Perseus and Medusa - first stages

I remember watching Clash of the Titans as a kid, and the scene in which Perseus fights Medusa, featuring brilliant stop motion animation by special effects legend Ray Harryhausen, scared the piss out of me. But I've always been fascinated by these characters, particularly Medusa, turned into a hideous monster for the crime of being a rape victim. Oh, you silly Greeks.

I took some reference shots and posed some models in Daz 3D to get them just so, and I was fairly happy with the characters. My first pass at the background, however, was not so great. The vertical columns are way too static and straight in contrast to the diagonal, flowing foreground action. With some great suggestions from my illustration colleagues I ditched this background and attempted a new, more dynamic composition.

The problem is that working with biologists and engineers for so long has the left-brained science nerd inside me yelling "No, no, no; Greek stone columns weren't designed to sustain an off-vertical angle; they would collapse under their own weight with unbuttressed support." So my right-brained artist is going "Shut up, science nerd. I just drew a woman with living snake hair; I don't need an engineering lesson. Give me your lunch money."

The new background silhouette, sketched digitally, turned out way better. I'm going to print this, break out the tracing paper, and pencil in some ruins.

Sketchbook: Woman at coffee shop

I stopped at Dutch Oven Bakery this morning on the way to work and was going to work on some concept sketches for a game project. I decided to get warmed up by drawing people. This lady was sitting by the window having a conversation with her friend. She was lit from behind by this great natural light that cast some brilliant rim highlights on her hair and face.

Steampunk Jungle Explorers - Finished

I'm really happy with the way this one came out. The middle ground foliage was a bit difficult, but I didn't sweat it too much or else it might distract from the characters and background. I really think it's one of my best pieces ever. I really like this traditional pencil/digital color approach. But I think I might try the next piece in Corel Painter. Just downloaded the demo yesterday.

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.