Sketches and Stuff!

I'm still alive, and here's some photo-referenced sketches to prove it! The source for each was from the September 2009 issue of National Geographic, though most are from advertisements therein.

Regarding future work, I've got an extra large sword-and-sorcery piece in the works, as well as a series of digital paintings. I'm a bit nervous about the latter, both because I haven't done any serious digipaints in a while and because I've learned that my monitor has crumby color accuracy, but, if successful, they'll be a great asset to the old 'folio.

In other news, I've found a fantastic Photoshop plugin combo for flatting comic pages! Developed by Boudewijn Pelt, they're simply named Flatten and MultiFill, and they reduce the amount of time spent slapping down base colors by a ridiculous amount. They aren't quite magic easy-mode buttons - the presence of grays, including those from resizing the image, will create some ugly artifacting, and the colors applied are a bit random - but they do free up more time for rendering and other adjustments. Very useful, and highly recommended!

Castle Bunnyskull

Just an environment painty thing. It was supposed to be quick, but trepidation over colors prolonged its creation needlessly.

Glitterfarts

*poot*

Many thanks to my brother David for recommending an autumnal approach to the colors.

Just a Quick Orc Portrait

Not satisfied with "King o' da Orcs," I decided to crank out something quick and orc-related that wouldn't be completely horrible, and this was the result. I'm much more satisfied with this, even if the scan over-emphasized the forehead highlight. Speaking of "King o' da Orcs," I've been tinkering around with it a bit more, and while it's not completely redeemed yet, there has been some progress. I'll post a revised version of the piece if my obsessive editing works out.

King o' da Orcs

This looked fine in the rough pencil stage, but some very, *very* obvious flaws manifested as work dragged on, particularly in regards to the rendering of those pauldrons/shoulder armor bits. They're supposed to be curved plates, but the lack of shadows on their receding planes and the dead-on, what-is-foreshortening view of the spikes makes the armor as a whole feel like a cardboard cutout. I suppose it could add to the overall whimsy of the piece, but I'm not sure. On a related note, I'm probably going to avoid working at 18"x24" until I get a larger scanner. 15+ scans on an 8.5"x11" scanning bed just to get everything in focus is a pain, let me tell ya'.



Just for kicks, I tried slapping on some digital gradients just to see if that would fix anything. It kind of worked, but now the plates seem to curve into each other instead of overlap.

Slight Website Revamp (Rejoice?)

The ol' website's been given a slight revamp, including new navigation buttons and a more organized portfolio section. Nothing exciting, but the streamlined interface makes me happy. Sadly, the old "Welcome" page has been axed in this set of revisions, which renders the above-posted doodle obsolete. I rather like this arm-headed fellow, so I'm hoping to find a project that he'd be suitable for.

Dwarvish RuneTank

I decided to tackle a traditional weakness of mine: vehicle design! Figuring out how the engravings on the wheels contorted was the most difficult part, and were I to do this again, I would probably just draw the design on the underside of a cup and reference from that.