Glacial shapes aka lasso, smear & highlight

Here's a little lunchtime waster. Just tried to establish a soft fantasy style for depicting a glacial tundra using some random compositions I painted into. I also attached a visual example of the process.

 

Steampunk City

Current work art jam is Steampunk and considering I was a no show on the last jam I had best make an effort. So here it is, the basic premise is that with all that steam born from coal the air would be dense and polluted so the crazy steam obsessed victorians had created large brass 'lungs' to help purify the air. Didn't really want to use a standard figure to set the scene so I went with a horse and cart, nah.

What a Tool

Being absolutely besotted by Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series I decided to pay homage to one of my favourite characters I've met thus far. He is Onos T'oolan the former First Sword of the undead race the T'lan Imass. Tried to stay fairly true to the descriptions I have found throughout the books.
Anyway I'll be hopefully have more to come from this series as its a great world of inspiration.

Sweet Relief

A few landscape studies from the past week. With a production extension at work I can fit it some personal work which is great.
So still finding my way a bit with trying to utilise the shapes tool and painting into it. I'll get there but in the mean time here they are:

Jamapocalypse

This months art jam theme was post-apocalyptic. I wanted to play on the romantic idea of travelling across a barren landscape on an adventure to find the source/answer (the BW layout was a quick comp that was abandoned early on). I also did a quick head study of some mutated colonel :)

 

Cryptic Chasm

Just a quick enviro concept, trying to utilize reference imagery to work up detail in a fast fashion. I have posted a wip to illustrate.

It's a Trap......Door

Another art jam for work, with the topic being 80's TV. I chose to do an ode to the british claymation favourite, TrapDoor. I have fond memories of Bert's plight when watching as a kid and looking back I'm really impressed with the amount of storytelling that came from a limited set. So that was my focus in this background matte.

** An interesting fact is that one of the co-creators of this show went on to be a key animator  for Aardman Animation, developers of Wallace & Gromit and many awesome others.

Just Shaping

Just can't get enough. If I get a chance I'll try and introduce some more hard surfaces, flowing shapes & figures. Then it will be time to take some to the next level and introduce some colour and paint into.
And just for reference sake, each thumb is taking no longer than 20min.

Shaping Down?

Too much fun. So I managed to get another few thumbs out on Sunday in-between going on a solid bike ride n going to see the smokin' flick 'Hanna'.
Anyway here is a second set of shape based comps.

Shaping Up

Thanks to stumbling on a great workflow technique by the master concept artist Sparth I spent the last few days this week creating a custom shapes library to use for creating quick compositions.
The immediate benefits are simply finding shapes that by simply painting traditionally you may not find and the versatility of the tool in being vector based comes to the fore very quickly.
Anyhow here is my 1/2 hr lazy Saturday trial. I will be doing five comps each day this week to try and build a heap of thumbs to work up at a later point. Really enjoying this fresh approach and only having to concentrate on positive/negative.

Monkey Jam 1 - Alice in Wonderland

Well in an effort to keep everyone pushing their creativity, my works AD Dan Tonkin has championed a new in-house monthly art challenge.
The first theme was Alice in Wonderland which is a real challenge as its a fairly well worn idea. So I thought it would be good to do a paint over of an old sculpt of Tweedle Dee with some strong romantic lighting and the second was just an attempt to make something out of nothing which can be seen in the wip.
Looking forward to seeing everyone else's & I'll try and link that stuff when I can.

*Edit* added the 'Knave of Hearts' profile sketch so I had something unseen for Mondays submission.

N+ NB = Fanart First

Its funny to think that I have been a practising artist for a few years now and never really sat down and done a fan art. Its not that I hadn't found anything that I enjoyed so much as to do an ode, I guess skills have always gotten in the way. Well a couple of weeks ago while waiting for surf I whipped out the DS and got stuck into a favourite of mine, N+.
Anyway I have always enjoyed the simplicity and due to that I wondered what all that pixel art would like with a lil depth. So here it is, admittedly it was a fine line getting the look I wanted mainly due to trying to keep the core shapes but I managed to get there. Thanks for the inspiration Metanet Software, and here is my pic alongside your tasty dual-screenshot.

Purple Haze

Been busy on The Run and haven't been able to get anything new out this week. So I'd thought I would archive a few oldies that never really got to see the light of day. As in the title the common theme is a hue of purple and variants on cel shading too.

No more Gnomes

Awhile ago I was charged with, designing looks for a potential team based game revolving around the mythos of gnomes. While the game eventually went no where, it still gave me some 'team' design experience.
Anyways here are few variants on team style aesthetics. Main thing was to push it in different directions and see what stuck, turns out nothing in the end, ha ha them's the breaks.

Your coming Downtown

Another speed sculpt to vary from the day to day work I'm up to. Kinda going for the ol' mug shots of sketchy characters. Character design was originally sourced from the uber impressive Paul Richards, wonder whether he'd enjoy were I took it.

Return to the digital Chisel

Going to try and keep my sculpting skills in check again. It will still play second fiddle to my 2D but its fun for sure.
Just a quick sketch (5hrs) inc paint up.

Another day, another new port of call

Been changing up employment of late and have been lucky to find myself at Iron Monkey/ EA back in games dev and hopefully I can bring the goods for em.

In the mean time here is a quick speedy of some hooligans letting off flares, kind of pushed the absurd saturation that flares emit.

Easy does it, again?

Been very busy helping wrap the feature film i have been apart of since early October, and its been a great experience to get a solid foundation in a vfx pipeline over quite a few different facets.

So my personal work has been suffering a bit but i have had 1/2 hr blocks here or there were i can have a quick paint. I have been enjoying painting landscapes with opaque colour values compared to working in BW then converting as it becomes more about warm/cool than light dark for me. Here's a few:

Morning Matte

Got time today to finish of a quick  photo based matte painting. Few things i think could be adjusted but sometimes its best to move on and make note for next time. I enjoyed and i learnt a real nice balance between clone vs patching.

* Also posted the base plate which i took at the Olgas last year.

**Watched 'Salt' while i was working, when did the Russians become the bad guys again? Anyway it was decent even though had a very linear progression.

Easy does it

New Year has already been pretty eventful, but its been making it hard to get my personal work out.

To prove I still been putting pen to paper this is a quick collage of a few punk head I have done over the past week on the train. Used a really decent ball point i got in the States at The Society of Illustrators for em.

Read some 'Hard Boiled' this week on the train so the influence is obvious.

I should start putting some personal matte work up soon that will be fun and challenging as always.