This website contains the art of Ty Grenier, including digital and traditional full illustrations, sketches, works in progress, and anything else he deems cool enough to show to everybody.
Plans first: I'll be going to Emerald City Comic Con in March. My primary focuses will be to help my friend Stacie Pitt run her illustration booth (go check her out, she freakin rocks) and to get some portfolio feedback and exposure with some of the industry professionals that might be there. If I manage to snag a little corner of a booth for myself, I might put out some of my work as well. Either way, stop by and say hi! I need friends O.O
Now for the art. This style was really fun and I plan on building on the process for the next few pieces. This one was made for a friend. Somehow she recalled some obscure sketch I did in my second year of college and asked for a remake. I'll add the old image below, too, since I just happen to find it still in my hard drive. It's kind of embarrassing, but at the same time it's neat to see how far I've come in five years.
The cool new piece.
The terrible old piece that should have been deleted and forgotten long ago.
After being delayed all summer, tomorrow I finally get to move into my own place. That means I will once again be able to have a dedicated place for illustration, and I can set up my main computer! I can't even really express how excited I am, so you'll just have to check back and see.
Well, this is an art blog, so I should post SOME images. Here's some really quick sketches I got to do in the VERY limited time I've had to make anything lately.
I've moved back to the home state (Alaska). The place I'm going to be moving in to isn't quite finished yet, so in the meantime I'm living with family and don't have a lot of room for my own things. As in, I have a twin blow-up mattress shoved in front of the washer and dryer, and I share the only possible drawing surface (kitchen table) with 5 kids. But every now and then I have some time to set things up and doodle around, so here's a quick 1.5-hour sketch of the new hero from Blizzard's Overwatch, Doomfist! I think he'll be an interesting hero.
Still working on this...there is a lot that you're not seeing here, as well. I am designing a skin concept for Zarya from the game Overwatch. Poor Zarya doesn't have any good skins...so I decided to create an idea for her of my own. My challenge to myself was to design it in such a way that if it were implemented, the developers wouldn't have to change any existing animations and the abilities would actually still work with the design elements. For example, her standard skin right now has a gun that fires a steady beam, a glob of energy that deals splash damage, and her ultimate is a gravitational well that sucks people into it and holds them for a short time; this design would fire a stream of water like a super soaker, a glob of water that splashes (duh), and her ultimate would be a whirlpool.
At this point I'm rendering up the design I settled on at the end, then I'll put together the whole concept sheet with all of the iterations I didn't use as well.
This was made as an example of work for applying to a project. It is 3 "tiers" of an axe, with each tier showing a different rendering style since they did not specify exactly what they wanted. I LOVE working on item designs; weapons, armor, trinkets, mundane items, it's all game.
My friends over at the Gamer Date channel had a blank slate for their channel art. HEATHENS! So I hooked them up with a little something. Go watch their videos, they're pretty cute together (but don't tell them I said that).
Once upon a time, Jeremy Dooley and Matt Bragg from Achievement Hunter faced off against Joel Heyman and Adam Ellis in the then-new Mortal Kombat X. Each team of two shared a controller and split the controls of a single character. Mayhem ensued. One of the characters Matt and Jeremy used was Ferra and Torr (I know, two people, but still one character play-wise). Jeremy made the mistake of saying "This is fanart I don't want."
Started this a year and a half ago and suffered a corrupted file after my computer bluescreened while working on it. I was only able to salvage a flattened JPEG of it and got discouraged and frustrated...but I didn't trash it. Only just now decided to work from the JPEG and finish it.
Took a break from current projects to watch the new animated short and quickly fell in love with Sombra's character design. Instead of playing a few rounds, I took about an hour and a half and sketch out a portrait. She's incredibly colorful, so the black and white doesn't do proper justice...after my current projects are done I might do a full, colored portrait of her.
Ah, Inktober, what a magical time of year. The time that I break out all the pens and markers I own and figure out which ones have dried out. The time that I hate myself for undoubtedly not making a pen sketch at least half of the days in the month. The time that I get proof of how much better my friends are at using ink.
Well, I was actually fairly happy with how this little sketch came out. With my extremely limited Copic markers, I actually kinda got it to look like D.Va and her Meka.
I've been trying to record one big tutorial finishing up the Overwatch piece with Mercy and Reinhardt, but given a lot of different factors I decided to split it into two or three videos. Here's the first. Learn how to use gradient maps to speed up the process of making backgrounds!
Currently about 2 hours of work away from being able to start the tutorial parts of this piece. That's why it looks slightly weird, with different pieces in different styles: I'm setting it up specifically to make tutorials for 3 different things. It will all come together nicely in the end.
Tutorial parts I want to cover:
Prepping a Black and White image to be easily colored
Coloring said Black and White image
Using Gradient Maps to easily create a background
Overwatch fanart: Mercy and Reinhardt on Watchpoint Gibraltar. Soon to be finished.
