Freelancer's Guide, Part 3: The Caged Bird

The world of the freelance artist is alot of hurry up and wait, not unlike being at the front of a line to receive a punch in the mouth.

The interesting thing is that you never know when you're going to suddenly have a small gap of time where you've got nothing to do. You may have 3 projects going simulataneously, but there will be one day when one art director is out sick and can't give you any feedback, one is in hawaii for the week, and one is just a jerk who can't be bothered to answer your emails for days at a time. And just like that. you'll have a half a day on your hands.

You may be paralyzed by this new found free time, just as a caged bird won't immediately fly out of an open cage..you've both forgotten how to be free. At some point during the last 6 months of drawing zombie pirate robots, all those thoughts of doing a nice landscape painting or learning some new media have gone from your mind. So, the lesson for today is: do not waste these precious moments. They are sparkling jewels in otherwise muddy sludge of your schedule. Do some personal work...read some tutorials...figure out what on earth the high pass filter is for in photoshop and why anyone would want to use it. But regardless, do something.

 In that spirit, here's a rough study for what will hopefully become a polished matte at some point when my schedule opens up. one of the areas which I'm sorely lacking in is matte painting, so with any luck, that'll be my area of focus in the coming year.

On another note, for anyone that remembers this guy:

He's found his way into the latest edition of Exotique, from Ballistic Publishing. This is kind of odd considering these books are generally full of sexy robots and all, but go figure. Monstro, you've hit the big time!

really?

Ok so for the last 2 years I've been hearing how great Transformers was from pretty much everyone.. I refused to see it on principle, but when it was on TV recently, against my better judgement, I decided to watch. This represents my viewing experience fairly accurately:

After having lived through this supernaturally stupid cinematic experience, I would like to make the following request: if you saw, and enjoyed watching this movie, please raise your hand. Now, use that hand to slap yourself across the face repeatedly until you no longer have the urge to give your money to Micheal Bay.


thank you.

Into the Vault part 2

Nothing too earth shattering today...just an old commission that seemed worth posting..

Happy PYKtWD everyone

another Maddox commissioned piece from the archives

And now for something completely different

Allow me to introduce you to my brief segue into scientific illustration with this tough customer: Edaphodon hesperis, a bitey fellow from the late Cretaceous, coming soon to a research paper near you! 

Out of the archives again

2010 has been a wild ride so far and with any luck I'll have some good new stuff to show soon, but in the meantime, here's an older work from an online game. No masterpiece to be sure, but at least it was quick and painless

and the rough

update: so I had a question on my reference procedure, so I thought I'd take a minute to go over my process. Thanks to google and other image searches, finding the reference you need is mostly a matter of how good your vocabulary is.

For example for the interior details, I knew the style of house I wanted, but you can't exactly do a search for "cool old stone house with a window". So you have to be tricky. First I tried 'fireplace' and 'hearth' and 'mantleplace' and similar terms because these houses always had these things. I then tried looking at old english pubs, which generally have the same kind of construction, but they were usually filled with people, or too fancy. It's funny, but you just never know what words will get you what you're looking for, so it's a bit of an art to keep coming up with different words that will trigger new images.After more strike outs, I found the magic words: 'slave quarters'. Alot of historical museums have empty rooms set up with period detail, and the construction and details were close enough that I could use alot of what I found.

 Once I have all my material, what I find important to do is to put it all together on one sheet so I can see everything at once:

 

So there's some things in there for detail reference, light reference, palette reference, and human reference. I try to keep everything fairly equal in size otherwise I end up ignoring the smaller images and over emphasizing the big ones. ( in this case I broke that rule because of the importance of getting the interior correct.

 So, all in all I'd say it was a couple hours for reference mining and maybe just under a couple days ( including feedback turnaround time ) to complete the image. 

 

Into the Vault

So as more of the work I'm taking on is under stricter NDAs, I'm heading to the vault today to find some stuff that hasn't been shown before.

So this piece started life as a project pitch image, done fairly hastily for the purpose. Then a few months ago during a lull in my work I pulled this out and worked up some of the elements I was never happy with and pulled together the background a bit better. So, give it a few more years and maybe I'll fix some more stuff and I'll finally have something.

 On an unrelated note, as professional work takes up more of my time, it gets harder to find time for personal work, so I have to make a conscious effort to make room in the schedule for it. So here's my list of priority works that I'd like to get to this year:

- more zombie related work
- a 40's pulp cover piece with dames and whatnot
- a follow up to the whale sub piece that follows the continuing zany adventures of the whale sub
- something giant robot related

That's all I got for now, but I'm open to suggestions if anyone's got any bright ideas.

New Year, New Stuff

So in the name of progress, I've finally gotten myself a new wacom tablet, finally retiring my trusty old 6x8 which I've had for about 8 years. In it's place, I've gotten a shiny new intuos 4 tablet in a large size:

It's pretty nice with a cool display and customizable stuff and even an assortment of nibs to give different feels across the surface of the tablet. It also can be flipped to accommodate south paws, which is much appreciated.

 Of course, getting a new wacom always takes a bit of time to get used to, so whenever I've gotten new ones at work, I usually open up a new doc and doodle away a bit to get the feel right. So that's what I did today and in the interest of ringing in the new year, I'm posting it here for your viewing pleasure:

Now, you may be asking yourself: " Is this a picture of Chewbacca puking on Charles Darwin?"

Let me assure you that is exactly what that is.