Dominance War Progress

I just got back from GDC and have not had a lot of time to work. Now I have to get to my actual homework, but I'm excited to do a full illustration of this character.

Dominance War III

Yesterday was the beginning of Dominance War III, which is an annual game art competition. I'm on the GameArtisans team. The prompt can be seen in full detail here, but in short it's a fantasy warrior/mage design. Here are my thumbnails and character roughs. Here's what that means for my process:

1)thumbnailing - rough small drawings in photoshop - prodominantly black.

2)thumbnail variations -- I find one that I like and make a bunch of copies. From here, I alter it until I find one that I like.

3)character rough -- I take my favorite little image from the last stage, enlarge it, and fill it with more details. At this point I'm trying to think about form, mass, and materials. Still very loose and painterly.

Mini-Comic cover

I'm in a mini-comics class right now, and our first assignment was to make a portfolio book of recent work. The actual goal for the project was to practice reproducing and binding books, but it needed content as well. Anyway, the night before it was due I remembered I needed a cover -- so here's what I came up with.

There are no space marines in the entire comic... in fact, it's not really even a comic at all. I had a laugh making the cover though.

Robot

I took an hour and a half last night to stop everything else and paint. It was great! I even got out my technical pens and some real paper for the occasion. This robot is what came out of it... it feels good to get back into personal work again.

More environment ideation

For these thumbnails, I grabbed a bunch of cool looking photos and texture images. I cobbled them together with perspective in mind, and did a tiny bit of painting on top. I'm pretty happy with the potential of this method -- it expands my mental library of shapes and materials.

I will probably take the third image to completion (yes, color).

Environment Ideation

I'm working on new methods of building environment paintings. For these two, I made quick abstract cubes in sketchup, and then did a paint-over. Maybe I'll make them full illustrations later? I need to find more free time to make personal art...

Robot Turnaround

Here is a robot turnaround for practice - I'm working on making character sheets without any linework. The inspiration came from those guys at Massive Black... they really know how to paint.... Anyway, hopefully I''ll do more like this when I find some time.

Engine Room

Yikes! It's been a long time since I posted. Thank you Ross for your encouragement -- here is an engine room plus material samples. Sketchup is a great tool for quick paint-overs!