Astronaut Dude

Toying around with some animation design. Love me some astronaut suits.

Mars Attacks Sketch Cards

Whew!  I just finished doing 100+ Mars Attacks sketchcards for Topps.  I haven't had to produce so much in so little time in a while.  Martians, mutants, damsels in distress, robots, tanks, gore - great stuff to work with.  I learned quite a bit.  Here they are, warts and all.

Some friends of mine also did some sketchcards.  Not sure if they've posted their work yet. Go check em out: Ryan Dening and Jason Chalker

Lego Old Republic Trooper Set

Looks like the Lego Old Republic Trooper set is available! Troopers designed by yours truly, speeder by Arnie Jorgensen.

 

You can get the set from: Lego or Amazon

1984 JCPenney Christmas Catalog

I am such a nostalgia dork.  I finally got my box of old Star Wars toys shipped to me from my folks.  Ah the memories.  As I was going through all the figures and vehicles, I found some pages from the JCPenney 1984 Christmas catalog.  I remember I was in kindergarten and tore out a couple pages and taped them together for more efficient perusing.  I mean who wants to flip past all the clothes and junk each time they need to get a glance at the B-Wing and Castle Grayskull.  I think there must have been more pages but this was all that survived.  There's a more comprehensive scan of the toy section of the catalog over on the Kokomo Toy facebook page.  Enjoy!

Happy Holidays!

Happy holidays everybody!

Elf Schmelf

Here's last year's Christmas card.  Not much going on here.   Just an elf. He's pretty damn happy.  I guess that's something.  This year's card design will likely be equally as lazy if not more.

God of Blades :: The Nameless King

Wrenching this world from the grasp of oblivion, the Nameless King wields phantom blades forged from the legends and heritage of a dying world.

My buddies over at White Whale released their debut game title the other day, GOD OF BLADES for iPad and iPhone. Here's the main character, the Nameless King. Go buy it!  

Sheila the Thief Redesign :: Dungeons and Dragons Cartoon

Fear not Ranger, Barbarian, Magician, Thief, Cavalier and Acrobat. That was Venger, the force of evil. I am Dungeon Master, your guide in the world of Dungeons and Dragons!

Man, I loved the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon as a kid. I crushed particularly hard on Sheila the Thief. Thought I'd try my hand at redesigning her. It's not too much of a departure, but I love so much of the original. Those boots are killer!

Ye Olde Republic

For over a thousand generations, the Jedi knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the old republic, before the dark times, before the empire.

Another marketing piece I did for Star Wars: The Old Republic. This one was a lot of fun.

Jurassic Study

I've been trying to get better at digital painting lately. I feel like I'm a much better draftsman than painter. My brain just doesn't work like a lot of the badass speedpainters' do. I always have to map stuff out with a line drawing ahead of time (not terribly speedy). Diving straight in and carving out shapes never works for me. I know I'm still doing a ton of stuff wrong, but here's a study I did of a frame of Jurassic Park 3. It's a nice exercise because I don't have to plan anything out and can just worry about shapes and colors.

Star Wars: The Old Republic Portraits

A while back I did some portraits of characters for the Star Wars: The Old Republic website. I learned a lot doing them. I had varied successes and failures as I blasted through them all. I took a few photos here and there for some very rudimentary pose reference to save time, but most of the time just invented poses. I really wish I'd taken some photos for the sake of lighting reference. Getting those forms to turn and have skin feel stylized but somewhat real was really tough with invented lighting. That said here are some of my favorites.

Bowdaar the Mighty

Darth Jadus

Jewla Nightbringer

Mandalore the Vindicated

Nemro the Hutt

Qyzen Fess

Vette

Elf Girl

Just your standard elf girl.

Critter sketches

I had this idea of doing a whole book of alien creatures a while back. I got a couple pages in and shelved the project. Here are a couple really rough sketches from that. I tried to keep them rooted in the familiar but down a different evolutionary path from earth fauna.

Star Wars: The Old Republic :: :: BT-7 Thunderclap

So, the game I've been working on has finally been unveiled in its entirety to the masses. I had the opportunity a few years ago (wow, it's been years?) to concept the trooper ship for Star Wars: The Old Republic. It was quite a challenge to make something new that felt familiar, was large enough to house a player, and had a radically different silhouette from all the other awesome player ships in the game. Here it is in all its glory, the Rendili Hyperworks BT-7 Thunderclap:

The icing on the cake was finding out that people were already doing custom lego builds of it. Beautiful stuff. I'm blown away.

Unknown awesome legoteer:

Gilkah Balcada:

I should also note that the Thunderclap's interior was designed by the wildly talented Ryan Dening.

Space Opera Dude

A character design for something I'm playing around with in my freetime.

Beast of Burden

Drilling down on the creature from a previous post just to brush up on some creature design and get the cobwebs off my drawing table.

Sketches and Studies

Life Drawing

Haven't been to life drawing a long time. Oh the rustiness. I like how these turned out but there were many many horrid mutant sketches that led up to the following. I really missed the discipline of drawing a model. Here are the fruits of this week. Hopefully I can make this a weekly exercise again.

Dark Path

Kum Automatic Long Point Pencil Sharpener

I know this bad boy has been available for some time and that pencil dorks all over have been snatching these up, but no one told me about it so I thought I'd help spread the word.

For the longest time, I've been looking for a travel friendly pencil sharpener that produced a nice long point like the electric sharpener I have at my desk. I've had to rely on clunky, messy, battery operated sharpeners or this piece of crap:




I hate those stock sharpeners so much that I just carry several pre-sharpened pencils with me or just stick to mechanical pencils when I'm on the go. For years I searched for a long point sharpener at brick and mortar art supply stores with no luck. It finally dawned on me to search online, and BEHOLD I've found the answer: the Kum Automatic Long Point

They're fairly cheap, easy to use, and travel well.

First off, here's the kind of point you get from a stock manual sharpener:



It's fat and won't last very long.

To sharpen a pencil using the long point sharpener, sharpen the pencil in hole 1 to remove the wood from the lead. You wind up with a rod of lead which is useful by itself for loose broad sketching or shading.









Then sharpen the pencil again in hole 2. This refines the lead rod into a desirable long point.




Here we have pencils sharpened with (from left to right): stock, kum long point, and an electric sharpener.



The Kum comes in a smidge shy of being as nice as an electric, but it's astronomically better than your standard manual sharpener.

Some folks complain about the stage 2 sharpener breaking their point off, but I have yet to have this happen. I've used the Kum for about 6 months now without issue.

Enjoy!