Quickie

Back from a much needed vacation, this time Italy. Can't believe how many pictures I took of architecture and statues. Breathtakingly educational material. My travel mates chastised me somewhat for all of the cloud pictures I took. I guess they couldn't appreciate the fact that I was mostly taking reference and inspirational photos. Oh well. Hopefully I'll be able to use some of what I took in future pieces.

Now on to todays quick face sketch. I've been trying out new brush variations for Corel Painter. I find that I'm still getting a hang of the program slowly but surely. And now that's I'm actively job hunting I actually have the time to experiment without a deadline to meet. No reference was involved. Took about an hour and a half from setup to finish. There are some glaring anatomical issues, but I was mainly trying to focus on value and tone more so than anything else. Anywho, enjoy.

Dreams of Steam Punk, Traffic and Climbing

So I'm trying out indoor rock climbing to keep me from getting too blob-like in my studio chair. I gotta say it was super fun and challenging although the shoes supplied were painful at best. So me and a couple buddies decided to go shopping for some proper gear. We headed out to Berkeley and hit up a couple stores. I founds some shoes that were relatively inexpensive and some chalk for my sweaty hands.

On the way back we got the serious case of the munchies and stopped off at Popeye's for some greasy chicken goodness. Mistake numero uno. Albeit hilarious, we get harassed by a typical street husslah calling himself Pretty Pete. You read that right. He had on clothes more expensive than the two of my buddies and I combined and was asking for tacos. We pointed out the fact that he should be buying us tacos! Needless to say he promptly lost interest.

Waiting til the middle of rush hour to head home, mistake numero dos. Back into the car we go and start heading down 80 to the bridge and we see a sign that says "3 lanes closed on the Bridge" Doh! Damn big rig drivers. So 2+ hours later and a different bridge crossed, we finally arrive home.

So what does this have to do with Steam Punk? Absolutely nothing actually. Although I do have two designs to share. Actually it's just one with the colors reversed. A good friend of mine over at Marsbarn, asked me to come up with a steam punk motif to be used on her handcrafted dice bags she sells, among other things. This came after seeing some of the stuff I was designing for a personal project. She had a bunch of clients interested in a steam punk design but couldn't find anything she liked. When the bags eventually go on sale I'll post an announcement and a link. In the meantime go on over and browse her other wares.

Steam Powah!

Some sketches for a personal project involving steam powered robots.

Monster Hunted!

So Capcom conducted a fan-based contest this past week where participants were asked to design a weapon that potentially might make it into the game for it's North American and European/Australia release sometime in 2010. If you know anything about Monster Hunter or are a fan of sorts you realize simply designing a weapon is too shortsighted a task. All things come from the monsters you defeat in the game...so naturally my weapon needed an inspiring monster to be drawn from, literally.

Now that this little guy was finished I moved onto the weapon, or in this case weapons. There are multiple categories of weapon in MH and I needed so see what I could do with all of them before deciding on one.

In the end I decided on doing a finished rendering of the Slash Axe weapon type, a weapon with two modes.

Submissions just ended recently, so it'll probably be sometime before winners are announced. I'll update if/when that happens. In the meantime I will probably flesh out all the weapons in my free time.

Big Update Part 2

And here's part two. These are the armor sets that are supposed to be added to the game. I always find it interesting how one's art develops as a project progresses. There is always some shift in style, emphasis, etc., as you work on long term projects.

Big Update Part 1

Okay, now for the first part of a big (well relatively speaking) update. Here's the first set of of concepts I did while working on Legends of Kaos for Shattered Reality Interactive as their Lead Concept Artist. At this point I'm not sure what's happening with the game but you can check it out here: www.legendsofkaos.com

Arid Outlook

Today I went ahead and organized a bunch of my photo reference into categories and chose a couple to bring this quickie to life.