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.