The Giants are BACK!!

Not only did we get to see giants again in episode 8 of season 5 of Game of Thrones but we finally get to see the army of the dead hit Hardhome very hard.  Great episode.  I did this pen and marker sketch earlier today.

I did some fun sci-fi sketches the other day.  I don't get to do a lot of this kind of thing with my regular clients so this was a nice way to stretch those muscles.

I need to do more of these in my down time.  It was really fun to do.  

BIGFOOT concept art

This is a bigfoot concept piece based off of the Silvanic juvenile bigfoot video.  I did this after seeing the Survivorman: Bigfoot special.  What I find kind of interesting is that it has two pronounced nasal passages much like baboons and other apes have.  Anyway..  This was whipped together pretty quick just for fun and practice.  Cheers.

Every Neighborhood Needs a Great Local Park

I keep driving past this empty lot of land in my town and thought how badly the area could use a good park.  So for fun I sat down and tried designing a place I think most communities would love to have down the street.  I included an cultural and performing arts center, a open-air public theater and (my favorite) a rock climbing area with different intensity climbing surfaces.  Cheers! 

ATLANTIS map

While working on jobs I like to have documentaries and stuff playing on my second monitor.  After watching a couple of documentaries on the lost continent of Atlantis, I heard enough historical/ancient descriptions of it that I thought I had enough to draw up a cool looking island landscape that is accurate to the accounts.  It one of those drawing that I just had to get out of my system.  Here are a couple of sketches, one is the basic rough sketch and the other is more cleaned up with some color.  This arial island illustration/map is still a work in progress and I look forward to finishing it up sometime soon.

Helping out on some Game Art R&D

A good friend of mine is working on some development work for a futuristic vehicle design.  He sent me some work in progress and here are a few idea I had for the design.  It's very rough but they're just to get the idea across.

Old advertising sketch

I was throwing out old magazines the other day when I found this little gem folded inside one of them.  I did this back when I worked for an advertising agency.  It's a rough sketch I did for a website dealing with new moms or something.  I would do sketches like this all day long, they'd get scanned in and compiled and used to build mock ups for new websites.  Once a rough sketch was approved I would flesh out and clean up the drawing, throw some values or color on them and that would get presented to the client for approval.

Monkey Trouble!! - App Game Art

Here is a menu board for an app game.  It's a vector illustration done in the Japanese chibi style of a game mascot and it's in a jungle theme. 

Pen and marker house sketches

 

Here are some architectural sketches.  Up at the top is a concept for a rapid response ranger station, it's perched up on the side of a mountain road.  I'm continuously surprised at how structures are built on the sides of hills and mountains.  The middle sketch is of what I call The Amazon House.  It's a house right out on the water, built on posts.  The third one down is an idea I had for a sturdy small house for creating new towns for fleeing refugees in Africa.  It's primarily build out of cinder blocks and concrete.  The idea was to keep them cheap and at the same time built tough enough to handle the tough weather.

It's great to just explore and expand upon some ideas on paper. 

"Get your a$$ to Mars!" ...from my sketchbook

I was talking with a friend one day a while back about what we would need to successfully terraform Mars for human habitation.  We arrived at needing specially engineered space workers who can survive the trip and the conditions of the planet long term, who can arrive first and build the infrastructure and living/working accommodations for eventual human habitation.  Here is a sketch of that Mars worker in their work suit.  Basically they're small and strong and need less water, food and air.

This is an idea for a one way transport ship.  It's basically a large ship carrying supplies and initial personnel,  It's composed of several transport cylinders that can be broken down and used for housing and raw materials.

I thought it would be a good idea to build the large human cities up inside the cliffs on Mars.  They would be self sustaining multilevel cities connected by large bridges.  That would keep any wind damage to a minimum from Martian sand storms.  I can't wait for the first space high school football game... GO! MARS HIGH SOUTH!!  BEAT MARS NORTH!!!  Only 300 years from now.. Can't wait. 

Zombie movie Animatic

The production of the zombie movie I storyboarded created this animatic of my boards.  It came out pretty great.  I wanted to post this up for you guys to check out.  Enjoy.

ZOMBIES!!! ...are really fun.

I finally got to work on a zombie movie.  It's been one of those bucket list projects for a little while now.  This is a indi-film project that will (fingers crossed) go into production in a few months.  This is the opening shot of the film where deep in the woods we find a zombie just before he crosses paths with girl who's job it is to kill every zombie she finds.  The problem here is... these zombies can still talk and act very human...  that will make it harder to see them as just mindless monsters.

College Commercial storyboards

(These are all going to have voice over that coincides with what's going on, on screen.)

 Continuous shot

 Continuous shot

 Continuous shot

 Lens flare transition

 Continuous shot

End.

 Continuous shot

Screen wipe transition (guy in foreground serving as wipe transition element)

 Cut (to close up)

End.



Things have a funny way of coming back again.  A commercial director got in touch with me and was looking for some art for his next project.  After talking with him some more and asking a few questions, it turns out the project was a series of commercials for one of the local City Colleges.  This brought a big smile to my face as it just so happened to be the college I attended for a while way back when.  The director would explain to me the various places he intended to school and I just kept answering, "Yeah, that's a nice spot."

The idea behind the commercials was to visualize a student's educational dream coming to fruition.  The first one is of a girl wanting to be an architect.  The director envisioned a almost continuous shot of the student in question, showing how education made a positive difference in their lives.  The second one in this post is of a girl not having many friends due to her difficulty with the English language.  She studies hard, learns English and is better able to make lots of friends.  I liked how the school/director is showing how the school is there to help meet both educational and personal goals.  I did a total of 7 or 8 of these individual stories.

The director was great to work with and I had a blast working on it and feeling like I was helping the place that once helped me.  Cheers.

Painting Castles

It's been a little while since I've painted and I just got the urge the other day.  I was going for a fancy Viking hall with a tower attached.  I forgot how great it feels to paint, even if it's digitally.  Cheers.

Movie Trailer for an Indy film

I did the storyboards for this independent movie a couple of years ago.  It's been making the rounds at the film festivals.  It's a dark comedy that was heavily influenced by the old Looney Tunes cartoons.  I found the trailer for it online a few months back.  Enjoy.

Finding Bigfoot Concepts... for fun.

So I was having a little Finding Bigfoot marathon and kept seeing opportunities for them to kick things up to the next level and hopefully actually bring something in to help prove the creature exists.  So I came up with some helpful tools that would help maximize their efforts.

The only things that are I think are missing is a trailer pulling a couple of electric motor ATV's.  That will let them quickly get to where the cams say the the creature is, and the reason for going electric is they're more quiet that gas engines and they're torque'ier than gas motors for having to drag out a 800 pound sedated bigfoot.

That's always the thing I think about when ever people ask eyewitnesses why they don't just shoot at and try to kill a bigfoot when they see it and bring back the body as evidence.  Those things are said to be way heavier that a full grown man.  Try dragging one of those out of the woods on your own.  Or... what if the one you shot is not the only one in the area and you just royally pissed them off.  Bad news.  The idea is to discover and learn, not to kill.  That's just bad karma.  Enjoy.

Animation Storyboards

I did these as a board test for a new animated show.  It's a really funny show.  What I think is pretty cool is you can actually see me getting better and better at the show art style as I go along.  By the time I was done I found myself pretty comfortable with the character model style.  I think that's the biggest hurtle when it comes to animation, getting comfortable with the character model sheets and the general style of the show.  Like all things, it gets easier with practice and mileage.  Cheers.

Start Your Engines!!!

I'm a big gear head.  I love working on cars and driving fast.  These are some T-shirt designs I'm doing for a new venture of mine.  It should be really fun.  I've worked at a couple of places as a screen printer and that lets me prepare the artwork and design with the whole screen printing process in mind.  I love one color shirts.  Their kinda punk rock and on the other hand it really makes you think and plan a more sophisticated design when you only have one color to work with.  The first design is for the classic AE86 Corolla, the second is for a car I love seeing at the auto shows, the AMC Javelin.  The third design is for an engine I felt deserved it once I heard that Mazda RX8 was going to be the last production car to use the rotary engine.  I really enjoyed doing these.  There will be more to come.

Commericial boards 02

This was a pretty quick storyboard job for what I believe is a new online learning/tutoring site.  I didn't get much info outside of the script.  Great client.  I got done a bit early so seeing I was treated really well by the client I went ahead and dropped some values to the boards to really make them pop.  I like going 110% when I can for great clients.