The Red God Rises

I've been toying with an epic fantasy story (among others) in the back of my mind for years now.

Every once in awhile, I'll get some inspiration to create something for it. Maybe add to the history of one character, redesign another or create an entirely new one.

This is one of the new ones.

He came about while I grabbed an old image I had done using DeviantART's Muro. It was a pretty lame sketch, and I think it was the only quick thing I did with the app.

But on a whim, I grabbed it because I was forcing myself to think outside the box and work on something that pushed me to do something different.

The resulting sketch was pretty cool.

Then I reformatted my machine and installed on the wrong hard drive and lost it along with some other pretty cool images.

:'(


Anyways, this guy and some other characters I had come up with, fortunately wouldn't die so easily.

And so once again I took a stab at him.

He is menacing and quite villainous looking. But he is actually a good guy.

A bit of MyPaint, Gimp and Krita too. I am really starting to like da Krita!

Tablet FTW

Recently I purchased a new tablet because I heard about a nice little app called Procreate.

Unfortunately I had to purchase an iPad 4 because it was only available in iOS.

You see, I would have much rather gotten an android tablet, such as the Nexus 10, if only because I've already invested in quite a few Android apps.  I also like that there is quite a bit more freedom in Android.

The iPad does have a really good contrast ratio though and that makes it good for this sort of thing. Though not nearly as good as a decently calibrated monitor.

At first I was worried that I wouldn't make much use of it, but fortunately, I now think it was one of the best purchases I've made in a long time.


Because now I can draw anywhere, and draw the way I want to!

Here are some quick sketches done to get a sense of the whole thing.


I did use some other apps as well.  I find that I prefer roughing things out in Brushes or Sketchbook Mobile. So I have been using those apps a lot too.

2013 - This Time I'm Going To Do It My Way

That was a bit of a lengthy holiday I just had. It's now a new year and I am very hungry to get back at this art thing, and especially Who Needs the Moon.

For quite some time now I have been working pretty exclusively with MyPaint. However, I have been looking at the work of others and wondering how to achieve some of the things that they have done.  There are limitations to what the MyPaint brushes can do at this point.

MyPaint is amazing, but it does lack a lot of the functionality of Photoshop.  But then I did recall that I was using the Gimp for image based brushes before I moved on to MyPaint.  So I started fooling again with the Gimp's painting features, which by the way, would be a hell of a lot better if the application recognized my Monoprice tablet.

I was thinking of book cover concepts and came up with this.

And here are the results, after brainstorming the forested world of Duskland. Where some day my character Lampy will adventure in.

I hope you like it.  Happy New Year.

Zombie Concept Dump

I've decided that I just need to fill out this blog a little better with art that has been done while I was working for past companies.

This dump consists of concept sketches that were made for zombie enemies that were used in a game that was the protoype that later became - Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green.  I worked on this game while working for BrainBox which is now a dead division of Digital Extremes.

These were made 9-10 years ago I think.

Monitor Calibration Horror.

I've been trying today to calibrate my pretty cheap monitor.

The worst thing about doing this now, is that the current settings that I have set up right currently, show me that a lot of the past work that I have been doing is pretty poor in contrast.

The previous post's image of werewolves concepts is a pretty good example of that.  Here's the problem, on my monitor before calibration it looks fine.  Obviously, I painted it in that environment. On my smartphone, a Nexus S, it looks fine, ignoring a few problematic high contrast areas.

On the newly calibrated monitor  though -  which I think is better than before, but far from perfect - it is barely visible and hard to make out.  As a test, I brought the image into the GIMP and tweaked the Levels, Brightness/Contrast and Curves as well. It appears better on my screen now, but shows that as a concept piece it is kind of weak.

When getting into an extremely dark piece like this, and this is probably true of extremely bright pieces as well, cheap screens just aren't calibrated properly and give a poor range of blacks and whites.  Graphics people shouldn't cut or skimp on monitors if they can afford not to.

I am going to have to fool with this monitor setup more and see where I can compromise. I just hope this doesn't ruin all my work. 

If you feel that you could benefit from some eyeball calibration of your monitor, here is the link

monitor calibration tips and resource

that I used to tweak my NVIDIA settings.

P.S. to all of you that have viewed my work on a properly or semi-properly calibrated monitor, I apologize.

Sympathy for the Devil

Well, it has been difficult to find time to work on anything related to the graphic novel, let alone any other type of art.

Currently, with my wife working her way through chemo therapy to fight breast cancer, I find that the whole family is strapped for time. Because of this my duties have increased taking care of the house, her and the kids and so I don't have much time for anything else.  When I do have some time at night, I find myself completely exhausted.

Right now I am REALLY tired. I've never been this tired. @_@

For a while there, early into her treatment, art seemed pretty trivial, when faced with the all the things cancer heaps on a family. Naturally I guess I've shied away from it, and so things have been left by the wayside. Probably for the better. I've stewed on design and story ideas.

Lately though, I've been making a more serious attempt to do something... anything. I really want to create this book.

Anyways.

I was never entirely comfortable with the look of the werewolf.  An American Werewolf in London's creature effects has had a huge influence on my design ( I love that film ) but I want to inject my own take and style on it. These concepts come from me trying to nail down something.

The whole character of the wolf needs fleshing out. And the town too.

More to come. I hope.

Some Old Work Back Online

The following work below was once shown online at my old site.  I abandoned the old school method of paying for a url, when I realized I was making little to no money and the blog sites were a good alternative.

I felt I needed to post some of the better work that used to be shown there.

Experiments in Design and Composition

So I am fooling around with design and composition. At the very least I am trying to wrap my head around it better.

For some reason I seem to be up against a brick wall with the Lampy short, and so I've been working on other things as an escape from the circles in my thought process.

I just can't seem to make up my mind on where to take it. I could just go ahead and create a silly action short that consists of a fight between Lampy and Bubba, but I don't feel that I would be very faithful to the world that I am trying to create for them, and I doubt anyone would even take notice.

There is a deeper experience to Lampy that I would like to bring out. It's not immediately apparent on the surface, but I think that it is worth striving towards.

As for the werewolf graphic novel(OH! hoity toity), I think these little exercises will help get me into a frame of mind over time to help me tackle that story better too.

These following two images are poster doodles. I was just blocking out strokes on the computer - hoping something interesting would pop out that I could pounce on and take somewhere.

This is what came about of that. I didn't bother with any kind of standardized poster size. Maybe these look more like old book covers. At least that is what I am starting to see while posting this.

These two "thumbnails", or at least what started out as thumbnails, were me working through the FPS ideas that have been floating around in my head for some time.

Again not really trying to do accomplish anything except rip something creative out of my head.

I stuck with gray scale in these images because I didn't really want the hassle of trying to figure out colours. To be honest I think my eye for colour can be somewhat lacking, so this was really an exercise in composition, dramatic tone and narrative.

These were all done using the super awesome, free and open source painting program called MyPaint.

Parental Leave

This is my best work.

While I'm not busy with them (which is usually never), I'm trying to squeeze in some time to draw something, anything really. Although I haven't found the time to do much at all. Usually, I'm exhausted and not quite feeling all that creative in the evenings when I am a little more free. During the day however my brain does wander from time to time and the stories in my mind get better and better. Here are some 30 minute sketches that I threw together in MyPaint, with maybe a little post here and there in the GIMP. The main focus was just colour and light.

Image Dump

Website is gone. Why pay money for hosting when there is so many great - and free - alternatives.  Sure I lost all contacts and any traffic ( if any ) that my website had generated, but this is better in the long run.

Sketch 6

start of a storyboard