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'.