Artchives 3

I've been putting in a lot of hours on a project for work, but I'm in the home stretch - just in time for my wife & I to go visit some friends over the long holiday weekend. Here's one last batch of old miscellany before I try to get back to a normal schedule.

These first three were for a story that I tried to get off the ground for a long time, but got away from me. Maybe someday I can go back to it with fresh eyes:




This one was for a pitch someone was putting together for a horror themed multimedia site, this character was going to be the host, in a simlar vein to Svengooli (get it? vein? horror?):


These last three were character designs for a video game about mobsters in space:

Artchives 2

The game I worked on for most of the last year is coming out on May 14th. It's called Texas Cheat'em - a poker game where cheating is not only allowed, it's the only way to win.

It was a very different project than what I had been used to, but it was a lot of fun. As the only artist on the game, I was responsible for every pixel you see on screen. The game has a lot of interface, so I did a lot more graphic design work than usual. I also got to do a lot more cartooning than I've ever done before on the player avatars. Here are some of my favorites:














Some of the avatars are specific to certain cheats (like the burglar=chip steal) or to certain mini-games (like the strongman=strength tester), but most are just meant to be funny. Also, creating these was where I learned digital inking since it was going to speed up my production time quite a bit, so some of the early ones are a bit rougher than the later ones.

Early on, we were planning out a story mode where you would play through a character's career as a gambler from rags to riches. At that point, we were toying with the idea of using animals as the characters and since our company mascot is a hippo, the main character was going to be a hippo. Here are some storyboards I did to try to get a feel for what all that could have been like:









Ultimately, it was decided that it would have been too much work for too little added value, so it got scrapped but we had some good ideas that would have been pretty fun to work on.

Artchives

I've had a fairly big assignment dropped on me at work that will keep me busy and pretty stressed out for the next two weeks, so I'm going back to post some older stuff from the archives in the mean time.

I don't generally post work related stuff on here, but I've had the chance to work on some cool things over the years, like these screens from Mortal Kombat: Deception. Each character had their own story arc and if you played a character all the way through the game you got to see an end game scenario related to that character. We didn't have the time or resources to make animated cut scenes for these so I put together these stills instead.

The character and environment models were all created by other artists - my job was to storyboard the scenes, pose everything, light & shoot the scene, render it out and then give them a 'spit & polish' paint-over pass to add special FX, extra detail and generally try to make them look like stills from a big budget movie.

There were about 24 characters in that game and I spent about 6 months on the ending renders. It was a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun. Here are the original storyboards and then the final renders:








Here's an example of a raw render compared to the touched up version:

Illustration Fridays: Theater

Another quick one - this week's theme, theater:

Illustration Fridays: Impossibility

Another quick take at an Illustration Friday challenge - this week's theme was 'impossibility'.

I've always liked the imagery of David vs. Goliath, so I thought I'd run with that.

Illustration Fridays: Fleeting

This week's Illustration Friday theme - fleeting:

The Good, The Bad and The Freakin' Weird

I'm on my own this weekend, so I've had movies playing while I putz around the house. Yesterday was western day - I watched For a Few Dollars More (a classic), Django (rough around the edges but fun), and El Topo.

El Topo is a 'mystical western' written, directed by and starring Alejandro Jodorowsky. Jodorowsky is a Ukranian who was raised in Chile and is best known for writing French comics. The movie has some interesting visuals, but man is it weird. It starts off with in the fairly standard "man with no name" scenario but quickly goes off the rails and ends up with a cave full of deformed midgets with a lot of flute playing, dead rabbits and old men wearing make-up along the way. Not for the faint of heart:

Illustration Fridays

Every once in a while I'll draw something based on sketch challenges I find online, just to mix things up. I just found out about a site that has a weekly challenge, Illustration Friday. It's nice that it's a regular thing and seems to have a lot of participants. I'm dipping my toes in the water with this week's challenge 'talisman'.

I'm taking the approach of working with the first image that pops in my head based on the theme and then knocking something simple out. Just keep it quick, fun and hopefully better with each passing week.

It's a long way from Oa to Abiline

I was looking at some art blogs and someone mentioned doing a commission for a collector who always asks for a western take on a superhero. That sounded like an interesting exercise, so I took a crack at the Green Lantern re-imagined as a lawman from the Old West:


It's no great shakes, but this has been a crazy week and I just needed to turn my brain off and draw for a bit. I really wanted to do this on paper (my inking brush has been calling out to me), but time only allowed a digital drawing.

Only The Shadow Knows

Just a quick Shadow marker sketch today:

Bad Mojo

Just a quick Jonah Hex after reading some of the recent issues drawn by Jordi Bernet:

Zeppelin Fight

I've had a very hectic couple of weeks, so I haven't done a lot of work on the Lord Bastard project. That's not to say that I haven't been thinking about it a lot - I'm finally to a point with the story and characters where I can see things playing out like a movie in my mind. The characters are coming to life and the whole thing is starting to have its own 'feel'. On paper, I'm behind where I want to be with the project, but I feel good about where it's going.

I took some time last night to loosely concept an idea for a scene I've been kicking around:



One of my most cherished possessions is an old copy of Prevue magazine from the late 70's that had a big pull out poster of concept art that Jim Steranko did for Raiders of the Lost Ark. I love the rugged feeling he gave the paintings and the warm tones he used to give the desert a romantic, pulpy feel. This is my lame attempt at capturing that same feeling.

Insert Bad "Who Watches the Watchmen" Joke Here

I'm going to see The Watchmen tomorrow with a group from work, so I drew a quick Dr. Manhattan today.

The movie looks like it's going to have some amazing visuals. The shots in the trailer where Dr. Manhattan & the Comedian are in Viet Nam always catch my eye because it looks like they dropped them right in the middle of 'Apocalypse Now'. I'm also looking forward to the flashbacks to the original Minutemen back in the 40's & 50's. That's probably the closest thing to a big budget Golden Age superhero movie that we'll ever get:

Another Study

Another quick concept piece to try out some things.

I realized that I've never posted anything that takes place after the first act of the story, which is when things really get going. Although there's a definite John Carter influence to it, Bastard doesn't end up on Mars. I was going for kind of a Spaghetti Western sunset and went a little nuts with the red:

Technique Study

I got tired of working on my story outline, so I messed around with some techniques I've been thinking about for doing the backgrounds. Again, just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks:


Not the most ambitious example, but hopefully tomorrow I can find the time to try something a little more involved.

And Now for Something Completely Different...

I managed to make Valentine's Day dinner for my wife without poisoning us or burning down the house. She wrote about it on the food blog she and a friend started recently:

http://creating-a-foodie.blogspot.com/2009/02/valentines-day-dinner-part-two.html

Pre-pre-production

Having just wrapped up the game I've been working on, I was able to have a long weekend off and managed to get a lot done on what I call pre-pre-production for my graphic novel. I already had a rough outline and a lot of notes, so right now I'm working on a more detailed final outline, nailing down names for people, places & things, and organizing my reference material for everything.

Once that's complete, I can move into regular old pre-production where I filter all of the things that inspire me into my designs for everything that will appear in the story - all of the key characters, locations and props. I'll also take the final outline and use it to break down the story scene by scene, loosely laying out the pages and writing all of the dialogue. At that point, I'll have a pretty good blueprint to follow.

I'm an organizer and planner by nature and since this is going to be a long term project that will undoubtedly have stops and starts as my free time allows I need to have this guide that I can use to keep me on track.

It's going to be a lot of work, but I'm long overdue to try something like this. I look forward to the opportunity to do something 100% the way I want to do it. That way, the only person that can hold me back and the only person I can blame for failure is me.

Major Dundee

One last movie sketch, this one of Sam Peckinpah's first films, Major Dundee. Charlton Heston plays the title character, a Union officer who leads a pack of rag tag volunteers and Confederate P.O.W.'s across the Mexican border to track down a band of Apache's who have been raiding forts and settlements in Texas.

There are lots of interesting characters all played by great actors in this one, but I really liked James Coburn as the scout who tracks the Apache for Dundee. This seemed like a part more suited to Lee Marvin, being a gruff, scraggily bearded frontiersman, but Coburn played it well. The fact that Coburn was so damn skinny helped. Usually when an actor hides one of their arms under their shirt to play an amputee it's very obvious and looks weird, but it actually made Coburn look beefier and more heroic: