the base cannot be spotted. You can only get there with the right coordinates! The base was once founded by a space pirate legend named (you guess it) Van Diemen. After one of his biggest coups he had to flee before a huge fleet that tried to hunt him down. His last chance was to hide in an asteroid field! He and his men made the brave decision to hide within an immense large weird splitted/cracked open rock, carefully maneuvering his massive ship, while the fleet searched everything for him. Soon he started to wonder why they did not pick up the energy signature of his ship and found out about the specialty of this place. He started to make plans… to build a hideout! That was 200 years ago. Now this place became a massive outpost for all sorts civilizations. The place now is named after its founder but it’s no more a place for criminals and other scum of the universe. It’s still very tricky to find this base and even with automated landing procedures there happen accidents every now and then. So when you plan your trip there… better pay some extra for a good ship and an even better captain!

4800px wide – photoshop – vue – intuos3

Plate can be found here.

Print detail can be found here (Large file).

Regards

CRYSTAL LAKE

This one was in the works for quite some time now. I’m not entirely happy with the results but i did my best to make it look somewhat interesting. Again it’s a try in digital matte painting combining rendered elements with photo. A friend of mine always said that i need something snowy for my portfolio and so i did it. I did not have any specific concept in mind for this one except the fact that i wanted crystals in there. The photos i used are none of the ones i shot while visiting a friend in austria. Those will come handy in later projects. The crystals were modeled in C4d and imported into Vue. There i created an eco system and painted them onto the landscape. Worked pretty good! Only the integration process in Photoshop was quite difficult. Some pieces are fun to work on and others can become quite heavy work. This one was work. Nonetheless i hope the stormy mountain atmosphere works and you’ll get some goosebumps from the cold the image shows!

5160px wide – photoshop – vue – intuos3

Plate can be found here.

Print detail can be found here(Large file).

Regards

Here we have some concept paintings i did a while ago. The first two were done for a company in beverly hills to visualize some futuristic structures and places. More of less successful i managed to create some stuff for them. I, for my part, am pretty happy with the outcome. The third painting was done early 2008 for a movie project. All three of them were pretty small projects but nonetheless i learned some stuff on them.

Solar Pole 1 – This one was fun to do. It was a first try of myself to create something icy, cold and snowy. The basics were rendered in vue and heavily overpainted in photoshop.

Solar Pole 2 – Here we’re looking, from above, onto the structure we see in the first painting. This is the one i’m not too happy with. Nonetheless, as usual, i tried a lot of things and catched up some new stuff.

Eisental – A friend of mine is a screenwriter and was working on a project. He was asking me to visualize a place and i tried myself on it. Problem was that it had to be done rather quickly. I’m happy that i managed to do something half decent here. The overall image isn’t a blast but it contains some nice spots and a good looking lighting and depth.

Hope you can get some inspiration off of these. =)

Regards

Mark Lovett, from UK, asked me to create a nice and slick cover for his musical endeavours. His concept was really appealing and something that fits right to my style. So i had this project done pretty fast. I really dig the outcome and hope it’ll help Mark to get the recognition he’s hoping for.

The pic itself started as a Vue render. After laying out the overall composition i moved into photoshop to refine the overall detail. Added painted elements and some good looking textures. Last but not least lighting fixes and a wonderful atmosphere. For the backside of the cover i basically took the front cover and manipulated it to make it look like we’re having the same peaceful scenery in a different daytime scenario/mood.

This project was fun! Oh and before you start to wonder… the song titles on the back cover are placeholders and from me. =)

Regards

BURNING SKIES

A painting commission i recently got finished. As you can see it’s definitely settled in the fantasy regions of literature. And the painting, obviously, is a book cover for a fantasy novel. For this project i started with a 3d concept of the landscape, made with vue. I tried to match the ideas i got told and over the time i matched the idea nicely. Then i rendered the scene and started to add my postwork to it. Main goal was it to let it appear very moody and almost ghostly. Not a place where you would want to stay at night. Once the landscape was done i concentrated on the tower. Created the base of that in 3d again and integrated the tower into the mountains. All the postwork was done in photoshop. This commission was fun to do and relatively quickly done. I like it when that happens.

This pic is copyrighted by Chris Belbin and Tigaer-Design.com. Like all the other images on this site, this image may not be reproduced or used without permission!

Regards

Comcept 7

This comcept piece took me a while to finish. Even if i wanted to keep it loose in style i also wanted to maintain a somewhat, more or less, clean look. I tried lots of lighting things and composition wise i think it really stands out and it all comes together very well i think. At least that’s what my eye tells me. It’s one of these pics where immediately stories begin to spawn in my head. “What’s happening there? What’s the guy waiting for? Is he coming or going… and why?!” Etc etc. =) I like this kind of pic. Hope you too.

4500px wide – 20 hrs – vue – photoshop

Regards

MISTRAL COAST

This project started as a commission and ended as a personal project. I had some wonderful photo plates i started to fiddle around with. Then the client jumped off and i continued on it myself. No big story behind it actually. Just another scene that i would love to witness with my own eyes… ‘for real’ so to say. I have had this ‘big alien monolith’ kind of theme in previous paintings too… and i guess it follows me. Let’s just say we colonize other planets and happen to find these huge structures. Scientists are trying to analyze them. Soon they find out that they’re some alien relic. They emit some sort of energy to the planet atmosphere. But what exactly is happening? It could end in a surprise…

Maybe a bit inspired by the mass effect game again. But it was more the opening sequence of wing commander III. There was this huge spaceship crashed into the sea and the name of the place was ‘mistral’. I always liked that name and the idea of a beach scene on another planet.

Technically i worked with digital matte painting techniques to get it done. I wanted to have a photoreal look for it. I did not do a photoreal painting in a while… so i wanted to have something done again. Stocks used for the beach, own photo material used for other elements. The monoliths and some vegetation done with vue. All combined in photoshop. I took myself some with this one so the work took place over a period of two months. Maybe 40hrs of work in it.

intuos3 – 40hrs – 5800px wide – photoshop – vue

Print Detail // Progress Viz

Regards

Comcept 8

And another comcept piece. Did this a few days ago with a few touch ups today. Idea behind it is to visualize ‘scale’ and ‘movement’. Wanted it to look loose and leave the interpretation of shapes to the viewer. If you followed my uploading then you probably miss comcept7… it’s still in progress and a more complicated pic. Will follow later. =)

3100px wide – 5 hrs – vue – photoshop

Regards