Rabbit Holes

I finally finished this painting I've been working on sporadically for over a year. It's been a lesson in deciding to just suck it up and do the work I know needs to be done.

Go - Elephant's Eye

This fast impulsive painting is the product of several ideas colliding across space and time. About six weeks ago, I started playing Go and am now completely enamored with it. I just learned the name for elephant's eye shape last week. Once upon a time, two years ago, I hatched plans to paint three endangered species in ultra-vibrant colors. The preliminary sketches were in this post. Passion for something even better (at the time) snuffed out that idea. Yesterday, I walked past the most amazingly brilliant red dahlias, and suddenly I knew where this was going. Red seemed appropriate because of passion, danger, and because, as I understand it, typically only one of the two Go stones can live in this configuration.

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.  

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!

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.

Underwater Stage

Level 3 (act 3 of the pirate theme) is an underwater level, so I got to make a whole new stage complete with sand ground rows, water masking flats, and a god ray backdrop. 

The Edge of the World!

In Level 2 (act 2 of the pirate theme), our friend the pirate ship sails to the waterfall at the edge of the world. Sure, why not.

A Fistful of Duckies Title Screen

A Fistful of Duckies is a mobile carnival shooter being developed for Android and iOS tablets. The wide screen format (above) is the widest aspect ratio on the Android, and the cropped version (right) is how it looks on the iPad. The button leads to the main menu. This is the widest shot the player ever sees of the carnival setting since the rest of the game takes place within the stage space. I used the thumbnails (below) to work out value composition and color before moving on to the final piece.  

The Barker character was designed and drawn by our animator, Parker Pierce.

Pirate Level Concept Art

Here's a stab at the target look & feel for the pirate levels. 

The "minimum-wage ducks" up front will always be available, but they are worth so few points that the game is not winnable unless the player also hits more difficult targets.  

Study of a Rose

I was having a pretty crummy day, so I made something to improve it. I don't often have roses in the house, so I took advantage of the opportunity.

Self-Portrait

I'm quite happy with how this self-portrait came out. I chose 3 colors - a magenta, a cyan, and a yellow - for my palette and did all the mixing with opacity and a couple of different blending modes on the brush. 

Mo'kai Character Sheet and Still Frame

The final character sheet offers a comparison between the original concept art and the 3D model.. Below is one of my favorite frames from the film. 

Mo'kai is running a time trial through an obstacle course as a right of passage. The film opens on him navigating the final stretch of a high-tech pipe gorge.  After nearly missing his leap over a deep chasm, he crosses the finish line and struts away victorious.

While the story is short and simple, this project was mostly about pulling off an entire film by myself. Character design, world building, and design documents were prepared ahead of time from a loose prompt. Then the remaining visual development, modeling, textures, rigging, animation, rendering and compositing were crammed into a single 14-week semester. Most of the work was done in 3DS Max, textures created in Photoshop, and compositing done with After Effects.