Pixels and Caffeine: 2010

End of Fall 2010

Term just finished -- here's a few things I've been working on recently.

More on my Dead Space redesign. I've only got a couple of pieces up to the level of polish I'm happy with -- more to come after I get some sleep:

A couple of pieces from my "Originality in Design" class taught by Nick Pugh. I was initially a little bit apprehensive about taking the class because of the "abstract" subject matter it deals with, but was actually pleasantly surprised and got a lot out of it.

I developed a design language out of an abstract scanning technique that turned out to be pretty successful. For the final, I had to build one of my designs in 3D, which was a little bit of a struggle due to my limitations with the software. Had to learn how to use Sketchup and Modo in two weeks, so given the time limit and my limited 3D knowledge, I think it came out okay:

Modo is really fun (Sketchup is not)! I expect to be using it more often in the future.

Thanks for looking, more coming!

Some sketches

I'm starting a Dead Space redesign, here's the initial pass on the "Necromorphs":

A lot more for this project to come soon.

Also, here are some sketches done for my "Originality in Design" class:

Nothing super original yet, but the techniques used to arrive at these are certainly out of my usual repertoire. I have to give some credit to my buddy Arron Ingold (super-talented guy, btw: you should check him out), who has come up with an extremely efficient "creature head" painting process that he was kind enough to share with me. I'm now able to do these fairly quickly, so expect more of them pretty soon.

Here's the WORK IN PROGRESS of my pitch illustration for the Legend stuff from the previous post:

Thanks for looking!

Legend Redesign

So school started again, and in one of my classes we are being asked to redesign a story of our choosing. I am doing an "updated" redesign of Ridley Scott's Legend -- paying homage to the original designs while embellishing on them (or in some cases changing them).

I kinda feel like these aren't done yet, but they are as done as they are going to be for the time being:

Still polishing the final illustration, so stay tuned.

As a bonus, here's a couple digital landscape paintings I did for a class I am taking with Robh Ruppel. Robh is a truly amazing teacher that I cannot speak highly enough of. He has somehow broken down a subject matter that I have had unending difficulty with into bite-size chunks.

Trying to get as much as I can out of three values / no fancy brushes:

A color study of the same subject matter at different times of the day. I was trying to get as accurate-to-life color as possible, while keeping the paintings relatively simple:

Thanks for looking!

End of Summer Update

Well, school started again this week, so I figured I should put up some of the stuff I've been sitting on for a while.

Another creature for Jerad's class -- a redesign on Pumpkinhead. Getting the anatomy right on this guy was certainly a struggle. I'm not used to doing horror-type creatures, so this was a nice change of pace (and fun!):

A closeup of the same piece:

I have more that I probably should show, but I want to polish a bit before I send it out into the world wide web. Stay tuned!

*EDIT* So, I checked this out on my laptop, and it looks pretty dark (losing a lot of information). It looks fine on my desktop, so please let me know if its dark on your monitor, and I'll throw a lightened version up. Thanks!

Late Summer Update

Here's another character done for Jerad's class, a redesign of the aliens from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind":

A costumed version of my goblin character from the previous post:

Something I probably shouldn't be showing, but will anyways until I'm told otherwise:

More to come soon (I promise)!

Comic-Con 2010 Aftermath

I just got back from Comic-Con 2010, and all I can say is -- WOW! I got to meet a ton of amazing people, got some great critiques on my work, and just had an overall great time!

Here is a WIP piece I am doing for Jerad Marantz's creature design class at Concept Design Academy:

Not only is Jerad a spectacular artist, but he is also a really incredible teacher: he possesses the rare skill of being able to effectively communicate his decision-making process when designing. I am learning a ton, and I think my work is going to make leaps of improvement in the near future because of it.

The Zbrush portion was something I did for a class taught by the immensely talented Bryan Wynia, whose Zbrush class at CDA is also not to be missed. Bryan is an amazing instructor who is able to keep things lively and fun through many of the more difficult technical hurdles of trying to learn Zbrush!

Unfortunately, much of my newest work is now for freelance clients and therefore NDA. I'll try to keep this blog updated as much as possible, however.

Just so this post isn't a complete wall of text, here's a pretty old environment sketch I forgot to throw up here (man, I have a long way to go with environments...) :

Thanks for looking!

2010 Intern Show Postmortem

A couple of pieces that made it on to my internship show wall this year that haven't really been shown here yet:

I also did a lot of tweaking on a lot of the existing pieces in my portfolio. You can find the changes on my portfolio blog.

Although the employer turnout left a little to be desired, I still learned a lot about presentation, what pieces of mine people gravitate towards, what type of work my portfolio is still lacking, etc.

Great job to everyone who participated -- I think the average level of work in the ED department is the best its ever been. Kudos everyone -- we put on a hell of a show!

Another quick caricature

So we had a very quick assignment recently where we had to caricature ourselves as a superhero (in a sort of cartoony/stylized fashion). I decided that it might be funny to just do myself (in street clothes), given that I have the power to stay up for ridiculous amounts of time:

Its just a sketch at this point, but I kinda like it that way. According to my friend Arron, its the best drawing/rendering I've ever done. Not sure I agree with that, but I do like how it came out, given the time constraints.

(for those of you who are -- or were -- in arch 2: yes, that is white gouache on the paintbrush)