Cursed Village

This was the original sketch, done while in some boring meeting.

Bridge

Castle ruins

Free Sword

All you have to do is pull it out of the stone.

Night version.

Daidoji Chitose

Samurai are always cool. This is one I did a while back for Legend of the 5 Rings.

Barbarian, Fighter, Druid

So I did this sketch of a barbarian with my splattery custom brushes in photoshop.

Then I turned him into a fighter.

And finally, into a druid:

This is something I see a lot of concept artists do where they continually morph a character or pose into several different variations. Looking through my work I'm surprised I haven't done more of this. It's fun, and you can quickly generate a lot of drawings. I love photoshop.

Workshop painting

Haven't painted with oils since January of 2007. It felt good to break out the old paint box and do a figure painting study from life. But I felt quite clumsy and found myself noodling in the worst way.

I documented the steps, I think where I failed was around 3, 4, & 5 (below) - I jumped to the details too soon, before building the foundation of the structure better and capturing more of the "feeling" of the model first.

Crows

I decided to go with the more realistic crows. Hopefully they still have some style to them.

Monkeys!

My wife has been working on this little project called Monkey Island, which was just announced! Her and her team were so dedicated, it was months and months of working until 2 or 3 in the morning and weekends. I'm just blown away by all the amazing work they did.

She was working so much we missed her, my daughter and I are glad to finally get her back...

http://www.lucasarts.com/games/monkeyisland/

Style vs. Stylized

I've been working on this little side project for a while and I reached a critical juncture. I love goth art style in works by Edward Gorey, some Tim Burton, and very few other things. I'm quite particular about it. I love Lenore for example, but not many other comic books in that genre.

This project has a morbid subject (murder), but it is also light hearted. In the way Edward Gorey is quite morbid, but his wit makes it so entertaining. Anyway, the juncture I am at is exactly how stylized am I going to make the art. This was my first pass (okay, more like 21st pass):


Well, my wife made some great observations, particularly about the general flavor of the project and suggested I push the crows to have a little more personality - to be a little less realistic. I agreed and took another pass. Then realized everything else had to be just as stylized - the trees, the character, so on. This was my second attempt:


I definitely like the crows better. I think the design is stronger. I can draw a better character then that and will have to just practice more to get them right. But I'm wondering if this is an improvement, or is it merely different?