CyberSnow

I've been working on this illustration on and off since like September. Took a break for several months actually, but started on it again recently.

It began as a figure study from a photo I found on deviantart.

Then I started trying a few different looks for a robot leg. I was super obsessed with game Transistor at the time... still am.

Started working on her skirt, and decided I wanted the challenge of adding a pattern to the petticoat.

I tried hand drawing the pattern but recently I thought of trying to model the frill in Maya and adding the pattern that way with a texture. It will also give me more options if I want to change it for a more difficult pattern. I've just started the modeling of it here.

In other news:

I got 4th in the design contest I posted about last time. Wooh!

And I'm working currently animating another Kreo Joe short, still pretty goofy, but a lot more fight action movement which is a newer challenge to deal with.

Buildings

Most of this summer I was working on location vocab, which is kind of tedious especially since I don't do backgrounds or buildings very often.

Unfortunatly being in my zombie state of not enjoying warm weather while at my desk, I didn't take screen shots or document in progress really.

I just have this in progress screen shot of the movie theater I did. It's actually the Heights Theater in Minneapolis. My housemate works there and was hosting a showing of Galaxy Quest at the time which was a lot of the inspiration and why I remembered to take a screen shot to show him.

I simplified some parts so that I could mirror the architecture. And then the signs and color was done on other layers.

Here is the finished piece. I had to replace the signage with non-words of course. It really is a wonderful little theater.

Sprouts and Vines

More work for Language Sprout. I was asked to to draw vines and sprouts to replace ladders and snakes in their version of the game. I managed to integrate in there characters too.

Experimenting with vines and sprouts here.

 

Here's the final board.

Robots

Here a few  unused/ early concepts for robots I did to illustrate vocab words for Language Sprout. All of these vocabulary words were related to family members.

Mom

This was the first one I did. I decided to go more traditional stereotype with the apron. I ended up putting a lot more shading into it.

Dad

I sort of tried to have style of the robots reflect their age. So Mom and Dad, I tried to lean towards 50s/60s appliances and such. Funny enough I tried to copy the final shaded look of the mom and it looked to muddy for the dad, so he ended up being rather flat in shading.

Aunt

I was watching a lot of Star Trek during this time and I thought it matched the time period. So say hi to Aunt Uhura Communicator Robot. Her colors ended up changing but I am super happy with this and the finished design. The Uncle bot is based on the new movie communicators and Spock aswell.

Step Mom

Her design changed quite a bit to match Step Daughter. I wanted to do more of a career woman but stick with the time period AND make her stand out from the non-step family members.

Grandma

This is one of two grandmas I made. They are suppose to be steampunky. I originally had all the elderly robots be a bit broken but that was changed. There were a ton of color itereations on her. Maybe its the weather but I'm still partial to these, especially the copper orange. Steam pipe gardener, she shares characteristic of Mom.

Grandpa

One of the two grandpas. Most of his changes were making him less broken, which were several. Made him more boxy like Dad. I love his sleepy face and that Penny-farthing bottom got used for both grandpas because they are awesome. I love them.

Other News:
I'm still working for Language Sprout. I finished working on a book for them but I haven't heard where thats at right now. I will totally be posting more info on it when I find out more about when/ where its being published to.

Working on some board game stuff now.

More book work is planned.

And I was not feeling awesome this weekend so I got in some sketch work and did some random painting in photoshop. Hopefully I will remember to post that soon.

I got invited to a masquerade party so planning a costume and mask for that. Gotta do that in the next month and probably will post some pictures of at least my mask making. Maybe I'll use pepakura.

Monster Body Parts

I've been neglecting this blog for a couple months so I'm gonna try to do a bunch of posts the next couple days showing some of the stuff I've been working on.

For the last 3 months or so I've been working for a language teaching program for small children called Language Sprout. I started by illustrating a bunch of vocabulary words for them to use in various ways. The first section of which was body parts and physical descriptions. I did 37. For these vocabulary illustrations they wanted me to work with a theme of monsters. I love horror movies so this was probably my favorite paid thing I've worked on for a while.

Here's some of the reject sketches and art:

Big 

Even before I watched Hannibal I loved the idea of antlers on things. A bit inspired by Where the Wild Things Are

Big

Big had a lot of changes. Its hard to talk about size without comparison.

Small

It looked too much like baby Mr. Krabs.

Butt

Inspired by the devil guy in Cow and Chicken. How can anyone forget that butt?

Back

Too realistic.

Chest

My mind always go to Frankenstein's monster when I think monster.

Cute

Fairly similar to the final. Sheep + bat = Adorable in my opinion. Also bow ties are cool.

 Eyebrows

Eyes

This was the first concept I did. Too scary. Inspired by Digimon.

Eyes

Nose

Got a bit further with this one before it was axed and switched out for something more human. They were all sketched in Photoshop but finished and colored in Abobe Illustrator.

Keep an eye out for some of these vocab illustration appearing on my website soon!

I've done more vocab illustration stuff that I'll probably post more on soon. And I'm just about done illustrating and formatting a book for them.

Besides that I've been re-learning some Unity stuff and doing some basic game programming, so more on that later too.

Pickles Illustrations

Last weekend I had the opportunity to apply for a concept artist position for a television show in developement with MC Lars. Being a big fan of Mr. Raven I already had done an illustration inspired by his work before. I was sort of just freaking out with excitement when I was put into consideration.

Unfortunately it didn't end up working out.  However I did two concepts with the star of the show, named Pickles when I was via-ing for the job. I thought I'd share them. The show is planned to have time travel and learning about history and literature involved. My prompt was simply to have him do something interesting. They seemed pretty pleased with them.

The first image is all Photoshop, the second Illustrator.

In other news:

A quarter of the way through the first animation pass of the Get the Diamonds short! Art sale next week!

Back to animating now.

Glitter Girls is published and for Sale!

Glitter Girls, written by Annika Ledstrom and illustrated by myself is up for sale on Lulu as a paperback.

You can find it here.

Money from the book sales will go to Annika's college fund.

You can see some of my in progress work on Glitter Girls here.

Glitter Girls

Hey, super busy again!

I haven't posted about Glitter Girls yet really, and since I'm a little more than a week from finishing it, I thought I'd quick put a post in.

Glitter Girls is a short kid's novel with 23 line art illustrations ranging from full page to quarter page. I'm also coloring one of the images for the cover and doing all the formatting.

Here are a couple of the original sketches I came up with. Drawn by hand and scanned in.

And here are a couple sketches where you can see my clean up and edits done in Photoshop.

Here's an image of the mock up I made for the book with the sketches. It was to scale.

And right now I'm in the process of inking the illustrations which is taking the bulk of the time I've worked on it.

As for other things:
- I have really regretably had no time to work on Redgirl or the origami fish short. I have just been way too busy.

- I just started work on a short animated fan film I've been commissioned for. It will be a big, long project as far as my work is concerned, with 6 main characters and at least 6 sets.

- I'm also remaking a somewhat bland commercial I've been commissioned to do which involves a lot of After Effects and 3D characters.

- La Jolla's Mermaid is at the start of its last 10 pages of illustrations.

- AND I've been rather unreasonably asked to do all of the remaining effects and clean up for Fang and Talon by the end of the month. Which includes 3 episodes I have(the third being transferred over right now) and 3 episodes I have not seen any part of yet.


YUP. Way too much. But so far besides F&T I'm balancing things okay. And if everything somehow magically works out I should be getting a new hard drive and a blue ray burner, so crossing my fingers. Anywho... back to the grindstone.