Turkey-Bacon anyone?

This week's COW was Clark's round for Thanksgiving (you weird Americans with your Thursday Thanksgiving in November), Turpiggen. The idea was that scientists spliced turkeys and pigs together to create some kind of ultimate thanksgiving meat-stravaganza.

I have to admit that when it comes to moderating Creature of the Week, I feel like I have a responsibility to make sure that the activity's quality does not deteriorate in any way. Now, I feel Clark and I have done a pretty good job with COW lately. We've recently experienced a spike in participation that's been quite nice. But, I always like to ensure that the level of quality of the winning entry is up to snuff. I'm a little ashamed to admit but I become kind of nervous when it's wednesday morning and I don't see any entries that I consider to be of my arbitrarily assigned "winner's quality". When I'm afraid right off the bat that this might happen, or if I feel there might not be few entries, I always make sure to try and get one in. It sounds weird or even like I'm a dick, but I kind of put myself in there as a fail-safe, at least for myself. I'm attempting to ensure that each round has at least one entry of decent quality. It sounds arrogant, but I know I'm not bad, and in some cases I know I can do much better than what is being entered. It actually happened one time that doing this was the only thing preventing there being no entries of a "winning" level in the poll, that round was (maybe you can guess) round #207: The Healer... and you may be able to guess (or remember) what happened: I won that round. It may be a stupid goal, or unfair to less experienced artists, but I do care that very high quality art is being pulled out in Creature of the Week, it encourages other higher level artists to compete which is nice. Not because I like higher level artists and don't like lower level artists, but because COW is a learning experience, and the new artists have a much harder time learning how to do it right, it they don't have good examples of how to do it right, and if they aren't getting pointers from people who can do it right.

...So in conclusion, this round I was afraid that there might not be a lot of work going into the poll, and I was worried that there may not be work of (what I consider to be) sufficient quality to shamelessly waltz into the Winners' Thread. So I busted out a sketch this weekend and threw this together in 2 hours this evening. For a piece that took a total of maybe 2 and a half hours, I think it turned out alright. Let me know what ya' think.

Another Name Game Piece

Hey guys. I'm a little busy watching the charity event Desert Bus at the moment, but I'm busy drawing at the same time. In a few days you guys will get a couple of updates on a few of my new projects. In the mean time here's a little fan art piece I did of The Escapist Magazine's Name Game webcomic. It was about a 2 hour study on this one.

Dragon of the Wastes

Hey guys. I've been busy with some art projects and with Dark Souls, lately. But I HAVE been working, dammit. I've scrapped a couple of awful sketches since my last piece, but I have something new for you today. Before I get to that, I'm proud to announce that my current project for drawing which will span the whole year will be based almost entirely in digital media. Once the project is complete I hope to have at least a small show for it, so I'll keep you posted on that. I will likely be starting up a sketchbook on ConceptArt.org to keep track of the work in that project as well as my personal work. I'll post a link when that's all ready.

Here's my latest piece. Yay, dragons! This piece is a character from my ongoing (about 3 years now, holy shit) campaign I've been running with my weekly group. In that world there are a mere 8 dragons, but each is powerful, vain and sadistic in their own way. This is Affel (nicknamed "The Storm"), who rules over the Grey Wastes. Originally I had intended her to be a little darker and a little colder in palette, but I think this works anyways. The little guys with her are her drake minions.

Ash Greels and Plumed Lumbox

Hey everyone. I decided to work on a Creature of the Week piece for the first time in a very long time. This was for Clark Miller and I's anniversary round. The brief was to create a creature which would spend the first year of its life as a relatively beautiful or cute herbivore. Upon it's first birthday, the creature would then transform into a much uglier and much more predatory creature. I guess that means Clark and I will become evil predatory moderators for Creature of the Week, now. Heh.

Anyway these are the creatures I created. Originally, the mid-point creature was set to be the immature herbivorous form, but I came to realize it needed to be a little bit more cute and a little more beautiful. So I relegated that one to the mid-point between the two creatures and created the little pink plumed bugger to be the true herbivorous form.

Here's the description I gave for the creatures:
In the ashlands of Caliope's fourth planet, researchers noted a strange pattern. The Plumed Lumbox seemed to have no real natural predators, despite being a fairly healthy portion for any one of the many predators in the area. But even the Aspynx would leave them well enough alone most of the time. Slowly the reason became clear. Upon observing a Lumbox for an entire day it was discovered that the Ash Greel's (the apex predators of the area) would often escort the Lumbox around it's daily activities. There was no symbiosis here, the Lumbox provided no advantage to the Ash Greel, and the Ash Greel would mercilessly protect the small herbivores.

It was not until a six month research expedition that it was finally uncovered why this was. Scientists observed that at approximately a year old, the Plumed Lumbox would begin to eat excessive amounts, slowly shedding their feathers. Over this period they would begin to lose their attractive frills and feathers, as well as their bright colouring, slowly turning a purple-grey ash colour. The Lumbox would begin to grow slight tusks and secondary and tertiary mandible structures as well as, most unusual of all, would begin scavenging meat from the Greels' kills. It would remain like this for two weeks, gorging itself until it became obese and nearly unable to move, whereupon the researchers realized they were about to witness the birth of an Ash Greel. The Lumbox-Ash Greel relationship was actually parent and child, not some odd one-sided symbiosis.

The transformation is noted as being brutal and bloody. The creature triples in size over the course of a single day. The limbs extend and the mutated tendons push themselves out of the skin in the first, forming membrane over themselves but leaving odd holes in the legs. Finally, and most painfully, the membranes on the creature's face begin to split. Over time, the creature's skull will rip itself the Ash Greel's signature 4-way jaw and the Lumbox's yellow eye will grow over into a sensory membrane. Adult Ash Greel's must bring food to the freshly transformed Ash Greels immediately or they will not live. The transformation leaves the Ash Greel too weak to properly hunt for two days, after which it will begin hunting for itself, and shortly thereafter will search for a mate. Male Ash Greels are solitary, leaving the female Ash Greel's to look after the Lumbox. If a male Ash Greel attempts to approach the immatured Lumbox, the female will often attack, and sometimes kill, the male.



Here's a lightened up version, since I realized that on most monitors the above is stupidly high contrast.

Dreolin

Just a quick update for now. This is a new race I designed for my regular D&D campaign. They're called the Dreolin, who are an underground race in the vein of dwarves and Zelda's Gorons. This is just the male version, I'm going to try and pump out a female model as well in the near future. Hope ya' like it.

It Just Wants Love... and Food

Hey guys. Been busy starting school again and all that junk, but I have some fun stuff for you, now! Here's a creature/plant design I finished literally 5 minutes ago. Originally I designed this while bored (and also not busy) at work along with a couple of other creatures I invented to have flora-like qualities. This was the one I spent the most time on, and ended up having the most fun with, so here he is:

I wanted to submit him to a big collaborative post-apocalyptic project called "WASTED" but the project closed for submission a few days ago. Damn. Anyway, I wanted to give it a ball, because I like the idea of it having this really obvious, and really kind of dumb, lure such that it could eat children.

This past week I decided to dabble a bit more in the realm of Industrial Design. The following is for round 178, the "Dwarven Mining Torch". That is to say, a flashlight for dwarven miners useable around flammable materials. The fun thing about industrial design with Fantasy is that you can make up things to help your design... like "luxor crystals" and "mana batteries".

Daravon's Standard Handheld Luxor torch functions on the principal that when a luxor crystal is contacted by a mana-based power-source it begins to glow. By establishing a slide-switch and locking mechanism allowing a small mana battery to contact the base of the crystal, dwarves can use the torch as needed without draining the power source. A mirrored cone is placed around the base around the protruding crystal allowing the user to focus the light. The torch is functional both upright like a traditional torch, and whilst aiming the light as a modern torch.

It's about damn time!

So, sometimes I'm lazy. Sometimes I forget about things. Sometimes I don't end up putting a piece up here because it's shitty, and sometimes it won't stop being shitty no matter how many times I seem to attempt it. This is the final result for a set I've been meaning to do for quite a while. Firstly because I needed practice doing quick variants (there's about 3 hours of total work on this piece). Secondly because I needed to finally fucking render these guys for the benefit of my D&D group.

The group I play with on a regular basis during the school year have, on quite a few occasions, found themselves faced with Gigas, a large-sized demon-creature. I've described them to the party at length, but I'e been meaning to actually DRAW them for a while; and while all the iterations from my sketchbook were good enough for a while, every time I would try and sit down to render them out I got frustrated and upset with the results. This time I actually like where the piece went. Influences include: DOOM (specifically the enemy called Mancubus), Final Fantasy XII (with the enemy of the same name), Shadow of the Colossus (as always) and a few other things. Hope you like 'em.

Podipuss and Friends

Hey all, here's a quick study I did over the last 2 nights. It's based on a character from a webcomic I read called: Name Game. The drawing is of the main character, Alix, with her pet/friend octopus, Podipuss. Total hours spent is probably around 4 on this piece.

Snowforts have gotten way out of hand

So, I managed to actually get myself to do some environment work. This is a piece I started about a 2 weeks ago and have been working on, on and off. For the most part it's just to practice environments but it's based on a location in my D&D campaign setting called the 'Harrower's Fortress'. I'm pretty happy with the turnout on this one. Originally the foreground elements weren't there, but there needed to be something to balance the values and establish scale. It's a bit cliche, but I think it works fine for what it is.

The Whothefuck

Yeah, I don't really know either...

"Self-Portrait" sinks to new depths

Sorry everyone, it's been a while since my last update. I've been really bad about working. At the moment I'm on vacation visiting Toronto before my sister moves to Berlin for grad school.

Here's a self-portrait I've been working on and off on for the last few weeks (basically since I finished the Solar Collector). It was a frustrating piece and I had a hard time staying focused the whole time I was working on it. Ah well, it's done now, and I'm pretty happy with the turnout.



In other news, Clark Miller is running a series of 3 COW rounds entitled the 'familiar series' looking at the concept of a wizard's familiar. We just finished with the Cult-leader's Demon Whisperer, which was a Lovecraftian-themed one. We're about to start the Alchemist's Golden Pet, with one more after that. Check it out.

Solar Collector

New creature, woo! First thing's first though: Allison Theus of Extra Credits] (a web-series discussing the development of video games as a medium) and incredible concept art fame requires shoulder surgery if she wants to continue to do art. Currently her team has set up a page to raise money for her surgery (which is rather expensive over in the states), if you feel like contibuting, please do. Here is the link to the page.
Here is a link to Allison Theus' website.

Anyways, here's my new creature. The topic this week was one of Clark's, the Solar Collector. It had to be a creature living in an extremely cold environment which had some way of harvesting solar energy to survive. Here's my entry. I wanted to show it with the frill opened and closed but I ran short on time. The one's in the back are just slightly warped and colour-adjusted copies, but I wanted to show scale better, as well as give it more of a populated look. Hope ya' like it!

Parlsey Coriander (Parssurrrey Coriahndurrhu)

Here's the finished product on my piece illustrating my character from Ravenloft, the late Parsley Coriander. For the record, the name came as my little tribute to the film Paprika. In the film, the character Paprika seems to have her name only ever said by dudes with really deep voices. With japanese accents it takes on certain je ne sais quoi. Parsley's name came from me and my tabletop gaming group deciding what seasoning was the most fun to say in a thick, deep, Japanese accent.

As for the character, I should probably explain a couple things about her to be perfectly clear on why certain things are in the illustration. She has fey in her bloodline, and was raised in (read: by) the woods due to her parents illegal dealings in hallucinogenic (and magical) mushrooms. I wanted the character to be totally out of place in the grim gothic horror of Ravenloft, so I decided she was a bit of a space cadet, who loved animals (ducks in particular), and whose main weapon was her imaginary friend/giant spoon (lovingly named "Coop the Scoop"). Her parents were taken away and killed and she was raised by a wealthy dude and his 6 bitch-ass daughters. Anyway, Parsley, over the course of our journey had the following happen to her (not necessarily in this order):
- Was told by an all-powerful computer that she had to use necromancy to see ducks again
- Saw several visions of her dead parents, including an instance of them coming out of a camel's humps
- Had a horse come back to life only to have it killed by Brian Mulroney
- Had several arguments with Brian Mulroney leading to several attempts on her life
- Had her love of animals nearly completely destroyed
- Was brainwashed by a squirrel demon
- Fell off a cliff
- Died
- Got her soul sucked into the all-powerful computer, destroying it
- Came back to life, undead
- Killed many a squirrel
- Had her adoptive family attempt to kill her in the form of living mushrooms
- Was effectively brainwashed by a lich
- Attempted to kill and was subsequently killed by another party member

Hopefully that explains the image somewhat... Maybe?

Still Kickin'

Sorry it's been so long since I last posted. I've been really bad about getting my ass in gear and actually sitting down for drawing sessions longer than an hour or so. Basically I started work again. Because of developer logistics, I have to test from 11-7:30, meaning that I get home at about 7:45 or 8 every day, at which point I'm usually to exhausted to do much of anything. You wouldn't think game testing is that soul-sucking, but it really really is. Anyway, that's why I've been so inactive. I'm trying to really get my ass in gear, but it's tough.

I've been trying to get my shit together for a piece of fan art I'm putting together for the Warriors of Darkness of Loading Ready Run fame. But big, crowded compositions are tough to put together, especially when I don't have the character designs down yet.

I did Industrial Design of the Week recently. The topic was "Space Smuggler", wherein I had to design the space smuggler's spaceship. Being a big fan of both Firefly and Cowboy Bebop, I decided to use those as my chief influences. I wanted it to look cobbled together, and falling apart, yet lived in and home-like. I'm not totally happy with it, obviously there are perspective issues and I rushed a bunch of it, not realizing I had second week to perfect it. Anyway, here she is...



This second piece here is a character I was playing in a recent Pathfinder campaign, run by the illustrious, industrious Simon Case. The character started out as my tribute to the kid's book Tatterhood, a little girl using a massive spoon as her chief form of weaponry. Anyway, at a certain point in the campaign, things took a turn for the worse, and her (read: my) loopy attitude led to her having a bit of a spill down a giant cliff. Thanks to a hilarious twist, she ended up revived as mangled perversion of her previous form. I decided to roleplay it so that she didn't really realize how mangled she was. Anyway, I tried to capture that character in this piece. I'm in the process of adding colour to the piece, I'll post updates on that as soon as I can.



Also, I have a Twitter now. I will update it with stupid shit about my life and also Creature of the Week stuff. So, follow that, I guess...

FAAAAAABulous Dragons

So, I recently had my computer brought in for repairs. Due to my previous experiences with the Apple store (and the competence of the employees within), I had planned on spending about a week to a week and a half without my computer. Logically, this would have made it difficult to moderate the Creature of the Week forums, so the week before last I asked Clark to kindly moderate a 2 week round so as to be safe in case I wasn't around due to computer repairs. Likely as karma for this, my computer was repaired not in the two to four days that they said it would take, but rather two hours after I dropped my computer off. Anyway, in addition to getting my computer back I was able to participate in the round that week which was "Faberge Dragon", the idea being to design a dragon that would hatch out of a specific Faberge Egg. I thought the topic was pretty clever, and there's some cool stuff going on this round. Anyway, here's my dragon from this round.



For the record, it was based (loosely) off this egg:

Rooooooocks!

Sorry it's been so long since I've posted anything new. I've been super lazy lately. Given the fact that work is iffy until mid-May, I've been just dicking around at home (mostly playing Persona 4). So my workflow as been burk...flowed. Anyway, I have a new creature for you all, so "Hooray!" or whatever it is that you say when I post a new creature.

Before that, a couple of things. First off is that my brother, Nick Sweetman, has an art show coming up, which opens on the 26th of this month at The Rivoli in Toronto. There's a link to the facebook event here, and you can check out Nick's paintings on his website here. I encourage you to attend if you're in Toronto, since his paintings are awesome.

Secondly, I'm currently in the works of putting together an audio-book version of my "kids book" Everyone You Know, which has been recorded an is in the editing process at the moment. When that's done I'll be throwing it up on youtube with the images going along, so you can watch me crush dreams whenever you want. I'll be throwing you guys a link to that when it's up.

Lastly, I'm pretty excited this week about tattoo news. My friend Alysha Farling, whose drawings continue to inspire awe in me, who I commissioned to work on a tattoo design for me, has finished the design. This week I finally get to see where everything is at, and what she's put together, so we can see if changes need to be made or if it's totally awesome already. I will put up an image of the design as soon as is possible.

Okay, so without anymore piddling around here's the creature I worked on this week. I'm really happy with how this guy turned out. Probably my favorite design since my Halloween round entry. The topic this week was one of mine, wherein I plugged a bunch of creature-y adjectives and such into a table and then used random number generation to pick 3 traits to generate a topic. It came up with a lot I liked, but I went with this one: Red-Hot, Speckled Rock-Muncher. Also fun: this is the 30th creature I've designed for Creature of the Week!

Bridge the Gap

Here's stuff from the Environment of the Week/Creature of the Week cross-over round called "Bridge the Gap", about creature's that create gestalt bridges out of themselves. I'm a little lazy now, so not too much to say. The environment got super rushed at the end so I'm not all that happy with the right half of it... anyway, here ya go.

Looking for a Party: Nilos, The Greek River Dragon

It's official, I've won my first creature of the week round! My little cancer-eating bacteria you see in the post-below scored up 19 out of 40 votes. I kinda wish I'd done even better, but I'm just happy to, finally, after so many attempts, get that win. So now, let's move back on to other business, where I'm less likely to win...

This week we had a COW winner (7 wins), by the username emerging, guest host Creature of the Week. The topic he chose was "Titan War Beast". This is our third official: "War Beast" round (Amphibious War Beast and Arctic War Beast being the other two), and I think this is the best I've done on any of them. The theme was to design a war beast that the Titans would have used in the battle against the Gods in Greek mythology. The idea was to use the sort of God of War-style epic imagery of colossal forces as our inspiration.

I decided to go with Tethys, wife of Oceanus and mother of the great Rivers of Greece, as the Titan I would draw from. I imagined that she had transformed the great rivers into massive dragon-like beasts. I invented a dumb little story that went along with it, as I did with my hanging gardens of Babylon creature, so I'll post that, too, I guess:

When the Titans rose up Ares sent forth his forces into the foothills to head them off. Enyalius led this force, charging forward in his shining, pegasus-drawn chariot. When they reached the foothills they found the beasts.

Tethys, mother of the waters, wife of Oceanus, had taken the children of her Tiamat and transformed them into the great rivers of Greece. Now she had taken here children back for the sake of war. Greatest and fiercest among them was Nilos, the beast who was the River Nile.

Enyalius' forces scattered at the sight of the Titaness' river beasts. Only Enyalius remained, charging alone against Nilos; a mere white speck against the colossal river beast.

You'd think I was Procrastinating...

...And that's kind of true, but I also really wanted to do a lot of digital painting in the last little while. So here's the most recent COW piece. It's for the topic "The Healer". This is a bacterial creature I invented, which seeks out and devours cancer cells. Despite, then attacking the previously affected areas, it's way easier to remove than the actual cancer. So there's that I guess. I did this in the last couple of days only, so I didn't quite get the time to work on it that I might have otherwise wanted, but I think it turned out alright considering.

Boat over the Hall of the Mountain Styx

This week I'm doing a ConceptArt.org community activity-stravaganza! Which may or may not be a terrible idea considering the amount of actual schoolwork I have. But, nevertheless, in the words of Sims and Dessa, we "Press On! Press On! You know what that's like!".

It was round 160 for both Industrial Design of the Week and Environment of the Week. I did both...
The topic for EOW was "In the Hall of the Mountain King", inspired by Greig's music. Whilst I was listening I imagined a city lining the walls of a massive cavern, the buildings all stacked atop one another precariously. Here was the result.



The topic for IDW was the Boat over the River of Styx. I imagined it as a cheesy theme park ride. The result was really heavily Grim Fandango-inspired.

A few D&D-related things (and Happy Birthday to Natalie)

Hey everyone. So for those of you that don't know, I run a weekly D&D session in a module I created using D&D e3.X as a base. Now, this christmas I wanted to give a little back to three of my players who have been with the party for the last 2 and a half years or so. I began creating a series of illustrations, but I never got around to finishing all of them.

The today is Natalie's (one of those three players') birthday. As a little present I decided to finally get the finished images printed for the party. These are those two images. The first is a poster about the original party I started with for this module's campaign. From right to left it is: Charles (played by Tavish Armstrong), Jonathan Teef (played by Nick Freeston), Grimbleshelf III (played by Natalie Black), Soren Kierkegarde (played by Cam Rockwood) and Xavier Kransk (played by Lachlan Fletcher) along with brief synopses of their characters (the synopses were sort of based off of the Scott Pilgrim school of describing characters). The second image is of Grimbleshelf III atop his faithful (late) mount, Mitze, the greatest abanse to ever traverse the Hoarshaal Mountains.





The third image here is also related to the same D&D campaign (I actually run 2 different ones). A character the party recently re-encountered for the third time, by the name of Errol Gilderine. This was a super quick character sketch... maybe 1 1/2 - 2 hours.



New environment should be coming soon. We'll see about creature of the week.

Even Goblins need a little lovin'...

So, despite slicing the fuck out of my finger the other day, I'm back to working a decent amount on my weekly drawings. I'm working on a couple of side projects, but none of those are far enough along for me to want to post. One of them the become a step-by-step on my process. I would do some video capture stuff when I'm doing a piece, but I think that would be really harsh on my processor, which already gets chuggy on PS sometimes.

Anyway, here's this week's COW piece. The topic was another one of mine: Goblin's Best Friend. The concept of the round was to create a pet for golbins that would be equivalent to what dogs are for humans ("Man's best friend"). So, here's my creature, the Bulwarf. I'm pretty satisfied with how he turned out. Think of him as the spiritual successor to my Halloween creature (with the terrible bird disguise), as I like the similar complete disregard for the world around them, and the similar palette styles and spot rendering.

Bioluminescent Invertebrate

Here's my recent entry for COW. The topic this week was one of mine: "Bioluminescent Invertebrate". I'm not super happy with the result, but I'm glad I've gotten some painting in, I've been sort of inactive of late. Tthe topic I created partly as a challenge to myself, so I'm glad I at least tried even if I failed, in my books. I probably should have used more reference than I did.

Everyone You Know... (Part 2)

“People won’t automatically like you. You may be socially crippled your entire life.”


“You will never receive notice that magic is real and that you are wizard...”


“...Your owl will never come.”


“Despite your canine teeth, you aren’t a werewolf.”
(having some problems with this image, I'll upload it when I can)

“Most sources of information on the world available to you are lying. Even your parents...”


“...You parents weren’t ‘Just wrestling’.”


“You probably won’t live a healthy lifestyle.”


“You will never be an astronaut...”


“...But it’s possible that outer space will come to you in the form of an asteroid, wiping out all life on the planet.”


Uncle Francis tucked Leo into bed.
“You look disappointed, kid...”


(This line would be on the final page of the book:
“...Get used to it.”

Everyone You Know... (Part 1)

So, this semester, my first assignment to deal with, in Drawing, was "Death". For those of you who don't know my work for my classes, I tend to use my stand-up as reference to generally make tongue-in-cheek pieces mocking the general world of fine arts. I'm of the opinion that so many art students have their head of their asses that everyone ends up taking themselves -and the subjects of their assignments- far too seriously. So, when this year I was faced with the idea that I would have to tackle Sex, Love, Death and God as the subjects for Drawing, I was less than pleased with the prospect of the cliched work that would be brought out of the most commonly used (albeit incredibly general and broad) themes in art. So I set forth the goal to shit all over every single topic I came across.

So here I am, finally finished with "Death". The project idea stemmed from the idea of telling a toddler that they would die eventually. Some moment that would destroy a child's sense of joy. I came up with the idea to create a children's book, one which would break horrible "truths" to children. So I went about writing down just awful things to tell a child. I'm pretty happy with the turnout, and I'm just back from the printing place, so I have the physical copy, but I figured since some people won't really get to see that, I'd post the images from it, here. There are a lot so I'll have to do it in two posts or more.

This is the first time I've posted any of my real schoolwork because it's really the only fully digital assignment I've done. I hope you enjoy it. Bear in mind the images are very large, and you will have to zoom out on them a ways.

(Everyone You Know...)
For Nick and Adrienne Sweetman who always told the right lies. I still half-believe that Canola is nuclear.


That day Leo’s parents were out. Uncle Francis came to look after him.
“Where did Mommy and Daddy go?”
“To visit your grandma and grandpa.”
“Why couldn’t I come, too?”
“Cause your grandparents are sick, Leo.”
“Are they gonna die, Uncle Francis?”
With that, Uncle Francis told Leo truths about life, and it all stemmed from that one, tiny question...


“Yes, everyone you know will die, eventually...”


“...but it’s okay, because everyone you know is probably an asshole.”
(In this image, the arrow pointing up is meant to point at me reading the story to an audience)


“And grandma and grandpa? Them too?”
“Oh yeah, them too, but they’ll go senile and forget who you are before that happens.”


“You know, you’re lucky to be born here. In some countries, you’d be forced to do manual labor in factories to make toys for kids in rich countries...”


“...On the other hand you will be forced into years of near-pointless education, which will culminate in very expensive, near-pointless education.”

The Mating Ritual (Finished)

Yo everybody, here's the finished image on my farting creatures.
Here's the description I gave along with the piece:
[To be read in the voice of David Attenborough]:
It's mating season in wetlands of Bumeria. Animals gather round the ponds and bear witness to one of the most unique mating rituals... in the world. Loud sounds echo across the ponds of the Bumerian landscape, as these creatures court one another. The Organ-backed Pondlok... The males will sit on a lily pad, using their organ like flatulating tubes to create music... Females will skitter across the surface of the water like hovercrafts seeking the male with loudest, most melodic and (of course) most pungent song... once they have located the desired male, they will approach the male and begin to play the same song in unison. If the song lasts for more than a minure, this means it is time to mate. The male and female dive underwater where the male shoots his spore-like sperm toward the female's cloaca. The female then nurses the eggs in an underwater nest, until it is time to hatch... The male, tired from expelling most of it's gas from the mating process, dies a short while later.
[/David Attenborough voice]

Pungent Organs and Stalker Eyes

Hey everyone! Working on a new creature for COW. This week's topic is one of mine: The Mating Ritual. This one has to have a distinct male and female creature and illustrate some unique way that these animals court each other. Much like Clark's Grebe or Darwin's Beetle (hooray for the show, "Life"). Anyway, here's my set, just after the first real colour pass. The males sit on the lily pads and use their extensive organ-like pipes to fart various melodies. The females skirt around the surface of the water seeking out the male with the largest pipes, the loudest song, the best melody and (of course) the most pungent odor. Once they've found it, the two play the song in unison. I imagined the song to be "St. Thomas".

Quick Enviros

Hey everyone. I'm pretty busy with stuff for my drawing class, so all my digital painting goes towards that, right now. I'll post that final product once everything is done. For now I have a couple of quick 20-30 min. speedpaints of enviros for EOW 157 Large water-filled knothole pools in softly undulating tree-form land. There's some really killer stuff going on in that thread, so comparatively I just opened PS and shit all over my tablet. Anyway, here they are...