Full Color Self-Portrait with Process

Last Friday, I gave myself the afternoon to start making whatever art I wanted. Since I hadn't done a full color portrait in a long while, and seeing how I'm still the cheapest and most accommodating model I know, self-portrait it was.

Happy Halloween!

So there I was, listening to Janelle Monáe ("Dance Apocalyptic," in case you were wondering. I know you were.), looking at pictures of red pandas, and vaguely wondering what to be for Halloween.

Here's what happened.

Hanging Lantern

Self-Portrait

Ancient City

I took inspiration from the Ajanta Caves in India and the Vardzia cave monastery in Georgia for this concept piece of an ancient city. 

Castle Paintovers

I love doing paintovers. They let me play with mood and color a lot sooner because so much of the content and composition is there already. 

 Overcast Day

Overcast Inspiration

Provided White Box Render, source unknown

Sunset Inspiration

Sunset

Paper Raptor

A friend made me a delightful origami raptor, so I painted it. 

The Lonely Giant

 Here are three illustrations from The Lonely Giant, a Scottish fairy tale. 

The giant asks his human friend how to cure his loneliness. Knowing that he could never marry her, she tells him to find a giantess to be his wife. 

He wanders the shoreline in search of a giantess. 

The giantess rejects the giant for being too small, and hurls him into the sea.  

Bat-winged Sharks! Run!

Cue "The Flight of the Valkyries."

A Snail Riding a Flying Platypus

A Fistful of Duckies Brochure

Outside

Doing some graphic design this week in preparation for DigiPen's Career Fair. Here's the team brochure for the game. A stack of our business cards will be paper-clipped inside over the whales. 

Inside 

Graveyard Concept Art

Concept art for the graveyard level of the Halloween theme. 

Franken-duckies & gravestones by Jon Gardner. Bats by Terrana Cliff. I did the rest of the painting and the final composition. 

The New and Improved Edge of the World!

Update to the Edge of the World level: new colors for sky and masking flats help distinguish it from the previous pirate-themed level, and background clouds add depth and interest. Woo!

Brown? We don't need no stinkin' brown!

Next up we're making a pumpkin patch level for the Halloween theme. I'm having fun interpreting earth tones with our limited vibrant color palette.

Drawings by Jon Gardner and Terrana Cliff. I did the painting. 

Robot Walk

Kraken Battle!

Level 3 (Act 3 of the pirate theme) features an underwater kraken battle! In support of our cut-out shooting gallery aesthetic, we decided not to aim for wave action on the tentacles and are treating them instead like flat pieces being controlled by sticks from below.

My team mate, Jon Gardner, did the initial character exploration. I then made final adjustments to the line drawings before taking over at the color exploration phase and carrying it through to final polish.

Thinking with Post-its

For A Fistful of Duckies, our team was doing a lot of talking about chains of events, which menus needed which buttons, when we should present information to the player, what calculations would need to happen when so that the game would play well and at least somewhat resemble the loan repayment process in real life. To make the conversation clearer for everyone, I got a bunch of post-its and made this flow-chart of how I imagined the game would go. Then our game designer, Anthony Murray, took over, made adjustments, and implemented it in accordance with how the game actually evolved.