Snow and Sky

Last few paintings from 2016. Only practice.

Saurian

Raptors spying on a passing herd of anatosaurus. Painted for the art book of Saurian, an upcoming dinosaur lifestyle simulation game.

Paints

Some more quick stuff, been pretty busy with freelance work recently so nothing super finished.

Tribal guy-

Below: I usually use these two characters of mine as scale reference in env practice.

Moonlight Meeting / Waterfall Dragon

Some process stuff for a recent illustration. Thumbnails and character exploration for the human figures.

Messing Around

Some recent studies, speed-paints and other messes.

Below: Trying out something cartoony. Based on Zedig Diboine a bit and his approach to characters.

Quick moody messes playing around with an old dragon character. About ten minutes for each thanks to some musical motivation.

An unfinished matte painting experiment.

Lunch studies:

Cold Wolfy Morning

Finished up the last painting of 2014, begun when I was on a werewolf kick and watching loads of terrible television shows. Didn't turn out how I intended but calling it done and moving on. 

Included a WIP to show how much it changed. I'll probably try a painting of a similar fall setting again soon to try and regain some of the things I feel I've lost from this images earlier phases. 

Leaves leaves leaves

Re-remembered I had found a photo of one of the previous studies under clear overcast conditions. I really like cloudy days (likely a result of growing up in the northwest), the even lighting makes everything stand out crisply and there's less overall ambient occlusion.

Doing these pretty sloppily on purpose, as I'm trying to care less about detail currently and focus on getting the light, color and composition right first.

You're going to have to bear with my atrocious handwriting. 

Env Noodles

 Practice. Some studies and speedy lunch messes.

Light and color, how dost thou function?

The Long Road to Competence

Get ready for a backlog of studies and sketches. I'm pretty comfortable with designing and painting creatures, but for a long time was less so with environments and human characters. In my quest to rectify that I've produced a lot of sketches and rough images, some are studies, others are character thumbnails and exploration. So far I've mostly been tackling people, more environmental stuff to come later.

Below: Some rough ideas for a female protagonist that I've had knocking around in my head forever. She'll be showing up again in the future.

Below: A compiled pile of studies and tests. 

Photo studies below.

Practice environment, used as a test bed for whatever technique I came across. Lasso selections, photo textures and pure painting, etc.

Oil Scraps

Some old oil studies from a painting class. 

Catchup

Haven't posted here in a while and for that I apologize. 2013 was a very busy year for both schoolwork and client work. There are some images I'm not yet able to post here, so for now it's personal work only.

A couple of recent sketches~

This creature is a design for a personal world building project, he's based on the mythological Ichneumon that hunted dragons in the same way that a mongoose hunts serpents. As this guy was originally inspired by the Egyptian Mongoose, I spent a lot of time doodling to figure out how to take such a small animal and make it monstrous. I'm still not ready to call this design 100% finalized and will be painting more iterations in the future.

I was only able to get around to painting this version thanks to a contest hosted on facebook by Helpful Bear Productions. Which I'm excited to say won! As part of the reward, this image will be appearing in an upcoming issue of ImagineFX.

Creature practice, nothing much design wise, just trying things out~

I'm not ready to call either of the two images below complete. They were done for a Digipen course class, and on a tight schedule. Amid client work and other homework I wasn't able to spend as much time or thought on either of these as I would like. I used the class as an excuse to get out of my comfort zone, by focusing more on environments, as well as painting the two main characters of my personal project. I hope to have another go at the idea behind these in the future.

Autumnal Qilin

A Qilin/Kirin. Revamp of an old drawing, now with an environment background. I don't know where the idea of Kirin as fancy unicorn horned deer came from. In Chinese/Japanese myth and in ancient illustrations and statues they have antlers, and look more like cloven hooved dragons than anything. The more unicorn-like variations on the creature remind me more of another Chinese creature called the Sin-You. 

Anyway. Here's the process I used for this one.

Thumbnail drawing, for establishing composition, lighting and rough values.

Lowered the opacity and sketched the critter in more detail overtop.

First, painting underneath the sketch lines, I started painting things in more detail/figuring out what was going on. Tossing textures around. Then I painted overtop the critter sketch a tad.

Next, make a color overlay layer, for ya know colour. Then started painting over top that once satisfied.

Then detail detail, and finished.