Have A Bad Ass Christmas!

I was debating whether to put this up in light of recent tragic events. In any case I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas!

- Ho Ho Ho

PS6

 

Photoshop CS6 has some sexy brushes.

 Just before home time this came out of my pen.

Twist of Fate

Hey guys. I know its been a while, but moving to London has seen my productivity dip somewhat. With more freelance work on the horizon too I dont know how much extra work I can get together for you here. But this time round I have a T-shirt design for you to gander. Its for a Threadless contest in the theme of Minecraft. If you like it, please score it here: www.threadless.com/submission/460714/Twist_of_Fate

Vote for your chance to see me jetted off to Disney Land lol.

In other news, I am now on Tumblr. I will use that blog to share not only my own work but also artwork by other artists I admire. If you'd like to see whats on there please follow: benhoart.tumblr.com/

Deep Loot

A commission piece for my friends at Monster and Monster.
This is a promotional artwork for their deep sea diving, treasure hunting adventure game, Deep Loot. You can follow the progress of how the game is developing here, but I will be sure to remind you when it hit the stores.

Lunch Doodle

Inspired by Enrique Fernández.

Insect World

Since I haven't posted much in a while I went digging through some old work and found this on my hard drive. Really old stuff but strangely I dont hate all of it, so I'll drop it here. Looking back at this, I would have brought the characters closer to the camera so the perspective is more extreme. The boy character could have done with a more natural pose rather than that mechanical walk hes doing. But I do like the colours a bit even though there is no focus.

EDIT: Bah! This looks way better as a thumbnail. Once you zoom in, you can see its shit!

Pokemon - Dewchops

This is a Dewchops! Dewchops are notable for the giant bubbles they carry on their back, blown out from a single nostril behind their neck. The bubble balloon it blows is essential to its daily life as it aids them in floating along the lake which would otherwise be tough on their tiny limbs. Though generally docile, take caution when one becomes hungry. It eats so much!

Special thanks to Belinda Leung for the card template and to the Clockwork Ballroom for the topic.

Imagination

For the Clockwork Ballroom. The topic is 'Precious.'
I had a little brainstorm of what I regard as precious in my life, immediately some material stuff came to mind but what I am really grateful for is the little things I take for granted. Like family, friends and all the wonderful internal things, but the subject I wanted to portray for this topic was 'imagination.' I am grateful for the life I have, for being an artist and being able to express myself through a medium I feel a lot of passion for. Our minds are like our very own creative playground where anything goes, we are limited only by our own creativity. All the ideas and creations that inhabit this playground is something I consider to be precious.

Mass Effect Style Alien: Portrait Render

Most of the design problems are solved before this stage so all thats left to do is to give the concept some polishing up. Textures are applied to give an idea of the different surface materials involved and a rimlight is added to pop the design out from the background.

Mass Effect Style Alien: Colour Tests

Continuing from the previous post, I paint further into the chosen drawing, destroying the lines and replacing them with varying tones to add forms that were absent before. This grayscale image would be used as the basis to produce quick colour sketches to generate ideas for a direction. The colours were all done on a 'hard light' blend layer.

At this point I found the frame around the forehead draws too much attention (almost like how you might be drawn to stare at somebody's bold patch) which is why I decided to keep the colouration close to the plate. I think I will take design #4 forward for being the least cliche (which perhaps makes it feel a bit more alien) and also because there is no other Mass Effect alien character with yellow skin.

Massively Effective Alien: Head Designs

A few of my buddies set up a new art blog, The Clockwork Ballroom, where we contribute artwork to a bi-weekly topic. The first theme we are tackling is 'alter ego.' As I have just completed Mass Effect 3 (and going through a bit of a sci-fi binge), I am going to be a complete geek and design myself as a Mass Effect alien!
This here is stage one of the process to a final concept painting. The brief I gave myself for theis design is to create a character that could fit into the Mass Effect universe as a squad member in Sheppard's team. As an ally to the protagonist, I wanted this character to carry clues about his allegiance (with generally soft flowing organic shapes) and the ability for him to pull a variety of expressions for the players to be able to relate to. In each design I try to restrict them to one unique motif. Imagine if you try to cram too many ideas into one design, you'll get creatures with 3 sets of eyes, 2 nose and a mouth on top of it's head, it would just be too many ideas fighting for attention.
Since this is a alter ego of myself in the Mass Effect environment I still need to relate the design back to me somehow. My thought was to give the design a dragon flavour with my alias being Bendragon and all hehe. A potential problem I was cautious of was avoiding falling into the realms of fantasy creatures, you can decide for yourself if it stays in science fiction. The design set #3 all originated from the same drawing. I chose this drawing as it was the best fit for my criteria, and then produced a few more variations following the same philosophy. I will take 3b to the next round so stay tuned for more!

Epic Mickey 2

Hello folks! Its been a long time coming and a lot of fans of the first game probably suspected this was in the pipeline and it was just announced the other day so I guess I can let you all in the secret. I have been working on Epic Mickey 2! Im very excited for it to come out and wish I can talk more about it and my involvement but Im probably not allowed to just yet.
However I do want to say I loved working on it. I got to watch Disney cartoons for 'research' after all... during working hours! Like many people Im sure, I was a big fan of Disney cartoons as a kid, always shouting for "Disney Wuuuuuurld!!!" whenever my parents asked for my idea for our next family holiday. Even into highschool I still had a secret fondness for the little mouse even when at that age it would probably be considered uncool. When I went to animation school and surrounded myself in the medium I was right back to loving Disney animation again and I feel like I've come full circle now working on a Mickey Mouse project. Sometimes I wonder how the younger me would react if he heard about this.

Process shots: Wolves

As requested, here be a little run through how I made the wolf painting. As some of you might have noticed, I used some custom shapes to build this. Custom shapes is a tool that Sparth pioneered after he saw the potentials of his experimentation. It works similar to custom brushes but it allows you to manipulate the shapes differently (quickly stretching and squashing them). Without going into too much of an explanation of what custom shapes is (I learned it all from just Googling the words anyway), I shall continue with the process.

Firstly, I use the custom shapes to make masks for different elements like the trees, rocks and bits of ground texture. Each are on their own layer for ease of use later. It is helpful to plan ahead, I already had an idea of the composition and layers I would work in which lets me lay down the masks a bit more deliberately.

With all the masks established I paint on one layer underneath it all for the areas that aren't masked off. The painting is pretty loose but the details are preserved by the masks.

Now I can paint freely within each masked areas without worrying about ruining the edges which gives me enough confidence to make broader mark makings. There were some colour dodge layers involved to add lighter tones that also gives some saturated hues.

At this point I flatten the image down and from here onwards all I am doing is paint with a simple round brush. Custom shapes is a tool and not necessarily an end in itself. Some paintings fail in my opinion because they let it be all about the dominant painting method employed. These are paintings when we can clearly see they are fancy custom brushes or custom shapes or even filters but left as it is without editing done to it.

In this painting I went back to retouch some of the edges that were made too sharp from the masks and generally try to disguise the tricks I used. The plan is for the viewers to be concerned with the scene first and maybe after closer inspection they may notice the technique.

The wolves were painted with references as I always do when Im not sure about something ... which is nearly all the time. One last quick tip to throw in about referencing: reference it, dont copy it.

Wolf Pack

The hunt is one ;)

Mutant

Here is a piece that I created from a photo plate.

It was very tempting to not do any art since the Mass Effect 3 disc has been loaded into my PS3 but I told myself I would be disciplined and continue to create more artwork hehe.

Add Colour

Renderman

Today's character painting. I will go ahead and colour it up too.

Drawn 2 Life

A couple of old vector art I found lying around in my computer.

Oxford Sketch Crawl

Recently I went to a sketch trip to Oxford with some of my buddies. I was armed with a new SLR camera that I got for Christmas (or to be precise, I stole from my parents mwahahaha). But I didn't really know how to use a SLR camera until someone later that day explained the basics of aperture and shutter speed to me and how to alter it on my camera. He also borrowed me a photography book too so this could be the start of a new hobby perhaps?!?

Fiddling with my new toy meant I didnt spend much time drawing but when I finally did I was shocked with how out of shape I am in this practice. However I returned the day after to try again. It makes for a good hang over cure! Surprisingly I found myself drawing better than when I was sober. This is all the excuse I need to get madly drunk *raises pint glass* "CHEERS!"

Seekers

Forest Mother

Something in a cutout style. The process was actually quite similar, I mashed together some old paintings to create a texture. This was then just cut and pasted together to create the foliage and then I saw a figure in the chaos and this is where I took it.

Happy New Year

Hello blog people! Its a new year and Im excited with what the future holds xD So lets kick things off with a painting. As you might have noticed with my recent posts, I have been in an environment mood. I have found that science fiction is a subject that is a little lacking in my folio so I will be looking to address that. Its a continuous effort to better ourselves!!!!!!