Steampunk Explorers: Beginning WIPs

Here’s the initial pencil work, value study and color splash work for a new personal illustration. The idea started as an environment concept involving a skull cave entrance in a jungle, but I thought it would be fun to add some characters and a potential story. The pencils were done in three parts (hunter, scholar, and cave entrance/third guy) and scanned at high resolution.

With the pencil layer blending mode set to Multiply, I started laying in grayscale values. It took a while to achieve the look I wanted, and there were a few false starts with the temple architecture. I decided on a more organic Maya/Aztec style. It still needs plenty of refinement.

I added a color layer set to Overlay at 65% opacity to establish overall color tone. The whole thing is pretty close to what I want, so as soon as I finish some of the temple refinements I’ll merge the color and value layers, keeping the pencil art separate for now. I’ll of course have to add all sorts of jungle vegetation, leaves, snakes, etc.

Landscape Sketch: The Road

The weather is still cold and lousy, so I don't want to sit outside and sketch. This is a two-hour landscape/value study using a screenshot from the post-apocalyptic movie The Road as a reference. I'm a big fan of John Hillcoat's style involving raw, gritty environments and characters. This movie contains a lot of scenes of industrial decay and abandonment that stay with you for a while afterwards.

Iowa State University Pixel Town: Agronomy Hall

It's back! I decided for a change of pace I'd get back into my ISU pixel town project. I can see that this is going to be sort of an ongoing project for quite a while, seeing as this is the 7th building in a series of what will probably be 50 buildings, and I've already spent about 93 hours on the entire project. And I haven't even done any vegetation, people, vehicles, animals, etc. But anyway, here's Agronomy hall. Kind of a tough one, with that weird angle on the southwest wing. The greenhouse and glass staircase weren't exactly easy either. One good thing about pixel art is that once you make an object (lamp, trash bin, bike rack) all you need to do is copy/paste it. It's especially handy with all the junk on the roof that you don't think about but is part of the building.

One Hour Speedpaint - EAI Pond

A one-hour digital plein air painting of the frozen pond outside the office and the buildings across the way.

What I Did at Work Today: Hose, Bucket & Spigot

So in our illustration of streaming technology we're using some vector art of a hose filling a bucket drained by a spigot as a metaphor for the idea of a buffer. The spigot is actually from a very old project. I know the perspective doesn't exactly match, but I needed to wrap these graphics up and get to tying everything together.

What I Did at Work Today: Reel-to-Reel Tape Recorder

We needed some more art for a work project involving music streaming technology, so I got the chance to make a nifty reel-to-reel machine to help illustrate old methods of recording. Notice that the volume goes up to 11. I also feel like this would make a great T-shirt.

Environment Concept: Sunset Keep

This is the first of many pieces I want to create for my concept art portfolio. I decided that I have very little (none, really) in the way of environment concept art. This took about 10 hours to do, but I want to get to the point where I can knock out something like this in less than 5. I am determined to get better at doing landscapes and environments, which I would argue is definitely my weak point. I’ll be doing a lot more plein air painting and outdoor sketching. Hard to do in February in Iowa, though. I need a change of scenery big-time.