Bruisers

Hey folks,

Just a quick drop-off. Here's a comp of 2 quickies I did. Each one is about 2 hours-ish, I think. Time lapse of both is imminent. Going for a more cartoon-y style. Maybe in the Borderlands school of design? Hope ya' like 'em!

Elise the Spider Queen, a railship, and a little rant on female character design

So, it's been a while since I've posted anything, and a lot of that has to do with my current schedule being a little hectic. At any rate I have 2 new pieces for your faces.

This first piece is a drawing I did inspired by China Mieville's Rail Sea, which I'm enjoying greatly. I like the idea that a train (something that is by nature on a set path incapable of travelling where there no one has gone before) can become a vessel for exploration and for rediscovery. I've put out a very small run of CMYK screenprints (about 10.5"x 15", page size is about 13.5"x17.5") of this piece. If you want one you can always contact me and I'll see if I can work out shipping one to you. Up in the screenprinting studio there's a beautiful view of Montreal, and at the time that I work you often get this incredible light bloom hitting the top of the buildings across the street on Sr. Cats, so I wanted to emulate a bit of that with the lighting in this one.

This other piece is done for this contest for League of Legends, which I occasionally play. The idea was to portray any of the game's characters preparing for the upcoming season. I picked Elise the Spider Queen, as I play her fairly frequently, laying her new brood of spider underlings. Now, I feel like I need to address something as a disclaimer: this is not my character design. Now, League of Legends has some excellent artists behind it, and there are some truly beautiful designs at play in that game, but there's one thing that they have to improve on: portrayal of female characters. Now, I've, for the most part, imitated for the purpose of the competition, Elise's impractical and absurd outfit, so you can see what I mean when I say that there's some room for improvement. In all media, characters tend to display unreasonable standards of figure and attractiveness and, for me, I don't have such a problem with it. If you're creating larger-than-life fictional characters, why not make them attractive? But there is a slight problem I have with the particular trend, in video games (and in fantasy video games in particular) of clothing female characters in the smallest semblances of fabric imaginable. I felt I needed to get that out there along with this piece. I'm proud of the work I did on this piece, and I hope I win, but I want to make it clear that my own character designs I hope never to resort to the metal-bikini stereotype so prevalent in fantasy. Anyway, here's Elise, hope you like it.