New Watercolor Set

I forgot to post these up here. Recently I ditched my feeble watercolor box that has stuck with me for years to bust out a mightier set that boasts more tubs of colour. With my previous set I was getting tired of seeing the same colour mixtures that I manage to squeeze out of the limited ranges. So hopefully I can get a better variety of them this time round. Traditional painting is so much fun and feels like Im interacting with the paint in a way I cant with the digital work. But the full on watercolor painting is trickier than I remember it to be. The ink and wash seen in the first image is a much easier and faster approach. Till the next year!

Samurai

Not going to have time to finish this painting off for this year. To be continued till next year! Cliff hanger end of year post *gasp*

Epic Mickey 2: Boss Arena

This is a few years old concept art for the Epic Mickey 2 game. In fact, all the Epic Mickey 2 art you'll see from me is ancient. Anyway this is a drawing I did over a 3d block out provided by the game designers. The block out told me the structure of the level and I just had to decorate it and 'make things look pretty'.

Dead Guy

Something I've been working on. Just to show you I'm still alive. Unlike the subject of this post.

Dragon Emblems

Dragon Skull

Still alive! Will post more updates later. Been busy busy. Oh and I broke my collarbone a few weeks ago :P

Here Be Monsters

Wallpaper painted for Here Be Monsters.
In other news, animators are pretty good at dancing so it seems. I can attest to that after attending the Amazing World of Gumball wrap party.

ToeJam and Earl

Been going through a nostalgia trip so I painted these characters from one me and my brother's favourite game as kids. We played ToeJam and Earl Panic on Funkotron on the Mega Drive all the way up till the machine wouldn't work! Heck, we used to draw these comics with them and it has been so long ago. I felt like I needed to revisit to my roots.

Being Social

Here are some selection of the art for the social game I am working on right now. The game is called Here Be Monsters and can be found on Facebook.

Metal Gear: Solid Liquid States

More gaming tshirt designs. As you can see this time it is influenced by Metal Gear Solid.

Can be purchased here and here for the black version

Journey On

My buddy Dan Burgess has been doing a lot of great t shirt designs and has talked me into giving it a go myself. Here is Journey tribute design, I was initially unimpressed by the game from the start but 2 hours later I was calling it 'poetry in motion!'

Oh yeah, you can find this t shirt here: Liiiiiiiiiinkkkk!!!
Whilst Im at it here is the link to my store too: Another liiiiiiinnnnkkk!!!

Vitalize Mech Unit 4

Here is the last of the Vitalize mechs. This one was designed to be the communications mech but in the end the decision was made to merge this one with the light mech (Unit 3). Unfortunately I didn't save myself a copy of the model for this one so all you have is this turnaround of the final in-game model, started by men and finished of by Steve Walker.

New Dragon Sketch

More dragon art from last night and this lunchtime. I am trying to sculpt the form in a similar way Norman Rockwell does. It has been huge fun to play with the light and form, knocking values back and forth to pop something else forward. The perspective proved to be a fun challenge also. A lot f us are used to seeing things in one certain angle so when it came to drastically shifting the camera I almost didn't know how to draw! Reflecting on this, I can see some knowledge coming through that I picked up from life drawing classes. Moral of the story is not to underestimate your basic exercises :)

Really Old Crappy Shit!

As the title suggests these are really old artwork I found in the attic of my hard drive. To be honest I am a little embarrassed by them at this point but I thought it would be interesting for some to see. Also, showing embarrassing work is a good way to motivate myself to upload more new work to cleanse this page!

Protect Your Art Career

Stephen Silver talks about working for free/ low pay as an artist. Something to be mindful of especially if you are a recent graduate or still a student. There are people out there trying to take advantage of the inexperienced artists, don't devalue your art.

Vitalize Mech Unit 3

Mech Unit 03 is a lighter and more mobile unit.

Vitalize Mech Unit 2

This is the heavy unit of the mech army. Credit to art director Ian Pestridge for guiding some of the design decisions.

Male Prosthetic Limbs

A few variations of the prosthetics seen in the previous posts, this time catering for the male soldier build. As usual, I included material references for the 3d artists to keep in mind.

Smaug Pre-Film Design

Remember my nightmare Smaug design? Well it got me thinking about what the real Smaug would look like which resulted in this. In the original sketch I had one central horn at the back of his head to keep faithful to the illustration John Howe did for the Hobbit book. However the appeal of a traditional two horned look became too tempting to resist. I also made sure to extend the snout further than I usually draw dragons to keep it to a more old school wrym look.
This drawing was also an opportunity for me to go back to my roots. Back in my high school days I used to draw dragons and such nasties all over my books. It was an activity that earned me a couple of nicknames and where my alias 'Bendragon' originated from.

Female Prosthetic Limbs

Continuing from my previous post. The game did feature some playable amputee characters. These are some renders of the final design we chose for the female characters. I did go through a bunch of thumbnail drawings which we whittled down with the art director. Our goal was to make the designs desirable and cool without sacrificing functionality. The researching stage was very helpful for me to recognise the kind of shapes we have in modern military.

Vitalize Mech Unit 1

Here is a concept of a mech tank I designed nearly a year ago for a game called Vitalize that isn't released publicly as of this point. The enemies in the game were giant walking tanks that could be piloted remotely. I started to design the mechs in SketchUp as it proved more convenient to design such a complex structure in three dimensions. You could design your heart out with a pencil but then find that it doesn't work from another angle so 3D meant I was able to design from all sides simultaneously.
Above you can see the Photoshop paintover. The second image is the final in-game model where my SketchUp sculpt has been taken to the next level with more details and textures by Steve Walker. The rest are all renders of my original model.

Nightmare Smaug WIP #1

This weekend I had a nightmare where I somehow got to watch the second film of The Hobbit. Not something worth having  a nightmare about but when I am so highly anticipating the screen appearance of Smaug the dragon, getting him right is a huge hope for me. It was John Howe's illustration of Smaug that got me to pick up the book all those years ago when I was in primary school. I was terrible at reading but just loved the art enough that there was no other choice during World Book day.
Anyway back to the nightmare. So now you have an idea how much I am looking forward to seeing the beast's design. The film in my head opened up immediately with the dragon flying over the mountainous landscape. It was such a shock cause normally monster movies wouldn't make the big reveal until much later in the second half. Usually monster movies can go down hill from the point we see the feature's creature. So this imaginary version of the Hobbit shot down my anticipation straight away. I was praying that at least we would not see a close up. But this being my nightmare we get just that! A close up of Smaug appears and his design was so off the source material. He looked more like an alien than dragon! I was outraged in a fit of nerdiness! My outburst must have been such that it had waken me a little, enough for me to realize this was a dream. Rage turned to delight as I realized "I could steal this Smaug design!"
So here is the sketch so far from today.

Monsters Ink Yourself

Happy New Year everyone! I hope this year I can start blogging my work more frequently. Life is fast and its hard to catch my breathe since I moved to London. I have been contemplating over my work and where I want to take it in future. Maybe you can see that progress in future :) So with the little introduction over lets get into the meat of what this post is about.

This is a project some of my classmates from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth (AIB) thought up. With the Monsters University film only round the corner we thought we would try our hardest to get into the university. But our applications were all rejected since neither of us classed as 'monsters,' not literally anyway. So our master plan was to create our own monsters alter ego and apply again!
After about half a minute's pondering I decided that it would be best to represent myself as this dragon character. Dragon has been one half of my nickname here you know.