Thursday, December 25, 2008

speedies

Heyo,

So it's been quite a while...

I've been doing some freelance work over the past few months, most of which I can't show (unfortunately).

I did a few trading cards for Fantasy Flight, which was a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to doing more work with them in the future.

Most of my time over the past few months has been devoted to the second book in the Amulet series by Kazu Kibuishi. I started off doing flat colors, basically setting up the photoshop files for painting, and eventually moved into painting pages for the book! We're finishing up right now, doing final adjustments on pages, which is a little bittersweet. It's been a really great project, so I'm sad to see it come to an end, but it was a fantastic experience, and the book looks INCREDIBLE.

The first book is on shelves right now, and is a really great read. The second book should be out in September of '09.

So, that being said, I haven't had much time for personal work, as evidenced by my neglected blog. BUT I decided to do a quick painting for everyone in my family for Christmas, so I thought I would post those. I spent about a half-hour to an hour on each one, and they're all pretty heavily referenced, but it was good practice.





Saturday, September 27, 2008

Hrm...


So I feel like I overworked this one a little. That being said, I certainly learned a lot about rocky landscapes and lighting on a grand scale. I came up with a few tricks that should help with the next one...

Onward!

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

WIP


Trying to polish this bad boy up...we'll see how it turns out.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Hello from PAX!


Hey all! I got into Seattle last night, thought I would post something I was working on yesterday/the day before. I'm only an hour or so into this one, but I'm really liking where it's going. It's been a fun experiment so far, but it's still a WIP.

Also I've decided I need to start sculpting again. Maybe it's because I had to leave all of my maquettes in Savannah, but there's something awesome about realizing a concept in (tactile) 3D.

And this is the best picture I have of my dino friend...what a shame.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Number 2!


And one more for the day. I think I'm starting to get the hang of this.

Now on to some character work...

Landscapey


So I've been home for a little bit now, and painting away. I'm still trying to get a grasp on environments, and I feel like I'm slowly getting there.

Rachel and I took a trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which is a free art museum downtown. I was absolutely blown away by what they had in their collection, especially the third floor which was full of classical landscape studies and plein aire paintings. I think I'm going to have to make several more visits there during my time here :)

Monday, August 4, 2008

Heyoooo

So it's been a while...I apologize. I've been doing some storyboarding/freelance work (more storyboarding than anything) and haven't really had time to make art for myself.

First thing's first, all you iphone kids need to buy Galcon! I was lucky enough to be able to do the loading screen art for the game. It turned out pretty well I think, though every time I boot up the game I find something new I want to fix with the illustration...oh well, such is the life of a professional artist I suppose.



Tonight I started a quick environment sketch. Just laying down colors/trying to get the mood right for now. I'll definitely be pulling this together over the next couple days.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

New Stuff

Heyo,

Thought I would post up some more recent work.

This is for an art test I finished recently, a Vampire Lord and one of his ominous towers. I was really happy with the result.



This is one of the environments I did for Nate the Great, just a quick photoshop sketch working with color/scale. I also did some sketches of the local intergalactic flora. I liked the idea of these big gas-filled pods. I felt like for a planet that's largely in ruins/overrun by wildlife, these big pods, as well as other air/gas-filled plant-life would give the sense that the planet was breathing.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Nate the Great!

Heyo,

Apologies for the lack of updates, I've been crazy busy with storyboards/job hunting.

I figured I would post some more stuff from my concept design class. I decided to try and put together an animation, something a little less serious to take my mind off of all the intense design work.

I settled on a kid (Nate...the same Nate from my Pantomime comic) who finds a portal to another planet in his closet. Unfortunately, the planets inhabitants have been wiped out by robots, so it's up to him to battle the evil Gammatron and save the last fragments of the alien civilization.



Nate was a fun character to design, just a really shy and imaginative kid. It was great to imagine how he would react to different aspects of his new environment.



This is one of the gadget designs I did. Essentially everything on Theria (the planet) is powered by little crystal spheres. Nate is the first kid to come to the planet to be able to activate these spheres, so he gets to use them in all sorts of cool gadgets, like Rayguns!



Overall it was a great project and I'm thinking about continuing it now that I don't have much on my plate. I have a bunch more work from the past quarter that I'll post up periodically as well.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

more dinosaurs

So here's a raptor design I did recently, experimenting with color variation.

I did several more variants ( I think like 12 total) but these were the six that stood out, and I decided to take the white one to final.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

walker


This is the first piece I've ever done digitally start to finish, and I'm pretty happy with the result.

I wanted to see if I could translate my dinosaur anatomy knowledge to machinery. So far it's working pretty well.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

DINOSAURS

Sooo, here's the final.

Yup.

I love dinosaurs.

Saturday, May 3, 2008

Swampy

Started this painting this afternoon, I've been trying to teach myself how to paint environments, as I've never really explored it over the past few years. I think it's a fairly successful start.

Still more work to be done, but here's the WIP:

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Storyboards

I thought I would post some of these as I realized I don't have any examples on my website. This is from an old TV show called Tales of the Gold Monkey. In the beginning of the episode a group of islanders steal a strange artifact from a band of Nazis. It's a pretty awesome intro, and from what I can tell a pretty great show. Definitely an Indiana Jones vibe. Anyway, this is part of that intro sequence:




Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Tank!

This guy was SO much fun to do.

He's an enemy for Level 4: The Lava Factory, which will be the final level for the game. Essentially when you enter the Lava factory it's full of Lava, and you're forced to swim around in it with a bunch of flesh-eating (tank-eating?) Piranha. Once you've drained the Lava, evolution takes place, and instead of dealing with the sea-dwellers, you get amphibians.

This guy essentially uses his long tongue to pull you towards him. Pretty creepy.

Friday, February 8, 2008

Tank Update

So I painted a couple more enemies from Tank today.

This is the Elephant Golem from Level 2. Level 2 is a huge forest with a temple right in the middle. The Tigerbear and Monkeys from a couple posts down are both from the exterior area, the forest. The Elephant Golem is one of the enemies you encounter when you enter the temple.


After that I skipped ahead a little bit to Level 4, the Lava Factory. As a factory that makes lava, naturally it should be filled with the stuff. You spend the first half of the level trying to find a way to drain the lava that has flooded the entire factory. While you're jumping/swimming through you encounter these dudes: vicious hybrid jet-propelled piranha monsters!


I also took some time to work on a particle system for the game. It looks like we're going to try and do some 2d particles, kind of like what you see in the Wind Waker.

I was just messing around/brainstorming today and came up with this:

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Pantomime!



So here's the nearly final cover for the Pantomime anthology.

I'm actually really happy with this overall, though there are some tweaks to make here and there. It was a real challenge coming up with a color scheme, but I think the pastel look works pretty well.

Oh, and unfortunately the internet tends to desaturate colors, so it's actually much more vivid in the print/original file.

Friday, February 1, 2008

more Tank!

So today was a painting day.

I had to do a paintover of one of my initial concepts in order to match the current color scheme we have going for enemies in level 1. Instead of redrawing, etc. I just painted over the current 3D model we have, which made the process go much more quickly. I think overall it was pretty successful:



I also started work on the monkeys that will be prevalent in level 2. They're going to be a swarm enemy, meaning you will see 8-10 of them on screen at once and you can just mow them down. With this in mind I figured we could use a couple different textures to give them some variety.


This weekend I'm also working on the cover for the Pantomime anthology for the Sequential Art department. Here's the initial sketch:


Monday, January 28, 2008

Tank!

Tank is back in gear, and it's been much more intense this quarter! I have a ton more enemies to design/paint, so I'll post them here as I go.

This is an enemy from Level 2, a bear/tiger hybrid. He was a lot of fun to draw and paint, it's not often you get the chance to draw a really muscular tiger.




Much more to come soon!

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Wooooo...

So school is back in session, I'm no longer jet-lagged, so I think it's time to revisit the blog.

Here's a recent cover I did for class. The character is one of Julie Collins-Rousseau's masterpieces. Max Starwind: Treasure Hunter Galactica!

Think of Indiana Jones in space and you get the gist...