Bruisers

Hey folks,

Just a quick drop-off. Here's a comp of 2 quickies I did. Each one is about 2 hours-ish, I think. Time lapse of both is imminent. Going for a more cartoon-y style. Maybe in the Borderlands school of design? Hope ya' like 'em!

Elise the Spider Queen, a railship, and a little rant on female character design

So, it's been a while since I've posted anything, and a lot of that has to do with my current schedule being a little hectic. At any rate I have 2 new pieces for your faces.

This first piece is a drawing I did inspired by China Mieville's Rail Sea, which I'm enjoying greatly. I like the idea that a train (something that is by nature on a set path incapable of travelling where there no one has gone before) can become a vessel for exploration and for rediscovery. I've put out a very small run of CMYK screenprints (about 10.5"x 15", page size is about 13.5"x17.5") of this piece. If you want one you can always contact me and I'll see if I can work out shipping one to you. Up in the screenprinting studio there's a beautiful view of Montreal, and at the time that I work you often get this incredible light bloom hitting the top of the buildings across the street on Sr. Cats, so I wanted to emulate a bit of that with the lighting in this one.

This other piece is done for this contest for League of Legends, which I occasionally play. The idea was to portray any of the game's characters preparing for the upcoming season. I picked Elise the Spider Queen, as I play her fairly frequently, laying her new brood of spider underlings. Now, I feel like I need to address something as a disclaimer: this is not my character design. Now, League of Legends has some excellent artists behind it, and there are some truly beautiful designs at play in that game, but there's one thing that they have to improve on: portrayal of female characters. Now, I've, for the most part, imitated for the purpose of the competition, Elise's impractical and absurd outfit, so you can see what I mean when I say that there's some room for improvement. In all media, characters tend to display unreasonable standards of figure and attractiveness and, for me, I don't have such a problem with it. If you're creating larger-than-life fictional characters, why not make them attractive? But there is a slight problem I have with the particular trend, in video games (and in fantasy video games in particular) of clothing female characters in the smallest semblances of fabric imaginable. I felt I needed to get that out there along with this piece. I'm proud of the work I did on this piece, and I hope I win, but I want to make it clear that my own character designs I hope never to resort to the metal-bikini stereotype so prevalent in fantasy. Anyway, here's Elise, hope you like it.

Koi Fizz Time Lapse

Hey folks, just dropping this little number off. I was time lapsing the Koi Fizz piece's process so that I could do it up to look just like the League of Legends art spotlights. Here's the piece, for your personal enjoyment/fun:

Hope ya' like it.

Graham Stark: Planeswalker

Hey guys, just dropping this off. I did this in a caffeine fueled binge last night as an art challenge for Desert Bus. The challenge was to portray comedian from Loading Ready Run, Graham Stark, as a planeswalker in Magic: The Gathering.

I ended up winning the art challenge, which would have netted me my second prize from Desert Bus' list of amazing things to give away. Instead I decided to gift the item back to Graham Stark himself, who I feel could better appreciate the Magic: The Gathering themed prize.

Sketch Dump

Hey folks,

I'm back yet again this week (what is this some parallel world where Simon posts frequently?) with some stuff. I forgot to mention how awesome NYCC was. Got to see some really awesome stuff and meet some really awesome people, including someone whom I consider one of my personal heroes, Mikey Neumann. I've applied to a few places to see if they want a piece of me, art-wise, but I've heard nothing back, yet.

Second on my list of things to say and do... DESERT BUS. Okay, so every year I get drawn into watching this charity telethon. It's for about a week straight, with a group of sketch comics playing the world's most boring video game and generally also being hilarious. They raise money for Child's Play (they've raised over a million dollars total over the last 6 years of doing this event). It's hard to describe exactly what makes Desert Bus so addictive, but it's like being part of a big happy family while you're watching it. The chat as well as the large cast of characters on screen weave a community complete with it's own lexicon of memes. Plus, you can win sweet stuff (I personally won a sweet Chrono Trigger bundle which I am awaiting with much excitement). You can check out the insanity yourself here. Desert Bus usually brings my productivity to a screeching halt, though this week it's actually been really good for my drawing, since all I seem to do is draw and watch Desert Bus. It's how I managed to do Koi Fizz in only about 2 days of on/off work. I've also, over the last month or so, done a lot of quicker stuff just for fun. Here's a bunch of that stuff...

Koi Fizz

Hey folks, It's been a while and I apologize for that. I'm a little distracted at the moment so I don't have a lot to write for the moment. I'll just drop this off. I made this as a potential alternative skin for the character, Fizz, from League of Legends. Wanted to do something dissimilar to all his current skins by doing an Asian-themed koi fish/koi dragon skin.

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.