Landscapes and livestreams

A couple of sketchy landscape concepts. The last two I did tonight while chatting with my buddy Clay on my justin.tv channel. A good time was had.

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020714 environment concepts

For a project with a friend! More to come. About an hour a piece.

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Dragons of Elanthia: Valkyrie Concepts

This is the design process that the Valkyrie rider in Dragons of Elanthia went through. Originally I had done a concept for a barbarian rider that sort of over time was transformed into a Valkyrie character whose armor suggests she's more of a deity than a warrior.

You can also see a little bit of my character design process at work, starting from little 1 inch. marker thumbnails to explore the shape of the character before I start throwing around color. With these I went right from thumbnails to color because our characters are often pretty small on screen so having big shapes with broad shapes of color helps in being able to distinguish them.

If you want to see more concept art and learn something about the design process for dragons and Riders, check out this piece my art director Tracy Butler wrote about it:

http://dragonsofelanthia.com/character-development.asp

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Sign up for the free beta at the Dragons of Elanthia website
Help our Kickstarter campaign
Vote for us on Steam Greenlight

Dragons of Elanthia: The Titan

Here are a few concepts showing different aspects of the Titan himself as well as his armor from the game mode Siege in Dragons of Elanthia.
It shows him with some armor variations and I painted him all the way down to his basic musculature and body type because having his body looking very heavy was important to show the enormous scale of the Titan.

We've started broadcasting  different members of the art team on Twitch.tv while they're working, so if you're interested in seeing this guy get sculpted, or watching me concept stuff, tune into our channel!

Sign up for the free beta at Dragons of Elanthia website
Help our Kickstarter campaign
Vote for us on Steam Greenlight

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DoE Concept environment

Another environment concept from Dragons of Elanthia.

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DoE: Concept art on twitch

I was working on this concept today while streaming it on twitch.tv! Myself and some of the other artists at Simutronics are going to be streaming our work more starting this week. If you'd like to see this stuff in action check out our twitch.tv channel!

As always you can:
Sign up for the free beta at Dragons of Elanthia website
Help our Kickstarter campaign
Vote for us on Steam Greenlight

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Dragons of Elanthia's Titan

Another little piece for today. Again, the Titan. Today in the Kickstarter we got our first 100 backers, here's to the next 100!

Visit the Dragons of Elanthia Website

Check out the Kickstarter

Vote for us on Steam Greenlight

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Dragons of Elanthia Concept art

Finally I get to share some of my work from the game I've been working on this past year! I'm getting to show them at last because we have launched our Kickstarter! I'm going to keep posting art regularly for the duration of the Kickstarter so be sure to stop back and check them out!

Also, please visit the Kickstarter itself and share it with your friends. We're super proud of the game and your support will not only allow this game to happen, but support the awesome and talented people that I get to work with every day and who have pushed me to learn so much in the past year! Even if you don't contribute, showing your friends is great too. Thanks everybody!

Visit the Dragons of Elanthia Website

Check out the Kickstarter

Vote for us on Steam Greenlight

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Western concepts

A couple of pretty rough sketches I did tonight. Following the theme of the latest CGHub New Worlds Challenge. I tried to keep them really fast and mean, but the middle one ran a little long.  Fun stuff, all the same. It's good to break out of the usual aesthetics. I've been long working on sci fi stuff, this is a good change.

15 min.

 30 min.

15 min.

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The Space Captain will see you now

I drew this truck last night. A little sketchy concept. 

Today I felt inspired to do this other thing which I like to call "The Space Captain will see you now." Much work to do yet. All in all, I'm enjoying the 1950s. Also, some things have beginnings. This thing has a beginning. I'm hoping to try to show progress in my work a little more frequently. As well as an upcoming livestream? Yeah. One of those.

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Posting again

Trying to keep going. For now, a very unimpressive zbrush sculpt. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how to translate 2D into 3D when it comes to faces. Also, I'm trying to explore some simple character design. This will eventually become the first character modelling job I've done in my spare time.

081413 posting.

Maaan, sometimes the summer shows up, sits down, feasts on your free time, and then poops out a bunch of half-baked ideas that you can't quite make anything out of. A month or two later you wake up and realize you haven't done anything of consequence, certainly nothing tangible, and you still haven't satisfied your need to experiment, learn and grow.

I probably come to this conclusion at least 4 times a year, but I really need to make a more daily effort of doing this bloggy stuff.

If there is one thing I have realized in my time away from school it is that as my sketchbooking has dwindled, I don't progress through ideas nearly as quickly or thoroughly as I'd like. I tend to be curious about something, explore it half-assedly, come back a week later with no new conclusions, and retread the same ground, getting just about as far as before, but barely any further, if at all.

These are my silly forays into science fiction from the past month.

Photo source credit: Isaac White

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mech wips...

The very beginnings of some things....I've tried blending the 1950's with giant mechs before but usually to no avail, but I've been playing with some ideas, so hopefully they turn out.

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Just a helmet today

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space

I feel super rusty. I haven't been painting for myself enough lately.

Started doing this 1950's sci fi stuff and I haven't quite figured out how to address this subject matter completely yet. The source is so simplistic and elegant I really don't want to trample on it or leave out things that I feel like are important.

Tricky.

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back to pulp

This one is a little silly. But it's what I've been thinking about a lot lately. 

I haven't been in the concept art mode for a couple of weeks, I've been mostly leaning toward illustration. For me, these are very different processes and mindsets. I think this begins to communicate a small bit of where I'd like to go visually in some future work, but it's just not quite there. Maybe it's not researched enough or maybe I'm just rusty, but I'm not quite capturing what I really want to capture in this.

I'm pretty sure I ripped the mysterious alien figure in the background directly out of a Frank R. Paul painting. They are too good.

Painter12. 1hr.

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purplescape.

Sometimes I just really want to use the color purple.

40 min. painterX

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pulp sci fi sky

 Hey everybody, I'm finally getting back to being able to make work after a particularly busy last week and I've been wanting to add some new work to my portfolio that deals more in specific genres, like science fiction, while embracing what I love visually about those genres. And so, this came about.
Originally I just wanted to do something with lots of atmosphere that embraced the look of old pulp science fiction art like that of Frank R. Paul. This is a far cry from Paul's work but I am in love with the bold graphic yellow backgrounds of those old covers and was interested to see if I could adapt it to a more contemporary look. Anyways, this is what happens after I tinker with it for a bit.

1.5 hours in PainterX.

This second image is a sketch that I did when the idea for the coral hive trees struck me. I quite often find myself coming up with ideas purely because of the way I imagine light would interact with it. Shape is, of course, extremely important, but sometimes I just want to see color shifts.

I'm really interested in exploring more of this pulp material to see how one could adapt monsters from that era so they would fit into a present day sci-fi horror film! Soon to come...
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71512_funny little experiments

These two funny little experiments I was working on today...didn't quite get to finishing, though. I've been making new brushes in painter lately, definitely struggling a bit as well. I've been feeling like all of my paintings have a sense of sameness in the brushwork, which I cannot quite live with.

I particularly admire the work of Sergey Kolesov and Jaime Jones. They are both tremendously fantastic painters. Jaime also recently wrote a blog post about his process with images to accompany it. It's really fascinating to see the way in which other people work. I felt a strange reassurance from seeing that post because I often feel like my own process is a little backwards or unconventional by digital painting standards. I tend to be very direct in my paintings and often times I only work on one layer, which means no going back. I think I might try to construct something of a process video of my own since I can imagine it's constructive for the artist as well.

In any event I've been considering dedicating myself to a personal project for a bit...or several. I find that it's very difficult for me to make work when I don't have a prompt, or limitations. I'd like to make my work more self-indulgent. We shall see where it goes from here. Thanks for reading.

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MK12 concept art

I've had a very busy recent few weeks, partially because of my current internship as a concept artist at MK12! It's a fantastic Kansas City-based studio full of very smart, very talented people that do some awesome work. Definitely do take a look at their new reel if you want to be just plain visually inspired. It's all wonderfully bold, graphic and sharp. They have a great sensitivity toward the use of color in their work that can't be beat!

What I have been doing there has absolutely nothing to do with those pieces though, I am a part of a new short film project that they're working on that I've had the pleasure of doing concept art for. 

Here are a handful of images I'm allowed to share for the time being.

You can see more of how they work and what they do, as well as these images on their blog.

Thanks for taking a look, more things to come...

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