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

WISH YOU WERE HERE

Now it’s time to add a big one again. My recent Comcept 11 was a smaller piece and now i’m happy to add another big one to my gallery. I’m on a landscape trip these days. I guess i need a break from the Sci-Fi theme. Now on this project i learned a lot about Vue again. As always. This time i worked with own textures and checked out how terrains handle it, how i can effectively use this technique for my future projects. While, of course, there is Photoshop work in here… it definitely is less than usual. I had to overpaint a few areas that did not come out like expected. I also reworked the colors and atmosphere a bit… as well as changing the clouds. So in the end it’s 50/50 between pure Vue and postwork with Photoshop. While i was indeed targeting a more photorealistic look i couldn’t resist making the atmosphere a bit more vivid than it would actually be in a photo. Ultimetaly it adds a new combination of colors to my overall gallery and therefor also adds more flexibility.

No specific story behind that picture except the fact that i wanted to make it look earthly… yet… other worldy in its overall appearence. Hope i succeded! Hope you like it!

Photoshop – Vue – Intuos 3 – 4500px wide – 24hrs

Regards

A colleague from deviantart kindly requested an interview with my person for his online art forum. So we met up in msn yesterday and made the interview. It was fun! Feel free to head over there for an interesting read.

The Interview

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

Last weekend i was in Austria, visiting a good friend. His family has a house on a mountain there and we took the chance to have some nice time there. I can say that i never saw as much snow as i did this year. The sight from up there was great. And i really really appreciate a nice landscape vista. The weather wasn’t perfect, except for one day. All of the panoramas were taken that one day. I took the chance and gathered some nice material for my painting archive. It was a lot of fun up there and i hope i’ll get the chance to get back there sooner than later. Thanks to my buddy for the invitation.

Bazora Nights – This is the sight we had a few meters further from our house. One night we risked a look and had this amazing vista in front of us. It was 2:00am and we decided to take this chance. We needed an hour before we got back to the house. It was worth it. Even if it was damn cold that night! This panorama consists of 10 separate shots. All taken with bulb settings and roughly 45 secs of exposure. Photoshop cs4 did a remarkable job stitching these together.

Bazora Days – Here we basically have the daylight sight of the night shot.

Muttersberg One – This was the perfect weather. The only day we had perfect conditions, we went to the ‘Muttersberg’. Surely not the highest mountain on the block, but nontheless a truly amazing sight. 15+ separate shots.

Muttersberg Two – The sun was already going down when i did this one. I really dig the atmospherics that are going on there. A vertical panorama with 5+ separate shots.

Muttersberg Three – Same position as the first two Muttersberg panoramas. Slightly different angle. I tried to capture as much of the sight as possible.

Regards

Derek from Jitzul.com invited me to an interview for his site. Much like i, with my ‘Meet The Inspiration’ series, he’s interviewing people he’s interested in. So i joined his interview archive and talked about various things. It’s a fun read! Feel free to check it out here.

Regards

ÆMPYREAN DECADENCE

Imagine cities, that large that it all is built in levels. One on top of another. Like it’s kind of happening in Hong Kong today. Your position in society is reflected by on what level you live. Now this society has risen up so high that it couldn’t stand on its own feet anymore. Society, as well as the architecture, starts to fall apart. The ignorance of wanting it all more bigger and larger than large doomed them to break apart. Only a few search and rescue teams, all volunteers, mustered up the strength to go out there. Millions of people trappend in this catastrophe, finally realizing the downfall of their, once so strong and inspiring, empire.

Well, that could be one of many interpretations of what’s going on in the picture.

This one surely made it into the top ten of my fav paintings so far. It all started with a concept i made from the ship/transporter. I, earlier, had a small concept of a ruined futuristic city. Unfortunately never connceted to it. So i left it. First when i had this ship concept done i thought about creating something for the background. Much like on my ‘Descent Heart’ painting i started to see shapes i really liked. So this painting became a larger project. Above the basic painting i added tons of photo textures to suggest detail. Without wasting too much time on perspective. I tried to align everything very quickly… and good enough to make it work. Also used parts of the destroyed city concept i made earlier. So basically you could say that i was just throwing stuff together here… and looked how the cocktail may taste. Most of the time it was good. Sometimes not so much. Trail and error as usual.

The final result is pretty rough but still gives a lot of detail for the eye. The painterly style adds a lot and gives the eye something to do. I like it that way.

5760px wide – photoshop – intuos3 – 1 week

Regards

Thought it’s about time for a little photo update. Haven’t had one in ages and i still got tons of things in my archive. It’s hard to sort out which ones are really worth some exposure. But here we have a few selected pics. The Captured Beauy additions have some wallpapers too. Have fun!

Regards

Hello ladies and gentlemen, i hope you all had a nice year 2008! I wish you folks all the best and good luck for 2009 as well! May all your dreams come true and may your success lead to a home made of millions of dollar notes. *nod* Thanks for all your support through 2008! Now lets see what 2009 brings for us. I certainly hope continuing to learn new things in my field of expertise and am excited what new worlds i will create this year.  Lets get it on!

Regards

Comcept 10 – Hunting Party

This is the last painting for this year 2008. I have had a productive year and, like the years before, i learned a lot! The painting itself evolved from a test render i did months ago. I started to fiddle around with some brush strokes and soon got some nice shapes going on. I also started to design some flyers for the scene to add an action element to it. Worked out very well. In the end it is a nice addition to the comcept series… and a nice conclusion for 2008.

Enjoy this new world and the wallpapers!

3500px wide – 1 week – photoshop

The artwork on:
Deviantart – Artstation – Drawcrowd – CGSociety

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