A Brave Effort

A few years ago Trent Kusters and myself were throwing around some ideas for a game; this illustration shows the main protagonist, a character with flaming red hair you play from a young age, slowly watching her grow up during your adventures. The colour of the hair may make the character seem familiar. We were beaten to the punch on this one, and this seems to happen an awful lot. The only consolation we have is that our ideas were proven to be competitive  :)

Space Thing

Thought I'd post an illustration far a space-horror title that got lost in the void ... pretty sure this will never be published, seems a shame to keep it imprisoned.

Chess-Boxing Champion Dies of Cement Sickness

Four times Chess-Boxing champion Adem Ademovic tragically died on this day 15th October, 2032, from a terminal case of cement sickness. Ademovic was known for his Queen Sacrifice manoeuvre, followed quickly by a blistering Dempsey Roll and Gazelle Punch. Some believe his sickness was an assassination by the powerful K.K.D.Z.O., a conspiracy theory which is impossible to prove.

Tasty Tasty Grandpa

Here's a logo made for Grapple Gun Games iOS title Tasty Tasty Grandpa. You can check out the progress of the four week sprint project on Kotaku Australia's site here LINK.

In other news, so much has happened in the last five months I hardly know where to start. Armello is turning into quite a beast, which means no blogging for me! Hopefully I can drop some news about it soon :)

Controlling a Genie

This is what happens when I do warm-ups; I usually can't stop. This is kind of old-school! Better go do some work ...

Constantine, Hellblazer

"A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths." - Marina Tsvetaeva

More fun with some fan art and playing with technique. John Constantine's about my favourite comic character; his whole bad /good luck shtick really works for me. He's the ultimate hustler playing against the biggest mark there is. When I picked up a copy of Hellblazer #1 in the late 80's I was hooked and it was another one of those defining moments. Moments like finding his pal Lester sitting in a bath tub covered in insects - mistakenly believing he was having a bad trip - was mind blowing. There was something about the modern London setting that made it unbelievably creepy.

Here's a close up so you can see how messy the whole job is :)

And a progression sequence for the curious (shift-click to escape Blogger's light-box mode for a closer look);

Drawing monkeys is fun

Another lesson I've learned drawing monkeys all day is that they're always funny.

BatMech

To save time, tonight's fan-art speed-paint combines both Ashley Wood robots with Batman. WIP.

Update: Refining and having fun. I'll post updates as they come in.

Alien Horse Whatever

I think this is pushed as far as my attention deficit disorder will allow. Try to ignore the feet for now and I'll get around to them later ... maybe.

Must Draw More Boobs

Note to self.

Cowboy Vampire

Painter.

Here's a Head

Warm up sketch

The League of Geeks + Armello

It's been a mad few months with little time for personal stuff. I'm on the team of a little side project called LOG, or League of Geeks, a collective of like-minded industry game devs, and we're in the process of working on our first IP. We recently announced this at the last GDAA meeting in Melbourne, and released our logo upon the world (above). I was going to explain the rationale behind the design, but the reasoning behind the beast is best left up to your imagination. You can follow LOG on twitter. The goal of LOG is working on containable dream projects outside of regular work. We're pretty excited about our first project called Armello (logo below) ... details to come!

By the way, loving the new Blogger interface. Slick!

Some days you just have to sketch Conan

Another WIP shot here.

Unrecoverable art, I salute you.

So a harsh lesson on the realities of processing power. I'd just finished working on the upper arm muscles of the above critter, and Zbrush crapped itself on save - a few hours work down the drain. This is all the evidence I have rendered shortly before implosion. That'll teach me to watch my poly counts - at least the previous saved version isn't borked and I can try again at lower subdivisions. The reality is that I won't be able to sculpt what I want unless I upgrade to 64bit.

Devil Bust Turnaround Vid

And here be a turnaround for it.

Zbrush Devil Bust - the final.

This is as far as I'll push this - I tried upping the subdivisions in Zbrush and it veritably cacked itself. Time to go 64bit I think.

Devil Bust, Zbrushing

I've been ultra busy working on a new book cover and some concept drawings, so there's been little to update recently. I'm also coding up a new website from scratch in notepad, having decided to teach myself some sweet CSS - not sure what came over me, but sometimes the other side of my brain likes to take over.

I had time today to enjoy some Zbrush sculpting, with the above results. My devil model was being neglected, so I swiped it's head and got stuck in. He's missing his tusks in this render, btw. Peace.

Severus Redux

Tonight I really wanted to practice some nice blends - here's an old speed paint that I've given a make-over. Objective was to get more painterly - specifically I'm trying to reconnect with Painter, something I used to be pretty good in but have slowly adopted PS as my main tool. Below, a close up of the arm. I really have to start using anatomical reference ...

And here's the old version, if you're interested in comparison ...  Black Emporer