Tashi & Hom Graphic Novel

Tashi & Hom is a game featuring a young boy, Tashi, and his companion blob, Hom, magically hacking and slashing their way through waves of delightful, adorable, and voracious enemies.

In addition to working on the game, I also made a graphic novel version of the main characters' backstory based on the established game mythos. The graphic novel isn't technically canon anymore, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

Character design for Tashi & Hom by Tyler Stuart. World and premise was a collective effort by Papertooth Games. I authored and created the graphic novel by fleshing out story details, writing the script, designing secondary characters, creating page layouts, and producing the final art. 

Bonbon Voyage - Title Illustration

Quick & dirty illustration for the title menu. As you may have noticed, many of these elements are embellished versions of the orthographic concept art made earlier in the process. We needed something fast, and this was a reasonable solution which still conveyed the essential character of our game. Buttons along the bottom (over the grass) let the player begin a new game, read a tutorial, see the credits, and exit. 

The character was designed and drawn by our character artist, Jacqui Sessa.

Tashi & Hom Game Menus

Pause menu, confirmation menu, lose screen, and win screen from Tashi & Hom, a hack-and-slash action game about a little boy and his magical companion fighting their way through waves of delightful enemies in stylized Bhutanese-inspired temples.

Ctrl P Print

This was an exercise in conveying sound effects and intonation in a purely visual medium. If you haven't already seen Eddie Izzard's "Glorious," it is definitely worth the watch.

Bonbon Voyage - Gingerbread House

And finally, the gingerbread house. I wanted each side of the house to be distinct so that if and when the player caught a glimpse of it from withing the labyrinth, he would have a reasonable chance of orienting himself at least in relation to the central landmark.

The production schedule was getting pretty crunchy by this point, so the orthographics aren't nearly as well noted and explained as I would have liked. Luckily, I was working closely with my modeler and texture artist, the fabulous Brandon Orden, and we were able to clear up the more ambiguous bits face-to-face.   

Bonbon Voyage - Gates Orthographic

The next orthographic for Bonbon Voyage. 

As the player approaches the hedge maze, the first thing he finds is a large gated yard filled with tantalizing candy treats. The initial idea was to slam the gates closed behind the player, forcing him to make his way to the gingerbread house in order to escape. The further we got into game development, however, the more we realized that this step wasn't necessary - the player wanted to explore whether or not he was locked in. Closing the gates only served to frustrate those avid explorers who insistented on scouring the whole game world to illuminate every last lamppost.

Bonbon Voyage - Hedge Orthographics

This is the first orthographic design I did for Bonbon Voyage, a game in which the player must work his way through a labyrinth of hedges and candy to reach the gingerbread house in the center. 

We knew we'd be using a ton of hedge pieces and connecting them at odd angles, so the cylindrical topiary piece served to hide the corners and create visual interest without limiting how the hedge units could fit together.

The candy cane lanterns lit up when approached by the player, helping him to recognize territory he'd already explored.

Goes Around - Prop Design

Here are the orthographic designs I did of prop and scenery units for my film, Goes Around.

Goes Around - Concept & Color

Concept illustration and color exploration for Goes Around.

Jay W. Aplegren

Meet Jay, the antagonist of my spring film project, Goes Around. Jay's kind of a jerk. But don't worry, he's going to get what's coming to him. 

Snow Day

My quick representation of last week's weather.

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.

Art Deco Box Office

This is a paint-over of the low-poly Maya model to explore color, texture, mood, and lighting.

Why I chose this scene:

1. I love art deco. 

2. With another mild Seattle winter looming large in real life, I wanted to create a space where someone could hide out from the bitter cold of a real Midwestern winter while watching the pageant of snowflakes outside.

3. I wrote a character once who lived in 1930's Iowa and dreamed of being a Hollywood starlet. This space is for her. 

After several more iterations, here's how the final render came out.

Sketch of the Professor and his T.A.

Trees

You Must Be This Tall to Ride

With this painting, I wanted to capture a feeling I had the summer I worked at a theater on Long Beach Island in New Jersey. As a popular tourist destination, the island was chalk full of fun things to do, shops to visit, and the a beach was never more than 2 blocks away. Unfortunately, the employees had little time off to enjoy it. I tried to capture the warm romantic spirit of sunset on the boardwalk and mix it with sadness and the longing to participate in revelries beyond one's grasp.  

Old Western Hotel

When I was a kid, I used to climb around on the rooftops of our house. It wasn't enough to explore the inside, I wanted to see how all the other spaces felt, too. Maybe that's why I play 3D platformers now.

I wanted the design of this building to spark that same need to explore. As I worked out the thumbnails, I was thinking: how would I get to the roof? What configuration of interior rooms and hallways would let me get to a particular door, window, or balcony? 

I was also thinking about the building's history. The little building was originally a flat-roofed single-story shack until its owner lost it to the hotel to settle his gambling debts. At first, the hotel just used it for storage. Some time later, when the hotel needed to expand, they added another floor, expanded the balcony, and converted those spaces into rooms.

Final building specs: 9,729 polygons, 3 texture sets at 1024x1024.

City Skyline

1960's Living Room

I had a lot of fun playing with the light and color in this illustration, especially when it came to playing the line work off the fill colors.

I wanted the props and decor to very clearly denote the time period, in all its quirkiness, while also giving some insight into the lives and story of the room's regular inhabitants.

Temple to the God of Effervescence

I was working under the prompt: Temple to the God of (fill in the blank). "Effervescence" made it on my brainstorm list after a host of more conventional deity elements, and the idea just stuck, strange as it was.

The two dictionary definitions are:

1. to bubble, hiss, and foam as gas escapes

2. to show liveliness or exhilaration

So I created a fantasy space which bubbled, hissed, and foamed, with waterfalls galore, and goblets of bubbly liquid, presumably with sacred significance. I also made it a place where visitors would be exhilarated. First, they'd need to climb up many narrow railing-less stairways to reach it, with the path winding behind the falling water, and then they'd have the opportunity to swim at the waterfall's edge or hang glide back down to the cliff base. Sounds pretty exhilarating to me. 

Part way through, I turned to James Gurney's Dinotopia illustrations for inspiration. 

Rambler

Tree

The Old Birch and the Young Maple

 I found these two trees at the Washington Park Arboretum. The birch was old, worn, scarred, gnarled, and awesome, complete with big black bird. The young Japanese maple was supple, light, airy and delicate. Whoever thinks trees don't have personalities isn't really looking.

Perspective Drawings

Mo'kai Discovers Eggs

I did this illustration of Mo'kai, the protagonist of my fall film project, as part of pre-production. He's a Gripus - a heavy earthy race who lives underground in a subtropical archipelago. Their main protein source are moa-like flightless birds, whose teal eggs are depicted above. The Maori people of New Zealand were my main inspiration for the Gripus culture.

A Lark in the Park

I lucked out this year with the most awesome film team. Marc Thompson animated the blue bookworm, and Jon Gardner animated the big guy with the butterfly net. They were a joy to work with. While none of us have any strong ambitions to do hand-drawn animation for a living, our project still came out pretty well.

We were given a limited set of character designs to chose from, and the beginning of a scenario: one character is wooing another, and the third gets in the way. How, where, and why any of that happens was up to the team to decide. All the frames were drawn by hand, scanned, and then colored in Toon Boom. I animated the purple woman and painted the background in Photoshop.

Will Fain Model

Well, here's how my first human in 3DS Max came out. A lot of learning happened, that's for sure.