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.