Time Lapse and The Lovers

First off, I forgot to post this when I actually uploaded it. I made a time lapse of twin arrow canyon. You can see at about 5:10 or 5:11 in the video, I actually fuck up and it's a mistake that I haven't corrected in the final image yet. I accidentally slice off a huge portion of the bow, which is why it's a little wimpy on the top half. I plan on correcting that soon.

            

This second item is a drawing I've been meaning to do for a while. It's a concept I've wanted to do for a long time but couldn't figure out a composition I liked. I finally settled on this one. I wanted to evoke Kinoku Y. Craft's type of floaty, surreal-feeling fantasy, within my own style. I used this piece to explore fabric and textiles in a way I hadn't thought of doing before. I hope that comes through and looks okay. Cheers.

Next weekend (Oct. 11-14) I'm headed down to New York to hit up ComicCon. I've never been to a Con before and I'm pretty pumped. Among other things (like potentially meeting Yoshitaka Amano), I plan on peddling my portfolio to companies to see if anyone may have need of a fantasy illustrator of my talents. We'll see, wish me luck.

Twin Arrow Canyon

So it's official, I've switched to PC. With that I've also upgraded to using CS6. I really like the design and feel of CS6, but I get a little annoyed with the way that the brush panels are laid out. In CS4, my Brush Presets and my brush options were part of the same panel, and I could just select which I wanted with one click. Now, my presets are all in one window, and any time I need to tweak a brush's settings, I have to open a whole new menu. I suppose it's motivation for me to have my preset panel more robust, but it's something I'm going to have to get used to, for sure.

 My new computer is really working out in terms of making art. My old Macbook Pro is now in such a state of disrepair that it will no longer start up. It's going in for repairs on Tuesday. But the beast I've build has enough RAM to run PSCS6 with tonnes of processing power to spare. So what am I doing with that? I've begun time lapsing my processes. The piece you're seeing below is the first piece I've time lapsed. You'll get to see it eventually, when I've got some decent editing software to work with. Until then...

This is a piece that came out of a doodle I did when I was visiting my family in Toronto, recently. The character is based on a character in game I ran on and off for a couple years, a gnoll by the name of "Grerr", whose ability two simultaneously shoot two arrows with a degree of proficiency was the bane of many a monster I had intended to be more challenging. Anyway, here it is. I've been really heavily influenced recently by the splash art for "League of Legends" characters so if you're familiar with that you should be able to see some of the style coming through there.

D&D Art Test: Round 2

So, back in late april/early may I did a piece that I submitted for approval to Wizards of the Coasts' D&D art test for 5th edition. Artists were given 1 of 3 briefs to work off of, and could submit to one, two or all three of them at any point. I already did #3, but I thought I'd do #1 as well, as a challenge. The challenge was, given two examples of orc-like humanoid creatures, you had to create either the tribe cook or the tribe shaman. I did the shaman, obviously. I knew there would be a lot of septum piercings and bones everywhere and I wanted to do something kind of unique, so I thought: what kind of body piercing or sacred mutilations might a really brutal tribe have. I decided, because I had already liked the concept of the mouth being sewn together, that I would also have it that shamans have double-piercings which stretch their lower eyelids by having them attached to their cheekbones. I think it turned out pretty cool. Let me know what ya' think.

Skirmish at Dawn

Here's a little piece I've been working on and off for the last little while. Working night shift is not quite as good for my drawing habits as I had hoped it might be. Anyway, this is a piece based off of Naomi Novik's universe in her series of books under the Temeraire title. The series is a historical fantasy set during the Napoleonic war, only there are air forces which employ the service of dragons. It's an awesome series, if fantasy is your thing you should check it out. I didn't want to descend to heavily into the realm of fan art, so none of the actual characters from the books are featured in the piece. The dragon in the forefront is a breed known as the "Yellow Reaper", other than that, it's meant to be rather vague what breeds of dragon are in the background, or even which are English or French. I had a lot of fun with this piece, but it's gotten tiring to work on, so I'm taking a break from it, for a little while. Enjoy...

Summoning

Here my latest piece, I did just for fun. Went all the way from a doodle in my sketchbook to this piece. It's likely I'll go back in and fix the background, which is a little wonky and muddy at the moment, but I'm reasonably happy with the character and the root-beast.

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.