goobber
Cătălin Apostol
Illustrator / Concept Artist
Study Cases
A few pieces that provide more insight into my workflow and how I go about during the creative process.
Personal Work
A log of most of my work, made throughout the years, varying in composition, color scheme, and subject matter.
Assigned Work
Pieces made from a set, given goal, for assignments, requests, and commissions.
goobber
Cătălin Apostol
Illustrator / Concept Artist
Flora
Vicar Amelia (page is WIP)
Make contact (page is WIP)
goobber
Cătălin Apostol
Illustrator / Concept Artist
goobber
Cătălin Apostol
Illustrator / Concept Artist
goobber
Cătălin Apostol
Illustrator / Concept Artist
About me
I'm a huge video game fan, I've been playing them for as long as I can remember. I still have fond memories of sitting and playing Lego Star Wars for hours on end on the PS2 when I was a kid.Nowadays, I've turned to more mechanically intensive games, soulslikes being a particular favorite of mine. However I still do enjoy a good story focused game every once in a while.I take my inspiration from the media I consume, the two most notable ones being Bloodborne and Alien, which have to be my favorite IPs of all time. I've always been inspired by horror and creatures in this genre, being able to entice dread through a monster alone.My primary goal is to have the same effect on people that other artists and creators have had on me in the past. Be it through my work on a game or just my art, I want people to look at it and have the same "that's so cool" feeling I had when I was younger and was finding out about this sort of media.
Experience
I'm mostly a self taught artist when it comes to 2D. I started drawing when I was just a kid and I kept practicing in my own spare time. I reached the point I am at today through internet tutorials, advice from the communities I shared art with, as well as simply experimenting.Now I study Creative Media and Game Technologies at Saxion University of Applied Sciences, where we mainly focus on 3D art and its separate branches (modeling, texturing, rigging etc.)During this study I have worked on several team projects that work in a similar fashion to game jams, where we would have a short period of time (generally two weeks) to come up with a game concept, and finalize it based on a few given directions.
Communities
A list of communities I am actively involved in:
goobber
Cătălin Apostol
Illustrator / Concept Artist
Thumbnailing
For this drawing, I wanted to create a piece of the Moon Presence from Bloodborne, one of its so called "Great Ones", eldritch beings that have far ascended humanity.This creature design stuck with me through the years after playing so I wanted to make it justice in an illustration.I started off thumbaniling different poses captured from a cutscene in the game.• The first one shows it holding a hunter/player character, almost like a motherly figure holding a baby, after it descended from the sky. This would emphasize its size and influence over the player.• The second thumbnail shows the creature reaching towards the camera, focusing on its monstrousness and grotesque appearance.• The third and final iteration depicts the Moon Presence descending form the heavens, backlit by the moon, emphasizing how otherworldly and alien like it is, making it feel serene, like some sort of grotesque angel.
Sketching
After choosing the pose I liked best, that being the third, I went ahead and started sketching. This is where everything had to be laid out to make the piece as clear as possible.The most important thing I had to get right is the perspective, making it clear that the shot would be a low angle. In this case, that's most visible through the flowers, since the "camera" is seeing the petals from underneath. I also angled the creature's ribcage to show this same effect, as well as some props around the environment taken from the boss arena in the game. The rest of the clearing up would be done by the rendering with light and shadow.Another aspect I always focus on when drawing my creatures is getting the tentacles just right. They need to have a natural flow to them for the piece to look correct in the end, and they need to be easy to follow, otherwise it all ends up looking disjointed.
Lineart & color base
When I work, after sketching it's important to get down a clear lineart that sets the boundaries for the rendering and lighting. This is how i get everything looking sharp.I also use this to add definition and details such as muschles, skin folds, veins, and other creases that I need to keep track of when rendering, since without them everything would start looking blended together with no clear definition.What I do immediately after lineart is blocking down a base value that sits behind all the rendering and acts as a support for the color I add later in the process. I find that doing it this way it's easier to keep everything nice and tidy and keep all the shapes well defined and within the boundaries of the lineart.Simply clipping the colors to the grey base also ends up being faster in the long run and allows me to experiment with different shades without having to worry about going outside the lines every time.
Rendering
Rendering is the most time consuming step of the process, but also the one that brings everything together. This is where I get to put my own touch into the pieces I make, as my way of rendering gives my pieces their distinct look.The foundation of it is hatching. By doing this I get to clearly define shadow and light with high contrast and give form to whatever I am drawing. A lot of attention needs to be paid to hatching in the same direction as the shapes of the body as well. Hatching recklessly in all directions would make the final product look strange in the end.Using this method also allows me to prioritize objects and give them different levels of detail based on distance or importance in the piece. For example, here the flowers and Moon Presence have a way more polished render than the pillars in the background and even more so than the sky and clouds. This helps differentiate the different planes in a three dimentional space, but it also makes the final piece less cluttered.One last thing I like doing after hatching is erasing bits of it, and adding white accents in order to give that small extra kick of definition and sense of light.
Color and final touches
The addition of color varies whenever I draw. In this case, for example, I tried coloring the pieces bit by bit as I rendered them. This experimentation ended up being inconvenient as doing this doesn't allow you to have the same sense of space, light and cohesion that you would have adding color to an already rendered piece with everything in its place. I had to go back multiple times to correct errors or body parts that looked odd, however I'm still glad I experimented and tried something new.The centerpiece for this piece was the moon itself, as it is the only light source in the scene. Therefore, all of the coloring and shading had to be done around it. This is also the reason I stuck to a very red centered color scheme. Since the moonlight is so overpowering, everything needed to have a reddish tint added to their original colors. Here, that's most visible in the flower stems that only look yellow in this context; if their color was to be picked it would turn out to be a pinkish orange.After coloring, the only things left to do were some final touches like obscuring some background elements to show depth, adding light rays from the moon and doing a bit of color correction to make the piece more saturated and lively.
Final product
Timelapse