Decisions...

Since alot of the stuff I'm doing is under wraps for awhile, I'm going through some stuff that I did earlier in the year which I never got to show. So I narrowed it down to this piece ( a portrait of Maddox as Moses ) or a illustration of Teddy Roosevelt in spandex underpants.

 After much deliberation I settled on this piece because I feel that the Roosevelt piece needs more of a write up than I'm able to give at this time, and I don't want to compromise the dignity of the image.

So anyways, here's Maddox as Moses, complete with in progess work ( Courtesy Maddox and Alphabet of Manliness extended Edition) .

Freelancer's Guide part 2: Deadlines

The Second Rule of Freelancing: The best jobs will almost kill you, but you'll be glad you took them.

 At some point every freelancer will get the call: I need these 10 things in 10 hours. Yes, I know it's impossible so here's some extra money.

 I always dread these, but a small part of me is excited at the challenge, followed a few hours later by the part of me that wants to punch myself for always taking these jobs. It's amazing what some crushing pressure can do to your work. To that end, here's some 1 hour pieces done under just those conditions..not masterpieces by any means but not too bad all things considered ( All work courtesy In Character Games ).

This may be the best crazy guy expression I've ever done.

Fully half the hour on this piece was spent lovingly detailing the star wars blanket. I think this one may be my favorite.

Not sure how good of a shield my monitor would make, but it works for this guy.

 

 Car Salesman, Zombie Killer, Bad Ass

good ol containment suits- no face to draw...

OK at this point my hand was cramping up so I used a previous sketch of the background.

Man that brought up a bunch of painful memories..you know what, I'm never doing this again!

Swingsetasauras at Sunset

 

Sometimes, I guess there just isn't a whole lot to say. Hopefully the illustration does the talking.

I hope he catches whatever he's hunting.

The Freelancer's Guide, part 1

Freelancing is an interesting exercise in controlled chaos. If you ask me it's a miracle that anything ever gets done on a freelance basis, but that's a subject for another day. The subject today is the First Rule of Freelancing, and that is: whichever idea you like the least is the one the one the client will pick. Consider this set of sketches that I did for In Character Games for the game After the Dead which you can play on facebook here.

These sketches are listed in the order I did them. Now when I'm doing sketches unless I know exactly what I want, my first idea is usually not my best, but I throw it in anyways. Personally, I think sketches 2-5 each bring a unique idea and mood to the narrative of the game which was related to me. I felt the first was a bit flat somehow, which of course guarantees that it's the one the client picked, which is what happened.
   Fortunately, the axillary to rule 1 is that you can always make it better, and fortunately the client knew what he wanted for the most part. So with a little back and forth, we managed to find a way to achieve all of our goals which resulted in the follow piece:

and thus all was well in the land of the zombies.

The 13th month

So August 25th is a significant date as it marks the release date of Maddox's latest book and calendar. If you know who Maddox is this is doubtlessly great news and if you don't, take a look here.

In the meantime, to commemorate the event, here's one of the images that will appear in the calender.


Oftentimes, when attempting to create an image with content this awesome, failure and personal injury can result. Fortunately under the tutelage of Maddox, we were able to safely contain the awesomeness without any bodily harm to me.

When he first approached me about this particular image, Maddox had only a vague concept in mind. Although he knew he wanted an image of something getting kicked in the groin region, he was not sure what, nor by what. So after an exhaustive research phase, we discovered that the most empirically awesome participants would be a shirtless guitar playing guy in the role of the kicker, and a rhinoceros as the kickee.

After completing the vignette, we could tell something was missing but we weren't sure what. Here is where the importance of having a good working relation with your client really comes into play. Maddox did some research and found the awesomeness could be increased by a factor of 6 with the addition of a nuclear mushroom cloud in the background. The rest was history.

So on the 25th go out and buy the extended version of Alphabet of Manliness and the accompanying Calender of Manliness soon thereafter ( in which this image appears in it's high resolution semi-gloss glory ).

More images to come!

quicky

please...think of the plumbers

Whale Sub, or A Little Sprezzatura

Sprezzatura is the fine art of making a difficult thing look effortless. Although I'm more of an expert in making easy tasks more difficult, I'm finding that illustration is an excercise in sprezzatura.

This piece, creatively titled "Whale Sub" was a careful study of putting just enough information to imply that this is a complex piece of machinery. I went through several iterations where I discovered that just one extra pipe or detail made it look labored and over worked. The same with the decking, where I initially tried laying in individual planks to convey the feel of the hull. In the end, it was far more more important to get the gloss from the wetness of the deck and the water dripping down the deck. I'd post up some of the in progress stuff but it's generally a horrible mess of trial and error.

And besides I wouldnt want to ruin the sprezzatura...

"The Pilgrim", or "1 day Painting Step by Step"

Done for the card: The Pilgrim, creation time: roughly 8 hours including thumbs and reference

step 1: create a quick thumbnail with color and value compostion worked out and some detail represented. Light is very important at this stage.


Step 2: Realize that the client is talking about the middle eastern religious type of pilgrim, not the thanksgiving type. Repeat step 1.

Step 3: After approval, continue to refine the color palette, starting with some photo elements if necessary.( note: the use of photos is sometimes a necessary compromise when working under tight deadlines. It can be thought of similarly to underwear: effective when used properly, but don't let anyone see it)

Steps 4-6: refine the things you can, kick out the fancy-dancy stuff you can't get to.

Step 7: exhale.

The Double Agent

So I've recently been working on some illustrations for an online card game called The Far Wilds and they've been kind enough to let me post my work so I'll put up some of my more exciting ones in the coming weeks.

These paintings have been a bit of a departure for me for a couple reasons. First, when shown in game they are reduced to 250x250 pixels, which is really forcing me to think and compose in a very efficient way-when you only have 62k pixels to grab someone's attention, you really have to hit them over the head on first sight and draw them in. Also the turnover on these is really high..I'm generally spending 6-8 hours per painting, including reference gathering. This is a bit of a departure for me as I generally like to spend a bit more time to really work things out.




One thing I really like about these assignments is the illustrative nature. Often I get not much more than a card title or a brief description of the concept, and I've basically got one moment in time to capture it- in this case, the card was 'the double agent'. I used the theatrical conept of an 'aside' where an actor will communicate directly with the audience to relay information that is not known to the other characters. Here, the foreground character is giving us a wink to let us know the other guy is about to get the ol' shank.





Finally,here's some in progress stuff which i've been promising to save more of, now in glorious GIF format. one thing to note is that i think i lost a bit of the original expression of the foreground guy as I went from sketch to completion...rats.

on a side note, special thanks to a certain A. Lluch for technical support in the crazy world of blogger.

Volcanic Refinery and Custom Brushes

A Fairly quick ( 6 hours ) piece intended to be the basis of a matte painting sometime in the future..
The huge advantage of PS these days is being able to create and modify custom brushes so quickly and easily. Back in the day if you wanted high frequency detail you needed to select it out of a photo and sort of stamp that around. Now with the magical brush creator, it's become an essential tool for me. I am constantly making brushes and also trying out other people's brushes to get new interesting textures and marks.


here's an early stage shot where you can see alot of raw splooshy marks just being put down...many of these splooshes are nice enough ( in the cloud areas for example) that I can leave them as is in the final. Of course when I take it to a finished matte then alot of photo material will be mixed in, and even then the organic edges of the custom brushes help to transition into the photo material.

If you haven't explored the brush engine much, just do a google search..well worth your time.