What I have been up to

...since it's been quite some time from my last posting. October was a pretty crazy month for me - I spent a good chunk prepping for an interview at Lucasfilm Animation, didn't get the job, but then got hired for some temp work at DIS again. It wasn't an art job and it ended last Friday, but it's looking like I managed to successfully segue that into some contract work for the next six months. So that's a load off my back; I was just starting to get used to regular paychecks again and would prefer to continue the practice.

I'd like to say that it's because I've been working that I haven't been posting any art, and that would be partly true. However, I also know another good chunk of that time has just been dedicated to slogging through the huge number of games that get released in the last three months of the year. :P Memo to game publishers: I hate your stupid schedule.

Anyways, I didn't want to make a post with no art, so here's a sketch of a mermaid.

It's October...

....and I've kind of been wanting to draw a scarecrow for a while now. I guess it's the season?

Anyways, the last image I was working on got so belabored that I hated it by the time I was done; so I kept myself to an hour for this one. Tried to vary up my colors, I tend to work from a very muted palette as of late.

Next page

Thanks for the comments on the last page! This is page 7. After this I'm going to go back to page 1 and work my way up, then see where I'm going to take it.

Also, do any of you guys know of a good way to do half-way decent rain in Photoshop? I'm not happy with any of the results I've been getting.

This is a constant battle.

You have no idea.

I have clearly underestimated...

...the amount of time that goes into making a comic. This is page 6; I've done 7 or 8 in sequence but wanted to color this one first to see how it went. The whole thing's a vast epic that'll probably never get finished, but I figured it'd be a good learning experience.

The text has been written, though it's not in there yet obviously. Neither is the title or author of the book the girl is holding, which, you know, is relevant and all that.

Trying stuff out

Joke post

Feel free to ignore it. It's 1 o'clock in the morning, time to watch Pan's Labyrinth!

Heresy spawns from idleness

And man have I been idle lately. This was mostly just a test to try out a different technique; working in black and white and then using an overlay layer for the coloring.
It's terrible as W40K art, it needs at least two more chainsaws, three eviscerations, and a mountain of corpses to rank anywhere.

(I officially hate Blogger for listing "eviscerations" as misspelled and causing me to google it to check. Don't ever google "evisceration.")

Girl page

I found a old inked version of a standing pose for the girl character, and realized that I'd started a counterpart to the one-page I did for the boy like a month ago and then totally forgot about it. So I fixed a couple of things, colored it, and added some extra poses.

Man, I need to name these two.

I'm not really sure which direction I want to go on this project. I had combined a couple side projects into one, but right now I'm not sure that was the best idea.

Building a better ship

Just refining the quick sketch I posted earlier. I ditched the balloon. Apparently this whole story takes place in a fantasy world where it's always 15 minutes till sunset. :P

Speed paint

Got a bunch of new brushes through a link from Selene, tried a couple of them out. Really didn't yield any difference from my usual work, I don't think. Oh well.

Anyways, speed paint, about two hours.


EDIT: Added another speed paint. About 45 minutes for this one.

More designs

I've just been plugging away at this project. I didn't get nearly as much done last week as I wanted to, partly on account of Comic-Con but mostly just because of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2. I'm proud of myself, though; my party uses all the races this time and not just, well, Viera.

Anyways, I've been trying to design airships the past couple of days. I'm slower when it comes to mechanical designs; I've spent so much of the last four years drawing organic characters that I'm a bit out of practice.


I've also been doing some work on the girl. She's pretty much finished, so this image may change in a day or two to a full sheet like the one I did for the boy.

Crew cut

Here are three of the crew members. The girl in the middle is the young junior mechanic, and was much more liked by the senior mechanic on her right before she finally grew taller than him. Once again the shortest member of the crew, he's been surlier than usual. The tall chap on the left is the medic, but is usually found filling in as the navigator when his medical skills aren't needed.

Oh captain, my captain

Just plugging away at a couple projects I'm working on. This is the captain of an airship. I want to get the rest of her crew sketched out in a lineup by the end of tonight, though I won't have time to color them obviously. Let's see if I can hold myself to that!

Hey, this isn't an art post!

If you guys haven't seen it yet, you should check out the Prince of Persia trailer they released at E3 this week. It's crazy awesome! Love the designs and the art style, they pulled it off beautifully.

Hot and steamy

I'm working on some steampunk designs. This is a heavy rocket trooper; he's powerful, but he can't actually make it that far before running out of steam, so he's usually slow to the party. His gatling gun has to be cranked by hand, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous.

I'm also posting some early sketches of him. I like the final version a whole lot more, but figured I'd show my progress.

I'm also trying to improve my cleanup lines. Hopefully I'm getting better at it.

Getting closer.

Trying to narrow in on the girl. It's tough to get her just the right age, for some reason. Other designs are up next besides these two.

EDIT: I replaced the image with a slightly recolored one. The old one was bothering me. Also fixed the finger on the middle drawing, which had been cropped off.

Boys!

I made a preliminary model sheet for the boy. Preliminary, because there's still a lot of work left to be done and he might need to be changed, but I'm pretty satisfied with him at this point.

E-mail is now enabled! I'm not sure why I didn't enable it to begin with, but the situation's rectified.

Girls!

Concept sketches of the female lead for the same project as the last art post. None of them nail it for me yet, but I'm getting closer.

Viruses are cooler when they spawn zombie hordes

It's a good thing I uploaded that image last night; it was the last thing to be uploaded before my computer died.

It's right back up and running again, obviously. The death was largely of my own making, and through a brilliant stroke of luck I had picked up an external hard drive a couple of weeks ago on a whim and backed up 99.5% of the files on my computer, so very little was lost.

The utterly daft part comes in when the system recovery program tells me that none of my data will be lost, only drivers, settings, etc. OK, I can live with that. And all of the data on my hard drive was safe - except for the My Documents folder. Why on Earth would that be the only folder to get wiped? It seems like it would be the folder least in need of getting erased; it's just pictures and music and the like. Again, I'm pretty lucky in that I only lost a couple weeks of work to the wipe, but still.

Oof.

Man, it's been a month since I updated this blog. Hopefully I'm getting out of this funk I've been in.

I had started working on a Flash portfolio, but I put that on hold because it was looking like I might have been able to start working a couple weeks ago. Still haven't heard back, and it's been long enough that I'm back to work on a couple projects I've had on the back burner.

Here's a character from one of them. It's an ambitious project, quite possibly too ambitious, and he's a long ways from finalized. The first portrait and the full-scale drawing are a bit too young for what I was thinking.

New portfolio blog

It's getting to the point where it'll be a chore to keep all of my portfolio work on the front page, so I think I'm going to split off a second portfolio blog from this one. I'll keep updating this one with all of my new work as I develop it; the second one is purely to keep things organized for job apps.

Portfolio excerpts

Here are a few pages from the portfolio I put up at the CalArts job fair last week. I tried to avoid putting up artwork I've posted to the blog before, though there's a repeat or two.

The top two images are from a game concept I was working on with my friend Clayton. The third was a rough for a sculpture I did (and need to put the finishing touches on and then bake and paint). Bottom was a sculpture of a hippogriff I did third year at CalArts.

More foxes

Tried to design them a bit more.

Foxes

I'm not the greatest at drawing animals, so I was practicing with some foxes tonight. The one on the far right is actually the first one I did, so it's a bit awkward, but I'm pleased with the other two.

Edit: That third one was really bugging me, so I cropped it out.

In other news...

I've been drawing a lot of guys with guns in the past few days, so here's a girl eating M&Ms for a break. I need to get a sculpture done for the CalArts job fair in a couple weeks, get something to grab attention from a distance since the alumni table's kind of overlooked a lot of times. This is one of the drawings I came up with while thinking of characters to sculpt.

Alternate future

I've been helping a friend of mine put together some video game pitches. Here are a couple of guys from one of them, kind of a nuclear winter, alternate history concept. I hope to get more from the two concepts we're working on done in the next couple weeks.

Goofy segue

I found a couple of old sketchbook doodles in old books this morning (judging from the caricatures of Andy Schuhler, they're from second year). I just found them hilarious and wanted to share them. :P I forget what sequence of events led up to these.

More portfolio type stuff should be going up Monday, at the latest.

Inevitability

I don't think it's possible to sit down and draw shady cops without coming up with at least one Clint Eastwood.

Bind pose turnarounds

What I like to call the "boring views." Portfolio-oriented stuff.

Giant CG post

These are the two characters I've worked on in Maya. The little girl character was my first character model I did in a class I took senior year. Hans' development has been fairly well-documented on this blog. I'm applying to a couple character modeling positions, so I wanted to get these up here.

Up late, listening to the Smiths

Possible color layout

I finally got a new monitor. Now I can actually see what I'm drawing, which I've found helpful in the past. Let's see if I'm a bit better about updating now.

Anyways, this is the color scheme I originally had in mind when drawing Hans, though I've been thinking about changing the orange to purple. Also worried that the stripe down his front makes him look too much like a wannabe superhero.

Hopefully my next post will be something besides Hans, I need a bit of a break from the guy. He's always a bit grumpy.

Expressions and hand studies

Spacemen

I've been working on a Maya model as a project for a portfolio I hope to submit at the beginning of next week. The character is from my third year film at CalArts back in 2006, one of a pair of unlucky chaps who are stuck cleaning up the refuse of the solar system for a living. I liked the film, probably the only film I made there that I can say that about, but among other problems I have with it I never really did have solid designs for the two guys until the end of it, and that always kind of bugged me. So my project for the end of the week is to have Hans here pretty much hammered down and have the modeling/texturing done for him in Maya. I figured I'd kick the week off with a sketch of him. Tomorrow I want to get some facial expressions to show, in addition to getting some more time in on his model.

I'd like to get some more designs in next week... the other character, not to mention their ship and maybe some other random spacemen/ships and some aliens. I've been on a bit of a sci-fi kick anyways recently.