2011 Intern Show Postmortem

Wow!  It sure has been a while since I put anything up here.  Bad Zach!  I'll try and be better about that in the future!

So another intern show at Art Center has come and gone, and once again the bar has definitely been raised.  The turnout was great this year, and the student work was spectacular!  I had a great time and got to meet a lot of very cool and interesting people.  Here are a couple of pieces I worked on for the show...

A new piece for my senior project -- the goddess Athena from my Greek/Steampunk/Fantasy version of "The Odyssey":

(She's sitting on her "steamthrone" :] -- I'm such a nerd!)

Here's a piece I reworked a little bit from my "Dead Space" redesign -- I think it makes for a more interesting narrative:

A 6-headed sea monster I'm designing for my "Odyssey" project:

Some more work on my cyclops zbrush maquette that I'm doing with Bryan Wynia.  Still a work in progress, but its certainly coming along:

Oh, and I got published!  Kevin Chen over at Concept Design Academy submitted my work -- as well as that of a few other students --to an article that 3D Artist Magazine was doing on the Zbrush character creation class that Bryan teaches:

I would definitely like to thank Kevin Chen, Bryan Wynia, Josh Herman and everyone else at CDA -- it was an honor to be selected and represent the school!

I have a lot more stuff in the works that I will be sure to post up here soon!  Thanks, as always, for taking a look.

One Hour Zbrush Sketches

I'm taking an independent study with the amazing Bryan Wynia, whose class you should take if you haven't already.  We're developing a "cyclops" character for a project I'm working on.

Did a bunch of Zbrush head sketches yesterday, each one was timed for an hour:

I apologize for the corny names -- I was tired and it seemed hilarious at the time. ;)

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*EDIT: So I did one today at school for the open house we were having in front of a bunch of people on the projector!  It was super intimidating!  Here's what I came up with:

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*EDIT: Took one of the more successful designs further, and toned down the "pornographic" nature of it, as per the request of one of my instructors:

Thanks for looking!

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)!