Fantasy reference fiesta

Thank goodness for dedicated nerds and their glorious costume galleries.

Skyrim

Honestly, I can't remember the last time I had this much fun with a videogame.

Vacation in Italy

It's been wonderful.

My Lord of the Rings

I hadn't fully mourned the loss of MY Lord of the Rings until now.

Peter Jackson's films were amazing and definitive and I love them, however it wasn't until I tried to read through the books again that I fully understood how definitive they were. Millions of dollars and hundreds of talented artists fleshed out Tolkien's world in a way my imagination never could. As I read I found that every character and location had been replaced by actors, Weta's sculptures, New Zealand's beautiful landscapes. It's all great, but it broke my heart to realize that mine was gone.

This image is one last hurrah. One last artistic foray into my own vision of the story when Middle Earth was the Canadian Rockies I grew up by, the soundtrack was by Loreena Mckennitt and the players were all made up.

It was funny and sad to see that even this attempt to recreate my image of the characters was tinted by the films. Oh well, I'll always have them tucked away on a shelf in my mind.

Assassin

Just a bit of exploration. I've been enjoying these hoods lately.

We are NOT taking the wizard.

Sitting around a camp fire, my friends and I talked about wizards. Wizards, if they were real, would be the worst people. Dabbling in all sorts of grim abominations for dubious ends. They'd be the last people you'd ever hire for a quest, and then only in utter desperation.

MDK

Galactus, Eater of Worlds

A quicky based on a conversation Tom and I had a year ago.

Galactus is a problem. In comics he's fantasic, a giant purple techno-demi-god that stands around vaguely menacing planets. When it comes to translating him into movie form, or even movie-caliber comic form (Ultimate: Galactus) he's been turned into a space-dust-storm and swarm of giant metal bugs respectively.

Tom suggested I read up on his backstory, and it turns out that Galactus is the only living creature to have lived before our universe and survive the big bang.

We may have been a little hopped up on Hellboy, but we started thinking it would be great if Galactus looked alien, ancient, and gargantuan. He could be loosely human shaped, enough that legends of him could have mistaken him for a massive man.

Sister

My sister came by for a visit, and it's her birthday, so she got drew'd.

Sean Beaner

Pirate

Okay, so the Tablet I picked up is the ASUS Eee Slate EP121. I've been loving the mobility. It works like a charm, it's got the blue tooth key board so I don't get slowed down trying to work around all my hotkeys and shortcuts.

For this one, I think there's a spectrum of complexity when it comes studies and I wanted to try something more complex. This is trying to translate reference material into my typical concept art "blueprint" style instead of a quicker traditional painting approach.

studizing

In order to familiarize myself with the new tablet I've been doing some photo-reference work. New medium = time to do some life drawing. Observational drawing forces you to really open up on a new medium, giving you challenges you wouldn't have chosen for yourself.

Anyway, here:

Courtyard

I love the way the light hits our building. It bounces around and creates these fantastic graphic shapes everywhere.

Watching a movie

Picked up a Tablet PC (ASUS 121 something or other) and to break it in I started doing some painting from life. This is a portrait of my wife watching Weird Science for the first time.

Doodles

Some of my latest doodles. Really trying to work on anatomy, foreshortening and action. Concept art can rarely be dynamic so it's easy to lose touch with drawing characters in motion.

Birth of Athena

This started as a figure drawing, but once it became Athena I couldn't help but polish it up a bit.

some practice

trying to get back to the basics

Disneypocalypse

So, here's the weirdest thing I've drawn in a while. My wife and I have been watching some classic Disney movies and it got me thinking about the short-lived gigantic final forms some of the villains take. Maleficent, Jafar and Ursula in particular spend seconds as massively destructive titans. It got me thinking about what would happen if they were able to spend days, even weeks as apocalyptic monsters. Then I started to wonder what would happen if you had to deal with all three at once. You'd probably want to limp away and wait until they finished one another off.

Cheetara

I was never really into Thundercats as a kid and there are dozens of amazing redesigns of these characters. Despite both of these solid reasons, I sketched this up anyway. The only purpose it served was to experiment with some exaggerated anatomy.

Some of the cast of Dragon Age II

Big Version

From left to right:
Varric, Cassandra, Anders, Aveline, Sebastian, Fenris, Bethany (with her early short blond hair), Merrill, Isabela and Flemeth.
This isn't the full cast, just a selection of characters I was involved in concepting. Thankfully, at Bioware the spirit of collaboration is a cultural norm. It can often be tricky to tell where one artist's work ends and another begins. I wanted to call out the Dragon Age II concept art team, a group of incredibly talented bastards:
Ben Huen
Casper Konefal
Ville Kinnunen
Steve Klit
Ramil Sunga
Nick Thornborrow
Also awesome but no longer at Bioware:
Joy Ang
Sung Kim

Medusa

My brother's friend suggested we "draw Medusa as the protagonist"

Why?

If you have a moment, i'm curious to hear your opinion.

Why do you make art? Why do you CONTINUE to make art? What keeps you going?