the wonderful thing about tiggers, and Odas.

Here's a quickie from today, it was for a friend of mine, Oda. She's raising money and awareness for WWF to help save wild tigers. She set herself the challenge to draw a tiger everyday for 28 days of February, and try to get people, whether artistically skilled or not, to draw a tiger. All the images produced will then printed and up for auction on the 9th of March at Elk Salon in Exeter. All the money raised will go to the cause. If you're in the area it will be a great event, with tiger themed food, fun things fo' kiddies and all ages alike. 

You can find out more about it here: Facebook Groups: Draw a Tiger . The more the merrier! 

You can also find a hi-res image of the above image below the image here: Said Hi-Res image.

CarsCarpsTarpsParps

I've been watching a lot of Scott Robertson's youtube channel lately, since I only found out a week ago that he had one. Also his Gnomon video tutorials should be mandatory to everyone regardless of what they do, because they are amazing. Would recommend. 

Now fo' my bizzle. Here's some cars I painted from some sketches I done sketched. Had a lot of fun painting the top design. Bottom one was a bit mehh. I tried to redeem it with some digital camo, because I love that stuff...and it seemed like a practical paint job. I also switched the original wheels from the Tan design (which I'd painted first) with the Green's just because the original wheels weren't working and I was trying to stick to a time restraint. Pootis.

Original Sketches at actual size are below the picture, pictured below. Enjoy.

010213

Speaking of rough stuff, here's a couple wee warm up paint jobs from today from some old sketches I done found.  I love the idea of a kid having an abandoned pillbox playhouse. Left originals are actual size sizes. 

YO YO YO YO YO

So its been nearly fo'ever, but its a new year and a new ethos, and I was speaking to Marcel and he told me to post stuff nao.  Plus I feel its time I kept a presence on the internet, stop wimping out on showing the rough stuff and get into the habit of posting again.

Thus! Here are some quick early environment experiments for a level from that ol' RCS3 personal project I've been slugging at.  

Happy '13!

...and rolling

Another late night post,  just a paint up of a sketch I drew last night. Still just experimenting with bits and bobs. Night all.

The Cage is a Rolling.

I decided to paint up of a car sketch I drew earlier today. It's been a long time since I used my painting techniques, the big project I'd been working on utilised a more animated airbrushed technique so I had adopted that for the past few months. It was really nice to get back to my old brushes, although a lot of them seem...rubbish and ill designed now I play with them and I think I've moved on from the kind of aesthetic they produce. They just sort of create useless noise most of the time. I feel inspired to go in and play around create some more refined brushes and shapes. 

Right now I also feel that I also want to 'design' more. I've been really keen on sketching recently just because I get to design, with consideration, it doesn't always work as you can draw something that ends up looking like a piece of ass, but I feel like it tests me more as a designer. Creating from chaos can be fun and productive, don't get me wrong. But I feel its made me complacent, you don't have to consider placement of form, stroke or perspective to the same degree and they are 3 things I'm trying to work on.

With that hypothesis over, here's me doodles. Painting was about 3-4hours to completion. About an hour of that playing with mixer brushes. Bottom is original sketch, blown up about 230%.

An Or-Nate sketch and some I did.

I got back from a family trip to France at the weekend, which was très bon. I did some sketches whilst I was there...

I forgot how liberating world building can be.

Speaking of trips - Seattle/Vancouver 2011. I made a post a while back about a trip two mates and I made across the pond to meet some comic and games developers. I said back then I would dedicate some posts to that trip to the people we met, and well, it's taking me a while, but here's a start.

Starting with the first two folks we met - Justin Norman (aka Moritat) and Nate Simpson (Project Waldo). Seriously these are two of the nicest guys I've had the pleasure to meet, and although I might question Justin's ability to correctly enforce a car's passenger capacity, they went to no-end to help us out. I hope to meet these chaps again some day. 

I've got something in the works for Justin, but herein lies a quick little paint-over of a Nate Simpson bad-ass doodle he noodled in my sketchbook. 

Also I totally recommend you all go buy this - NonPlayer its practically a paper-carnation of Nate's soul. A soul full of Monster's, Robots, Crazy fights and some of the best looking stones I've ever seen. 

I would plug Justin, but I don't think he's flogging anything,  I'm sure he would accept any pennies you have spare though.

Enjoy,

loading up another.

December!? Blaaagh. well, I've no excuse for that huge 6 month delay. But hopefully the next few posts will make up for that a little. I've been busy with some graphic design related business and some other bits and bobs. So I've decided to use this little calm period to put some time away to work on my portfolio. Get back into doing more concept art. I don't like talking about things I intend to do, as I usually don't end up doing them once they've been enunciated. So from hence forth I think i'll leave it to stuff I've done. none of that hypothetical jib jab.  

Below is a couple of renders for some 3D product shots composed for Loading Games Café's - Mega Coffee.  I used the box-net I designed for the physical packaging for the UV map, both shots are straight out of Modo's renderer. The only post production is some additional bounce light on the base of the boxes on the top image, and the images' rounded corners for blogging porpoises.. 

Standard Product shot, and a Teaser image. Depth of Field is so much fun to play with. 

www.monstermonster.net

To double up for the night, here's something I can now release, although it's been on my site for a while. My mate monstermonster has just published his site. He asked if I could do a robot for it, so I did a robot for it. Please find below the robot I did for it. Check his link out for a full version of the image (yeah, I've bugged him to fix the pixellation). 

Below that are some pictorial logo's I did for him using the typographic one I'd made a while back. The idea being that they all can be utilised and animated to morph into one another. Mainly for a animated cover image for his youtube channel videos. or something... Enjoy! 

throw bugs on it.

Blahhh Sorry it's been such a long time. I've been real busyfor the last month, I'm working on my own IP atm, and I've been real busy with some NDA stuff so I've not been able to show what I've been up to. I'm gonna try and post up some new stuff soon, I feel like I'm cheating posting older stuff. I've got a couple of projects on the go that I should be able to post up which I've been wanting to do so for a while now. Keep posted! 

Either way this is something I meant to post aaaaages ago, but I'd lost all of my second yr Uni work .Which blows. However my girlfriend had a copy of some larger-res jpegs on her computer for some reason. Which is awesome. So here they are. It's a Information project I did back in second year. I wanted to design a insect spotter's guide since I had one as a kid which I loved, and I've always been keen to do my own. I recall this being quite a short project, or at-least I didn't get to spend that long on it. So its not as fleshed out as I would like it to be, and if I get the chance I probably will finish up the rough edges. I had a lot of fun with it, would be real sweet to get something like this published. 

Enjoy

p.s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q949rFuVfHM&feature=relmfu

Rune for thought.

A post or so back in the rockbot update my friend Marcel mentioned about looking into runes for their decor. After he'd mentioned it I had a flick through various alphabets and things, and thought I would spend a couple of hours fixing up my own for fun. So I decided to post them up. I was looking to create something that could actually be read reasonably easy, but still looked very foreign. I actually remembered that number code from the episode of The Simpsons where Lisa couldn't work out that the numbers were mirrored and I pulled inspiration from that. So I halved the alphabet and combined that with the similar principles from this Korean alphabet chart to create a language in runes. After creating the basic foundation for it, I pulled inspiration from Japanese calliagraphy, particularly the Gyosho style of calligraphy, which deforms the characters either to create more pleasing compositions or for the sake of efficient writing. I wrote these out by hand in a chunky marker and scanned them in as it felt more authentic that way.

I liked the idea of taking something existing, and manipulating it to create something new, but understandable. The potential for the type to actually be read/understood either for eastereggs or just pre-production fun ( I do enjoy it when studios/companies throw in little injokes into their work) or whether it could be utilised to work as clues for gameplay or storytelling is also something of a bonus.

It's construction rules, also mean others can take the principles and characters and create their own sentences with meaning and still retain a consistent aesthetic. 

Enjoy.

Wild Jo Appeared.

My girlfriend and I were on Skype™a couple of nights ago, she was working on her uni work and I was about to start painting. I was thinking of what to do, when I noticed how the desk lamp she uses made for some really nice lighting, and the pixellated cam made some weird glare effects and blew out a lot of areas of the image. So I thought I would do some studies of it. They're sort of done whilst she was on cam, and I screen shot a few to work up. She moved during one of them. Enjoy. 

p.s. my lady partner friend has gone done a website for these hog roasting folks based in Milton Keynes. They do spit roasts and all sorts for MK, Bedfordshire and the surrounding areas. If pork is on your rind, maybe grab yourself a piggy for your do. 

rockbots in the rough

Here's some rockbots. I took a little break from characters, well atleast of the Human variety (mainly after I saw my mate Phandy's last robot post a had a burst of inspiration). So I thought I'd take some of that gesture stuff and put it into something more creature based. So I popped on some FZD youtube videos and had a night of thumbnailing. I then took three of those and worked them up a little. Which is whatchu got here. 

I thought these things could be kind of bare muscle/mollusc like creatures, that live in rocky areas and they use their surroundings to form their bodies by binding to natural rocks to make an exo-skeleton type thing. As they become stronger and mature or beaten up, they depose of the smaller, crappier rocks and attach larger ones. I sorter then developed that to suggest that local tribespeople have domesticated these things, and carve more efficient bodies for these creatures to adopt. 

above ^ are the original thumbnails, these are probably about 50% larger than I drew them. Enjoy.

EDIT:  Just to clear up, as I meant to write this and forgot, and it confused Marcel (although from my experience, thats easily done). These "rockbots"actually aren't that rocky. I was referencing a mineral called Galena. So I was going for a material that has a similar structure and texture to that. The original images are just under 4000px wide, so alot of texture has been compressed/lossed. I painted them with the intention of scaling them down for printing out, so the loose details tighten up a bit when they shrink. However my blog posts are only 900px wide so thats a lotta shrinkage. I intend to develop these guys more, the above are just rough ideas, to help convey the core concept.  Hope that helps answer any ifs or crits anyway, cheers to Marcel for pointing out some bits. I can always count on that guy for feedback.

Shyguys.

Hmm.. I can't believe it's been nearly a month since my last post. Pootis. I've been working on a few graphic jobs here and there, which once they've been published I'll post them up.  So that kind of explains the delay in posts for the past month. Anyway here's a quick post on something I was working on last night as Faye was moaning at me this morning for not updating in ages. I hardly ever do characters, which explains why I suck at them, and because I suck at them,  I don't do them. However I'm hoping to change that, because I enjoy thinking up characters and clothing ideas. I've had my head stuck in Loomis' "Figure Drawing: For all it's worth" for the past couple of days and I think it's starting to click. I've just been focusing on gestures. They're not great, but here's a trio of dudes that I sketched last night. I didn't really know what theme I was putting these peeps in but. meh. Some sort of army salvage guys. Enjoy

hubcups

This was a personal project I did a while back that I found the other day. I went through a phase of drawing the hubcaps of the cars parked outside my window. It was intriguing to be able to guess the brand of car that the hubcaps were from just from the design of them. I found the patterns and designs pretty cool when they were simplified, so I vectorised them and stuck them on cups. I was going to look into getting some printed if enough people were interested in them, although I'd probably make my own original "hubcaps" so I didn't get into copyright problems. Either that or maybe they'd make for some promo gear for a car/wheel manufacturer. Who knows, I just did it for fun because I thought they'd look cool.

feel free to drop me a email or comment if you were interested or just wanted to say hey, I like getting emails. Enjoy.

Star Time Adventure Watcher

A month back Brandon Graham revised an old art-meme with his version of Moebius' Starwatcher in the hope that it would cook up like Apple Pie. It certainly seems to be. I've only recently, since my trip to Vancouver, found my love for Moebius' work. This is mainly due to Brandon, when staying at his, handing copies of 'bius' work to look at and i'm thankful he did. I really fell for Jean Giraud's (Moebius) style of aesthetics and technique and his ethereal colour and characters. Seeing as this Starwatcher  seemed like a fun thing to join in on, I was inspired to do, and no-one had done it yet, an Adventure Time tribute. Because I fluffing love that show. 

So here it is, I've been working on it on and off for the past few weeks, in-between work and things. Warcel had the pleasure of throwing in some alternate ideas after I had drawn up the line work so I'd like to go back to it and alter bits or do an alternate version with Beemo as the focus and push more of Jake's bombastic attitude into the image, but I feel ready enough to post this one.  It's been a pretty fun journey to take with this, I was originally going to go for a more Moebius or a Cell Shaded venture, but I was really attracted to the AT title cards. They bring in this crazy painterly juxtaposition of styles against the simpleness of the cartoon that works really well. So I thought, let's do that!

 enjoy.

boxes.boxes.boxes.

And we're back. None for ages, then two in a night. This is one of the mutherfudgers I've been working on over the past trio of weeks. Loading is going mobile with its coffee, and it needed some snug little boxes to contain the bean dust cans in. So here's a sneak preview of said packaging. It was a real fun little project, and a huge curve learner. I got the opportunity to design and create everything myself from the net upwards, which is fun, but having the responsibility of getting it printed professionally this time, I've been triple checking my triple checks to ensure its right. 

We went with a retro/tribute to Mega Drive™. It was great fun to do, and surprisingly personal also, I grew up with the Sega Mega Drive, Sonic was my absolute hero as a kid (alongside Earthworm Jim). I've always loved their style of aesthetics, and it felt nice to celebrate that and try to keep it alive whilst giving it a modernised, coffee related spin. I hope you enjoy it. 

To accompany the box+tin I designed a little double sided "Instruction Manual". I recreated the pictorial safety notices with game item/character related ones. Some are more abstract references than others.

Here's a little close up iconparison of the original (bottom) and Loading's game versions (top).

If you would like to lend a hand to help get these puppies born you can help Loading get funding for the print costs by voting: here It only takes a minute and costs yee nothing. And you stand yourself a chance of winning some of the powder gold known as Mega Coffee in its shiny box as well as some gaming goodies. It would be much appreciated folks.

Take it easy

hmmmm....

Well this is a well over-due blog update.  It's been a weird couple of months of moving about and doing bits and neglecting pieces. But here we are and although I've not posted anything for a while, it's been bugging me that I haven't, so here's some stuff. 

I'd like to kick start this with a tribute to a good friend of mine, Angelo Trofa. Just because he's a radical italian dude and a great designer. I've had this batch of post-it notes depicting the incredible Football tekkers of Luke illustrated by said rad-man from when we were at college together. I've been meaning to .gif for a while. It's sentimental, so I thought I would share it for you college peeps of the past. 

gun red and hidden links.

I've been meaning to post again for the past few days. I've still a back log of stuff I want to talk about and show, but we'll hold on for another time.  

Here's some guns I drew. I was trying to experiment with keeping shapes as simple as I could, while keeping them interesting. I did about a page of ideas for pistols, pushing how simplified I could get them, then I took my favourite design, and tried to apply the same aesthetic to other types of firearms. I'm going do this sort of thing more often, As I learnt a ton, and it was real enjoyable to do. Enjoy.

periodical remixes.

I thought I'd try out something different lately. I'd like to post up random crap I've done outside of work, or stuff people have bought/made me, or just random awesome bites people have shown or I've found. A sort of Jon Schindehette / Brandon Graham blog baby.

So i'll kickstart this thought with a visual remix I did the other day for myself of a Periodic Table of Game Controllers that I wanted to use as my desktop to match the one on my other comp of a Periodic Table of Typefaces by Cam Wilde (to which I did a similar thing).  The original PToGC image is by Mike Vasilev, he's got  some awesome design stuff up on his site so definitetly check it out.

I take no credit for this image, the genius is all from Mike, I just made it black and purple for what I wanted, I find black desktop images more sexy for some reason. Which I hope he doesn't mind. Sorry its not in a higher res. The Flickr plan failed because i'm not pro enough to have it larger than 1024 pixels.

Links to both the originals for Mike and Cam are in their names, their work is certainly worth perusing.

hi-res version

drink.relax.play

An advert for Loading's second in the series of, Latebit . There's a big A1 poster version being printed for the event. This is just the web graphic for their site info it just looked sexier on the new layout I've decided I'd do. The old one didn't fit the new aesthetic.

check out Loading online, i'm real glad I get to do the occasional design work for the guys, and not just because it gets me, more often than I probably should, free coffee. <links in the title>

Also, I think I may have to invest in a flickr, them hi-res versions ain't that hi-res...Thanks Photobucket you're awesome.

bots.bots.bots.

if in doubt. add mountains.

I think i'll chuck out some of the stuff I'd done and worked on before the America/Canada trip before I do a post on the actual trip, so things are more chronological. A big dump update so to speak.

This and the purple mountains in the post below are environment studies exploring painting processes. I was aiming for something graphic/painterly. These are pretty old, and not very interesting, but were really useful for me. I'm starting to feel I'm finally getting somewhere. 

Something speaking to the guys at ArenaNet on the trip that really got me focused on was that I want to explore techniques and styles more, not search for one exactly, as I'm a believer in the style finds you, but I'd like to help it out by experimenting with techniques and media that I've not really pushed yet. So I'm pretty pumped to have the time to really push my image making. 

hi-res version

it's been time, and things have certainly changed.

Where to start? I can't believe my last post was January!? Damn. So much has happened since; tough stuff, awesome stuff, nice stuff and exciting stuff. Uni is over, which is crazy nuts as certainly doesn't feel like three years has been an gone, I feel like the journey has only just started. Which is semi-right as one has. The sheet scary one of getting a job and working for a living. But I had the amazing opportunity to meet a load of crazy awesome people in Seattle and Canada, I'll dedicate a post to that trip because what I got out of it was invaluable, it was so worth the money and effort, I really can't thank those I met and spoke to enough. It really put things in perspective for me, it was an incredible experience and I'd recommend it to anyone.

So basically, expect some massive updates over the next few days. Now I've finished my uni work, and the couple of live jobs I had to do as soon as I finished, I'm really focused on making something out of this opportunity that's in front of me.

I also want to put out a thanks to my 'rents for helping me out with the trip, I hope I can return all the help you've given me over these years to get to where I am. I do love you guys.

hi-res version 

hmm...

I've been really busy with work lately, and haven't got round to posting anything. So I treated myself to a little jam, here's the result of what was meant to be some c.brush experiments. About 30mins painting and 2 hours faffing.

full_version