Assorted weekend sketches + The Google Art Project

The "Google Art Project" Chrome extension

A few days ago on the Verge I saw that Google has released a new chrome extension that turns each new blank tab into a masterwork from over the last few hundred years. I immediately installed it and am glad I did! Historically I've never really gotten into fine art but I am finding it really inspiring when something shockingly beautiful pops up unexpectedly!

30 Minute sketches

For a bit I was debating if I would post all of my daily sketches or just the ones I liked most. I think for starters I will post everything as a way to drive myself forward, but I hope they don't turn perspective people away from my work as a whole. I am trying to push myself into different workflows and out of my comfort zone. I've seen some amazing stuff done in 30 minutes and I want to get there!

As always my prompts are coming from Concept Art Sessions. (Who has a TERRIBLE mobile site...)

"Messenger" + "Battlefield"

"Aircraft" + "Research"

"Pistons" + "Delicate"

"Seatbelts" + "Square"

Sketch - "Norse" + "Wagon"

Getting back on the daily sketch horse and will try to get one 30 minute drawing down and out every week day.

This one was hard to start off on because my horse/oxen game is pretty weak - so I knew I didn't want to burn a large part of my 30 minutes on it... 

For the wagon I basically cut a long ship, threw wheels on with a hint of knot work for the spokes and called it a day.

Man that horse sucks hard...

Via Concept Art Sessions - 30 Minutes - Vehicle - Tags: "Norse" "Wagon"

http://conceptartsessions.com/piece/3821/Viking-Convoy

(Derelict) Space Fighter

I am wrapping this one up and calling it done! Over the past few weeks I've been exploring this type of ship design - and you can catch up with the thumbs and progress sketches by checking out my previous blog posts.

While I started off drawing an agile space 'fighter' I ended up framing this illustration as a recovery or inspection of a derelict ship adrift in space. Hopefully in the further future I will be able to revisit this branch of design and better demonstrate some of its physical characteristics.

WIP GIF

This model carries 12 missiles (one is missing) on its side ready for release and 2 laser cannons. The end of each axis can spin freely around the central trunk and houses a primary thruster in addition to 3 folding and articulated vectoring thrusters. And while we are here making stuff up they can also tear holes in space time for FTL travel... Why not!?

A thanks goes out to the guys who helped me on this, especially Nick who suggested changing the spotlights from being on the astronaut to on the ship behind.

Space Fighter WIP - March 10th 2015

Some more baby steps! I decided to trash the telescope and replaced it with an open airlock to toss in additional narrative.  I might be ready for 'atmosphere', debris, decals and details as I turn the corner for the home stretch in the next day or two!

There will be a lot of color corrections and work done on the mood and tone as well - but I am feeling that out as I go.

Any suggestions and feedback would be appreciated as always!

Sketches - Feb 28th 2015

Wanted to post up some work in progress shots before heading out to GDC this next week. I wish I had another day to finish it up but oh well - See you all in SF!

Needed to break and reset some arms and legs - and didn't have the time to block model out first.

Not at all done but Im starting to play around with the lighting and materials a bit.

Gamers for Good and the KKG Artbook

I wanted to take a moment and drop a stone of thought into my RSS feed on the very excellent art book I recently had the mixed pleasure of donating a piece to.

A long while back my friend Peet queued me into a project his wife Liz and him were working on. A project to help a great friend of many with his fight both emotionally and financially with cancer. I never knew Kevin but over the following months a bit of who he was was bright enough to bounce off of others and still manage to blind me. A coworker of mine who worked at Blizzard years ago in completely different departments echoed what so many were saying - Kevin and his wife Constance were truly wonderful.

Kevin passed away just a few short months before a book compiling fanart from his top 10 favorite games could be completed and bound but not before having seen a test copy. Currently the book which is raising funds for research and charity is chugging away on indiegogo, and is hopefully (but regretfully) the first of many ways that artists around the world can show their support for people they know and love.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gamer-for-life-kkg-fan-art-tribute-book

The 3x5 Artist Challenge - Day 5 (c.2007-2008)

I still like this tank - and include it to this day in some of my portfolios!

My first block model! And using painter?! Anyway, I created this guy with a few cubes and cylinders and felt pretty awesome about myself afterward. Im not sure what prompted me to start walking towards this natural combination - Like I said I worked in 3D and 2D but never put them together. If i had to guess it was probably something I saw on Conceptart.org.

 

Fear my falconer's arm shield!

This "warlord" was done for some sort of computer contest and I was feeling pretty secure on victory until I saw just about every other entry! This also marks my last use of Painter! It's all Photoshop from here baby! I still see this as a weird chimera of ok and suck. I'm most happy about the blood ring on the ground :D

 

This demon dude as alluded to marks my major step forward into Photoshop. This also closes out my 3x5 challenge as the step into the modern age for me. This was the first thing I created on my Cintiq 12wx (A flawed piece of technology but a hundred thousand times better than my Intuos 2!). Beyond this point my art can be found on most of my modern sites.

Thank you very much Kai for getting me to relive some of these old memories and diamonds in the rough! I was unpacking .rar files that hadn't been opened for almost 10 years and realized I had forgotten most of what I had ever created or worked on!

The 3x5 Artist Challenge - Day 4 (c.2006 - 07)

Don't ask about the apparent leopard print party materials on the top. I probably felt that it needed some sort of color... like brown!!!

Starting off we have another "Industrial Design of the Week" entry - and again done in Sketchbook Pro.

 

This was the design I recently grave robbed and redid a few months ago. This is also a great demonstration of my terrible terrible presentation skills.

This gunship marks another somewhat misguided turn taken - The shift towards using Painter! Sometime before this I stumbled into some Ryan Church tutorials where he demonstrated how to do marvelous stuff in Painter. I followed suit without even a scrap of traditional painting knowledge or need and spent over a year using it. It clearly wasn't all bad, and there are still a thing or two I miss, but once I rounded the corner into Photoshop things got way better for me I feel.

 

#killzone4lyfe

And lastly, here's is where I found my personal "lens flare" - the FX Glow tool in Painter. That thing could polish all sorts of turds!

The 3x5 Artist Challenge - Day 3 (c.2005 - 2007)

Moving on to day 3. One thing I hadn't mentioned was that starting around 2004 I also had started working in 3D. I had taught myself how to use Cinema 4D (as it was the only 3D program I could 'find' on the Mac) and while I wasn't yet clever enough to use it for block modeling I did spend a large amount of time and needless polygons on elaborate models of my own work!

The "Troop Transport" also shows a notable turn as I had dropped painting in photoshop and transitioned over to Sketchbook Pro almost exclusively. My favorite part of art was the line work and idea of the piece, and I felt (feel) that Sketchbook Pro did a better job of letting me communicate that. It held my hand and treated me nice at the cost of my rendering. It also is a small window into the Conceptart.org forum threads I was participating in. It took me a long time to muster the courage to post there but once I did, the daily sketch groups and industrial designs of the week were foundational for me.

And lastly "Keep" as I called it was my last graphite rendering ever completed and scanned. It in reality one of the last traditional pieced I ever worked halfway seriously on and so with that my day 3 is capped out!

I edited in the sketch done a year prior for context. This was rendered using the Cinema 4D sketch and toon shader which I was really really proud of figuring out!

This was done along with other countless pictures as part of Conceptart.org's daily and weekly challenges. Something I owe a HUGE amount of my development to.

I find it odd that my creation of complex fight scenes and medieval armor kinda stopped after this picture was completed as well. I still love it, but rarely practice it.

The 3x5 Artist Challenge - Day 2 (c2004-05)

So after yesterday's start, working on mods with great artists Im going to whiplash back to what I did for fun in my freetime. Graphite with a bit of marker. Here are 2 of my better received drawings followed by the ONLY self portrait I have ever made. During this time I still had a tablet, and there are a handful of sketches, but most of my time was spent with a mechanical pencil and kneaded eraser.

Some of the elements added into this picture would find their way into my DNA for the next 10 years. Deviantart loved it and so did I!

I made this over a year - off and on - for an older acquaintances son. As a gift it was trivial to give as the picture existing on the computer was the only thing I cared about. I was just glad to have an excuse to draw Aliens and Predators!

Crushed shell necklace and the Sony behind the head - headphones. A staple of 2005.

The 3x5 Artist Challenge - Day 1 (c.2004)

Thank you Kai Lim for dragging me onto this bandwagon - aka "The 3x5 art challenge" wherein you are to post three art pieces, old or new, for the next five days. With each post I have to nominate an artist to do the same, and for this one I volunteer Tony Ferguson as tribute!

I've seen a few people's takes on it already and feel like walking through my art starting back in 2004 to 2009ish. These were the years where I transitioned from elaborate doodling to finding out what "Concept Art" was and securing a vision.

​I just did some dumpster diving into the archives and am getting those "old folk feels" of wishing I could have changed my cadence back in early high school, but the past is the past and all of that grin emoticon

Back in 2004 I had purchased a huge purple wacom intuos tablet at great cost, somehow knowing that it's what I needed to pull myself up onto the shore and evolve my art. But with nobody around my beach my progression was glacial. At this time I was really into graphite and marker art and whenever I used the tablet I took so many steps back that I scared myself and never pushed on. I still see this as one of my biggest mistakes in life. It was 3-4 years before I felt comfortable on digital, and that really sucked.

Anyway, I didn't yet know Kai, but I sure as hell followed him on DeviantArt and around that time he started posting work for Project Hull Breach - a Halflife 2 mod. I had worked on a few UT mods but nothing of note and for whatever reason had the mindset to create a "breaching craft" - almost as fan art but with the hidden hope that it would draw his attention. It did, and for some profoundly mysterious reason he shanghi'd me onto the team where I proceeded to provide 4th grade level work in pencil, hurriedly scanned in and uploaded to the computer. I was easily the worst person on the team, but easily made the most important friendships and jumps as well, not only with Kai but with Samuel Aaron Whitehead as well!

Included are some images of the "virii breaching craft" - created as a way to board hostile ships. Im still pretty proud of stealing nature's oldest payload system and making it out of metal. The first image actually used photoshop to color it in, and includes all sorts of crazy crap - like distances and angles?!?!? What was I thinking?... I'm kinda glad I don't know to be honest. (As a side note I did almost all of my concepts in orthographic projection using a ruler and triangle for some god forsaken reason until Kai grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me violently!)

The "Virus" Craft - with some needless and laughable annotations!

BONUS - Extra blog art!

A "Covert Recon Bot" for Hull Breach. The only other contribution I was/am proud of.

This was my state of the art beyond mods. Pencil work with micron pen over the top!