Kaian Markland - Rookie Awards 2024

Hello, I'm Kaian Markland! I'm a concept artist and Illustration student at CGSpectrum and I wanted to share a few of my projects for the Rookies Awards! 

Cozy Bakery

In this project I was tasked with creating a set design where a character might live, work, fight, etc. The front walls are invisible for the purpose of seeing the interior.

When creating this piece I aimed to achieve a warm, inviting, and comfortable feeling when choosing my colors, lighting, art style, and scenery. For this reason, I selected thumbnail one as it felt like a cozy little bakery to me and the other two felt more like big restaurants.

After selecting a thumbnail I did my line art and value. I wanted the rendering for this project to have a simple, cartoon-like style, so I painted in the shadows and light accordingly. Finally, I decided on my colors. I was going for a warm feeling, so I picked out lots of warm colors and spent some time going back and forth on my options, trying different gradient maps, and blend modes, and changing the values I filled in until I found the colors I was happy with!

Witch Desk

This was the first project I did at CGSpectrum, it really made me test the limits of what I could do and I feel like I've improved and learned a lot since then!

The instructions for this project were to line, render, and color a demonic book. Instead of just designing a demonic book, I decided to change it up and illustrate a whole desk scene since it felt more fun to me. The aim for this piece was a witch student's desk!

One thing I struggled with most to begin with was the chains. During my first live class my mentor, Eric Wilkerson, suggested that I use physical props as references and take pictures with my phone, so that's exactly what I did!

This was originally going to be just a desk with no creatures. However, my cat, Snowy, decided he wanted to play with the plastic eyeballs while I was trying to set up the props and gave me the idea (and reference picture) for it!

After stitching together some of my favorite reference pictures, I started on the sketch for my project. The reference pictures helped tremendously! I try to take references for every project now as long as I have the time for it. 

Then I moved on to the value. This was also the first time I tried painting in value before color, and then finally the color! For the colors, I used a lot of purples to try evoking a mysterious feeling. Overall, this was a very fun first project and I enjoyed illustrating it!

Gates of Asgard

As the title suggests, I was instructed to paint my interpretation of the gates of Asgard, it was fun gathering references and searching for icy scenery to inspire me for this project!

The brief I was given asks for Vikings explorers finding the gates of Asgard. However, the Vikings are not supposed to be the focus of the piece and their presence is to be kept minimal. The environment should contain bodies of water and ice and the time of day should be dusk or night.

With the brief in mind, I started exploring ideas!

Thumbnail one was my first attempt. It's a portal-like gate in an icy environment like the brief suggests.

Thumbnail two is when I started my floating island idea! However, I felt like the angle made it a bit cluttered and difficult to understand.

Thumbnail three is a dragon skull tunnel with a river flowing inside. More of the dragon's bones are stuck in the ground along the river.

Thumbnail four is a giant wall engraved with patterns, there's a floating water source leading to a castle off-screen. This one felt difficult to understand again, and was my second attempt at a floating island idea.

Thumbnail five is where I tried something a little bit different. I had spirit-like animals drifting from the aurora into the giant portal, with a small Viking ship and Vikings in front of the giant gate.

Thumbnail six is the one I ended up going with! However, I changed the gate's design slightly and cropped the composition.

When cleaning up my value sketch, I played around with the values and ideas, especially with the floating islands. They felt very plain, so I opted to make it look like the islands were made out of ice instead of just rock.

Other Projects

Here's another project I plan expanding on later and possibly presenting in the next Rookies Awards!

Thank you for taking the time to look at my projects and read through my process! I'm looking forward to sharing more of my work for the next Rookies Awards!