Bubblegum Derps

It's been a long time since I did a Creature of the Week round. The topic this week was to create a creature who will explode as a defense mechanism for the rest of it's species. The round was called cute, fuzzy bombs. I decided to create these super derpy creatures that I had sketched while at work the other day. Total time on this piece: about 4 hours. Here's the description I gave for the creature.

There are few species quite as oblivious as the Bubblegum Blast-Rat. Breeding at a rate of approximately 100 new Blast-rats a month, per-member of the horde sounds like a recipe for disaster... and it is, but not in the way one would think. See the Blast-Rat is so oblivious of it's surrounding, that, upon seeing a predator the Blast-Rat will have a surge of adrenaline, which, unfortunately for it, it is highly allergic to. The allergic reaction trigger the massive quantities of phosphorous in the Blast-Rat's diet to ignite, cause the Blast-Rat to explode (creating a distinct popping sound). Often this may cause a chain reaction of Blast-Rats becoming startled enough to explode. An exploded Blast-Rat will usually leave behind it's large, bushy tail which often float around like tumbleweed. They are collected by local artists as they create excellent brush-making material. It is said that the prairies that house the Bubblegum Blast-Rats are simultaneously the most fertile and least profitable place to build farms, often having ones crops blasted to smitherines right before harvest. It is said that the Bay farming family has lived on those prairies for a century. Their youngest son Michael taking inspiration from the Bubblegum Blast-Rats and going on to have a lucrative if mediocre film career.

D&D Art Test: Culture - Soldier

Hey folks. Here's a new piece, done for the WotC D&D Art test. You can find the details here. This piece was done for the 3rd challenge: Culture. The challenge was to create a soldier or town guard based on the examples given in the brief. Here's the artist statement I wrote to go along with the piece: The two full-colour characters shown as examples evoked a sense of both Russian and East Asian influences, but contained a lot of calls to an Inuit sort of sensibility. For a soldier within that culture, I thought something taking cues from Mongolian style armor might nicely tie the above influences together into something somewhat militaristic. When it came to the weapon I went through a lot of iterations with the character holding a various pole-arms and both curved and straight swords. I ended up feeling like this kind of great-club fit with the sensibilities of the rest of the design. I wanted a strong sense that the warrior culture was about physical might, and intimidation, so the war-mask paired with a big, heavy and blunt weapon felt right to me. I really got into the idea that masks might play an important role in the cultural identity of these people. With the more shaman-like character you get a much more serene effect. Here I wanted to have something that might call back to the masks on the armor of samurai, but still play within the confines of the pre-established design, so I attempted to take the visual cues from the mask of the shaman character and make more complex, gargoyle-like masks that might be seen as more demon-like and give a more spiritual side to the warrior culture. I've included a couple of examples of war-masks just to get a better sense of that side of things. I figured maybe in the warrior hierarchy, different levels of complexity in your mask, different patterns of war-paint might indicate rank. The simpler, less intimidating mask going to the low-ranking soldier, the ones with all the bells and whistles (and teeth) going to the officers.

Work dump from the last month or so

Website planning has been delayed because... well... for the most part we've kinda forgotten about it. Also I can guarantee that Tavish and Natalie probably don't really have the time to worry about doing that kinda thing for me right now. It'll have to wait for this summer, which is approaching fast, so no worries.

Here's a couple of pieces from the last little while, though I've been really lazy with my workflow lately...

This is a piece I did for Character of the Week over on conceptart.org. They were doing "Dragon Riders", and having just finished the first of the "In His Majesty's Service" books, I wanted in. Artists in Character of the Week have a tendency towards going for badass rather than giving any of their characters a sense of personality or chemistry, so I wanted to approach it by giving the kid and his dragon a bit of a dog-owner type of relationship. Obviously How to Train Your Dragon was a pretty big influence on the design.





This is an image from a set of creature design projects I've been working on over the course of the last 8 months or so. What started out as a Brynn Metheney-style exploration of an ash-based wasteland, turned into an exploration of creature design and cybermutation. This came from a set of images that I sub-titled "Assemblages". The top row of athropods are all created from a set of insectoid parts, then thrown together and mirrored in illustrator to give me some basic creatures to work with. The second row is taking the initial creatures and splicing top and bottom halves together. The third row is the same, only splicing left and right halves together. The fourth and fifth row are then taking the second and third rows, and splicing them either horizontally or vertically (depending on which way they had not yet been spliced). It's one of a few different pieces I'm doing, based around exploring digital media and it's implications in drawing. I'm pretty happy with the result. This piece was printed on rice paper, and will be chin colléd onto stone-henge individually.



Finally. I submitted a couple of designs to Threadless' shirt design competition-whatever-thing. It was a way for me to explore doing a little more graphic, line-based pieces, while giving me the potential to make a little money on the side. Neither of these designs ended up getting made, but I had fun enough with them, so hey, I guess that's alright. Here they are both as they were advertised on the site, and just the images alone.

I'll Protect You, Buddy

Hey guys. I just submitted a design to Threadless. It looks like This. It's still pending approval, but if it gets accepted, I'll let you guys know. If it does, though, help me get it voted in! In the meantime, would you wear a shirt like that? Let me know...

EDIT: Shirt design now up for scoring! Please vote, if you can.

Fungus Beast

Hey all. Here's my latest piece, the mycocanth. I'm pretty happy with the turnout, but I've been told the image comes off as kind of flat. Ah well. Anyway, it was for Creature of the Week, round 249: fungal beast. The creature cultivates the large fungi on it's back and legs which allow it to grow its other fungi types (the small blue clusters and the protruding phallic mushrooms), which function as it's reproductive organs. I still have to work on my enviros quite a bit. I'm going to try and tackle some characters and enviros in the next little while, if I can find time in between that, my print classes, my paintings, my work-intensive cybermutation project, and any free time I have... Oh, and Mass Effect 3 is coming out soon? Oh good, I'll have no time to do any of that.

Yes, I am still alive and doing things...

Hello world.
God it's been a long time since I've updated this thing. Here's the deal:
I've been super busy with my studio classes. It's left me very little time and even less motivation to get a whole lot of digital painting done. I had a creature design project on the go for a while, called The Ashlands, which was based around creating a pseudo-museological exhibit based around a set of invented flora and fauna (in a similar vein to Brynn Metheney's Morae River and current project, The Red Valley). Now, being in a highly concept-heavy art school, illustration-type work is very hard to get away with, and like many of my projects for which I set out with noble intentions of blending creature design and "high art", I ended up changing directions. I am still doing something in the vein of creature design, but it has taken an unexpected turn into the direction of cyber-mutation. The Ashlands may be picked up again at another time, but for now I'm abandoning it for a more conceptual-based commentary on my evolution from traditional to digital media.

In other news, I'm going to try and get a new website up in the near future. It should have my digital and traditional work documented on it, so I'll keep you posted on that. The creation of that site will likely mean the death of May Contain Dragons as you know it, so enjoy this blog while it's around, it won't be for much longer...

In the mean time, here are two pieces that are both quite old. These were originally intended for The Ashlands project, one for the Ashlands' harsh ash deserts, the other for the silt swamps that pock-mark the southern regions of the ash deserts. I'll post some more of my sketches from that project in the future. The Fithe (the phallic one) was done for the Freestyle Creature of the
Week round which happened in December, but was adapted for the project.

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.