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.