Ursadon't stop me now...

Here are a couple of works in progress. Don't really know if I'll use them for anything. The drakes I'm taking a bit of a different approach on. The Ursadon, I'm checking the effects of working onto a texture. The drakes are a flipped composition right now. They're really going to go the other way in the end and I may change a bunch of stuff up with that front one.

Tower over the Edge of the Known World

Here is the finished version of the WIP I was showing earlier. There are some issues of position I couldn't quite fix but I'm actually pretty happy with the turnout.

Sandstorm

Here's the finished version of the Gravel Thresher. I think it's pretty well composed now. I balanced out the colours, I think, buy adding some more subtle blues and reds into the background. I beefed up that whiny little rock, and I think the yellows of the eyes really help bring the eye from the carriage to the beast. Hope you guys like it.

Gravel Thresher

This is a new creature design. I wanted it to be dynamic and incorporate some background. That carriage will be fleshed out in the end. I'm going to be playing a lot with the idea of something emerging from a sandstorm abruptly. Hopefully it'll turn out.

The creature was my favorite of a few thumbnails where I couldn't decide whether it would be reptilian or insectoid. This one combines elements of potato bugs, prawns and will later probably have some centipede elements in there. I'd like to get across the boom and the thud of it emerging from the ground and then slamming into the ground after a triumphant leap in the air.



Here is the image after some more work. Still developing atmosphere, flipping around to see which direction I want to put it. Working with light and balancing still, too.

Happy Birthday Josh

Today, the 10th, is the birthday of Josh, my very good friend and fellow Assault Commander. So happy birthday to him.

Here is a little study I did on both terrain and space ship design and movement.

Low Profile Work

Here's a new TAP frame, and some kind of artichoke dude I was working on. The dude is a work in progress, but I just really don't feel like working on him right now. I'm going to try and do some more sci-fi stuff for the next little bit.

Overhang

Here's the fixed version of Zemelac, the newest member of the team (loosely based off of username Fanboy) and a new environment I'm working on.

I Like Hot Chicks

Identify this 30 min. practice portrait to affirm knowledge of Simon Sweetman's favorite musicians... Major Clue: The flippin' title.

Lurker Hound and Co.

Here is the finished product on the lurker hound. I changed the legs a bit as I was doing them, so that it looks more like a leaping, or dodging pose. I noticed that a lot of my poses are pretty static so this was an attempt to get across something a bit more dynamic.

The other drawing is the first of a few drawings that I'm doing in preparation for a cyberpunk D&D campaign in the near future. The campaign is going to feature a group which will act as the rival characters to the party, each one loosely based on a different friend of mine from the artist community at the Escapist. This is the first one based on a user named Zelamac.

Sick Day

I have been very sick lately. The last 4 days have been spent mostly at home... in bed... doing nothing. It sucks. Anyway, this is what I've done in that time. Not as much as you'd expect but here you go. The second is the finished version of the Defiler redo. The first drawing is a work in progress of another monster in the same vein as the Lurker Maw a few posts ago. They will both be monsters in my D&D campaign. They both live in a vast wasteland where the sandstorms are incredibly bad. The reason neither have eyes is because, presumably, sandstorms would destroy their eyes, thus I've decided that the red barbs/spikes on them are extra-sensitive feelers like antennae which are heat sensitive and cold sensitive so they can tell where objects are based on heat. Some future creatures may use echo location or something...

Refiler

Here is a pretty much finished version of the Defiler redo. Hope you like it.

WIPping myself into shape...

Yesterday I saw material from a 16 year-old kid. It made me shameful of my meager talents. Holy balls is this kid good. He's the featured artist in the latest issue of ImagineFX, which is like THE concept art magazine. His character art is really quite good and, considering is age especially, is enough to make me feel inadequate. Nevertheless, with shame comes inspiration in this case. So last night I sat down and drew. Today I drew some more. Here are my two works in progress for the moment. The first is a REALLY early stage on some knight character. I'm planning on building him up. Starting him with the simplest of details and slowly building on them until the image is complex enough for me to be satisfied. The other image I'm posting is actually a revamp of a previous image. One of the first things I did for May Contain Dragons was a piece called Incursion by Defilers. Well, I decided to take a look back at the defiler and redo him with all I've learned taken into account. It's also my first time using texture overlays, which was fun and I think turned out really well.

Does it break your vow of silence if it makes noise when you transform?

I have a lot of influence in my life from East Asian culture. Particularly what's become part of mainstream popular culture in the North America. I love images of Buddhist temples overgrown with foliage. This goes neatly along with my love of secondary succession. Anyway, I did this number throughout the day today. I honestly couldn't tell you how much time I spent on it, since I was so sporadic working on it. This is the first time I've tried to tackle tropical foliage and I've come to the very reasonable conclusion that I have no fucking idea what I'm doing when it comes to that. I don't know how concept art guys do it, but I have a feeling it involves a full version of photoshop and something that rhymes with 'gustom grushes'. Anyway, here's my newest piece. The background sort of fades out when compared to the saturation levels of the dude and the dragon (which I didn't intend to be a dragon when I started), but hey, it's more about the dude anyway. I feel like this is one of those characters who's really a dragon the entire time but just takes the form of a human just for the helluvit, and just when you think you know him then he's all like *Bam* "I'm a dragon!". You know... kinda like me.

I Like Eerie Greens

Here's a little character sketch I did today. Some kind of forest warrior with an anomolous-looking scimitar. There are some obvious issues with the piece, but I like the layout and I think I'll look into doing more with this layout in the future.

Onnaroll

I've been working a lot lately. Here's a quick creature design that took me about 45 minutes. I'm also working on a spaceship design, a concept drawing for one of my campaigns and a few other things that I'm on and off with.

Two Random

Here's a weird little drawing I did last night as well as a creature design I did this morning. The creature design I'm pretty happy with. Took me a little less than an hour and a half. Cheers.

A'Sploded!

Here is the inflammatory beginning of the conflict between the Tiger Assault Pageant and the Cyborgs. This one action, the busting of the Cyborgestapo officer via fo'ty club, would start the greatest battle ever.

Here is the 9th frame to the second song of TAP...



Here's a self portrait I did today whilst bored...

Couple of quickies

Here are two quick practice digital paintings. Both are about 30 minute studies. Both feature my poncho, one of my favorite things in the world. I'm not too happy with the Wild Thing one. I did it a while ago and am still a bit ansy about posting it.

Off one adventure, off to a new one

So I've gotten World Escaping Land to a state of completedness that I feel happy with. It's not the best I've done, but I think its pretty cool. I'm going to try my hand at some more complex stuff next. Trying out things like cityscape, types of environments. I'll also get some creature and character design in too, hopefully.

I always like finishing a piece like this because it opens up my time to do almost anything. Then I start that adventure... and then it may or may not become a pain in the ass to work on.
Cheers,

World Escaping Land

This is the next WIP shot of "World Escaping Land". I'm pretty happy with how this is coming along so far. One of the better environments I've done. The sky city is a bit sketchy, but I really like how the dragon and the cliffs etc look.

The First WIP in a Long-Ass Time

So this should give you a really rough idea of where this is going. Cliffs in the background. Waterfall. There are some small, ruined architectural elements. Then there's that city in the sky which I'll go into detail for. The dragon at the front is meant to be made from dirt and rocks, with roots and junk sticking out of it. When I make its wings, I'm thinking of making them out of branches, which I think would look really cool. Already I think this environment is turning out better than the previous 2 dragon + environments (mostly because of the learned success from "Fallen Leaves"). I think the key for me has to be to work on the dragon and the scenery simultaneously rather than one after the other. I'll be going into much further detail than is here when I work on this further. After this one I think I'm going to try out character design a bit, and look at that side of concept art. Maybe do a bit of creature design at the same time (since I haven't really done that since the Shambler and the Strider).
I'm also thinking of doing a cool action shot of the Shambler and the Knight in front of it having a chase scene.

Fallen Leaves

Here's the work I did through out the better part of this evening. This is probably 2 maybe 3 hours of effort here.

And the Battle Begun...

I got on a bit of a role doing TAP frames today and did 2. It really didn't take too long and you'll realize that part of it has to do with the fact that I sort of ripped off other frames bit and editted them to my needs. But screw you, I'm making progress. So with that in mind here are the next two frames coming up.

Promote the Cause

So, after much procrastination I decided to procrastinate a little more on TAP by just making some promotional art for it. The top one is the preliminary design for the cover art of Tiger Assault. The other is just a promotional drawing. I'm pretty happy with both.

Shades of Video Game Spectrums

Here's another kinda bad dragon on a pretty mediocre background.

I Will Always Look Up...

This one I did all in the last 4 hours, on and off. In total it has probably two or two and a half hours of work in it. I'm not so happy with the fact that the dragons look so out of place on the background, but I don't want to go back now.

Caldera Sunrise Sounds a Bit too Much Like a Beverage...

I've started trying out doing environments a little more. After taking a look at a few quick albeit not altogether helpful video tutorials I get the basics of it a little more than I did before. That said, this isn't my proudest moment. This drawing took about an hour and a half or an hour and three-quarters.

Also, true to my name I will be starting a series of drawings involving dragons very soon. This is the first of them. Anyway, here's some kind of Caldera environment at dawn or dusk. I really need to work on skies at some point...

An Overly Long-Winded Explanation

I feel like I should fully explain Tiger Assault Pageant to everyone. It may help explain to you exactly why it is that I keep drawing these weird-ass robots and tigers. So here goes a brief history of the band, the art and the plot of the comic.

A few years ago I met a wicked dude named Josh. Josh and I have become great friends in those few years. Towards the end of grade 12 in high school Josh told me he wanted me to do some art for some theoretical bands he wanted to make. One was to be called Dangerous Rape which turned into an entirely different project, void of Sweetmanian art. The other was something called Tiger Assault Pageant. He wanted me to draw tigers wearing dresses, with guns. I thought that sounded hilarious and spent a few hours making what I found to be some quality drawings for the project. Josh loved them and told me that I should become part of the project fully. TAP started as a band that was going to be entirely "progressive". With Josh as a huge Steve Vai fan and us both having an appreciation for The Mars Volta, we started talking about poking fun at progressive music by "just making a lot of sounds with a lot of effects". The project fizzled out after we moved to different cities.

Halfway through last year Josh messaged me to ask me if I would just do some art for TAP, of Tigers with guitars and lasers and stuff. Some of them fighting robots. The project gained new life and I drew the picture featured in one of my first posts on May Contain Dragons. Josh suggested that we make a comic that people listening to the album could read as they listened, with lyrics in the songs reflected in the dialogue of the comic. So we started. No longer so interested in aping prog rock, we were now interested in just making something that sounded good, looked cool and most importantly... now aped a lot from the 80s cult classic Heavy Metal. So we developed a plot and how the songs would progress. We decided that each song and chapter should be done in a slightly different art style and wildly different musical style. These were pretty much based on whatever music me and Josh like or want to make fun of so the range is pretty wide. We later recruited our friends Ryan Peters and Andrew Jarvis to help us out on the musical side. So Tiger Assault, after some prep work, came to life as a politically incorrect, and frankly bizarre comic/album.

Tiger Assault Pageant follows the events of a Tiger Uprising on the planet Aries. Above the planet's surface live Cyborgs who are oppressive and evil rulers who abduct tigers and perform genetic experiments on them. One day they knock on the wrong door. This starts a tiger rebel group known as the Pageant to start a rebellion (mostly based on the fact that the Cyborgs destroyed all the fo'ties [40oz bottles of malt liquor]). The Tigers go on an epic adventure that takes them into space, finds them allied with dragons, a rhino and some malfunctioning robots.

Josh and I are both big fans of doing, frankly obnoxious, freestyling. Themes in our freestyling have really come out into the themes of TAP. Things like Starcraft, 40s, Pizza and Dr. Pepper are frequent themes in out raps and you'll see those themes come back a lot in the actual album.

After that long explanation I hope you get a little more why I continue into these drawings of anthropomorphic tigers and these... cyborgs. Here are the latest frames I've done. I'm almost at a part of the comic that will actually be interesting.

Angry Magic

Look at this dude. He's totally a pissed off magic dude.
This drawing took about 4 or 5 hours. I'm pretty happy with the turnout.
The background is half-assed because I didn't want to do one, I just needed something for the background while I did some character design. The character is called Tulius, and he's some kind of angel thing that I might put into a D&D campaign somewhere. Hope you like it.

Svripping on your (?)Turntables(?)

Alright, so this year I'm taking a course on narrative and story in drawing. In addition to our classwork and assigned projects we also have to complete a good amount of personal work on a self-created assignment. This is the first of those drawings.

To give you a brief description of my project, it involves child-like wonder, one of my current (and Miyazaki's) favorite themes to put into my work. The drawings will follow me trying to see mundane objects in a new way. This particular drawing is about my playing with the screen off the top of my gecko's terrarium. I ended up just scratching on it like a DJ, so I created a few sketches of me, the terrarium and some DJ equipment. Originally I had half the terrarium as a speaker, I had it in bright pinks and high contrast, but it looked awful. This is the one I ended up with. I had to bring the yellow into the actual drawing in a way that connected the words to the character so I put touches of yellow for the headphones and I shaded the crown on Max (from my WtWTA tattoo), since that actually is yellow on my arm. I feel like this turned out really well. It will be accompanied either by a short anecdote about my playing with the screen, or detailed instructions on how to be a 'screen DJ'.

Eerily Lit and Squinting in the Dark

Here is the finished product on my work with the model. I wasn't quite sure what to do with the background so I just sort of messed around and ended up with this. Its not great, but I'm happy enough with it to call it finished.

Hope y'all like it.

The Duel of the Hunter and Hunted (Transmuted/Disfigurer)

Okay so I have a couple of things to put up. Firstly, I feel finished with my Atrix Wolfe piece. I tweaked the background a little bit, I feel the figures are more integrated into the piece. The only edit I may make is to add some ravens flying around in the aura of the Hunter. I'm pretty happy with the turnout. I hope you guys like it.

The second item is a half-finished project for DRAW 300. As you may know, I refuse to put up any and all of my non-digital work if I can help it. As a result you never really see what it is that I do in class. So last class in a hope to make the class a little more interesting (since I have to "learn" rudimentary drawing skills again... for like the 5th or 6th time) I brought my laptop and tablet in order to draw from the model (who was more of a still life than anything). The drawing is not yet in colour, which I will be applying this weekend at some point. Its a work in progress, and it may look a little flat to you, but that's actually because the profile of this model was fairly flat. Anyway, here goes.




More TAP frames soon. I have one new one finished with two more on the way very soon.

Past all that Good Shit

The school year has started for me, which may mean that my personal projects may slow down to a trickle... Instead of the slightly faster trickle of the summer.

Here's another WIP shot of my piece based on the Book of Atrix Wolfe. I still really need to clean up the background and I still need to adjust lighting and shadows so the characters look like a part of the background rather than static images pasted on. Anyway, I'm pretty happy with how the Hunter turned out. I may do some more smaller details with regard to the new tongues of flame on Atrix. I'll have to see.

Hey, New Stuff

Hey, new stuff. I can't steal my neighbor's internet for too long so I'll be brief.
First couple drawings are the second part of the Atrix Wolfe drawing and the preliminary amalgamation of the three drawings. The second drawing is the progress on the next TAP frame, which I'm pretty happy with.

I'll edit in more once I have internet this Friday.