Hey Azurites! Some Inspiration for ye!

Hey everyone! Happy Holidays!!!

This is a crazy time of year when family / presents / and stress are on the brain. I hope everyone is doing well.

Something interesting, I recently came across this great interview by this amazing artist who I have been following for a long time on CGHUB named Cryptcrawler (Brad Rigney is his name). This guy is interviewed by Crimson Daggers, who on youtube have a bunch of interview videos and paintovers. It is run by 2 guys who are just hilarious and awesome: Dave Rapoza (who is an amazing amazing painter) and Dan Warren (a good designer).

This interview is all about this guy's career, how he started, and what he does to help himself improve. He has worked for Wizards of the Coast and Bungie and is a hilarious interview-e. It can even be potentialy interesting background noise.. but anyways

TLDR: awesome artist & interview below

his CGhub page:  http://cryptcrawler.cghub.com/images/

and

the Interview:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEU03Q5H5sU

Once again happy Holidays and I would love to hear what you have all been up to / what your plans for 2013 are!

Cheers!

-Kevin
http://kevinjickdesign.blogspot.com/     just updated :D      ^^      >_>   :O

Bad Guy Ships, Round 2

Took Kevin's notes (and from some other friends) and pushed it flatter, blunter, more brute-like.

Bad Guy Ships

Guys, I have done like 500 iterations of this ship and I cannot figure out what a bad guy spaceship should look like!  Needs to hold a crew of 5-10 bad space bandit/pirate type dues.  I am trying to go for "ugly" and mean (it still needs to look cool, but not elegant).  Feedback please!!!

Hey Azurites!!

Hey all, hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!!! this is the perfect time of year to eat way way too much.

So this is a self portrait from my Head & Hands class, part of a 32 self portrait assignment, but this is one of my favorites so far. I know it is not concept art, /cry, but it is what I have been doing recently. I have to sneak in concept work on the side when I am not super busy w/ class work.

But yea, hope everyones been doing well. would love to see what you all have been working on recently. and feel free to rip on this pic, i would love any and all sugestions how to improve this piece / work on for the next ones.

P.S. just showed this to my family, and they all stated bagging on it hahaha. good times.

P.P.S. also, I was thinkin about taking a CDA class next semester so if anyone wanted to coordinate a class that would be coolbuns.

Cheers!
-Kevin

Timeslot Sketches

Time-traveling slot machine.  Some days, it's starships and space cowgirls.  Other days... Well, at least I'm getting paid.

Pressure Poster

Caught up with Kevin today and it was pretty great.  Told him I'd post some art -- this is a poster I created for our new Dungeons and Dragons game, which is a deep sea survival horror.  Here is the original lineart before I ruin it coloring in Photoshop.

Hi all,
I am on an east coast trip at the moment so computer interface time has been at a minimum.  I did want to contribute however.  Because of my computerlessness I have been sticking to the sketch pad and aqua brush pens with 4 gradations (including black) and I must say that I highly recommend them for ease of travel and versatility.  Also wanted to pass along jetpens.com.  You can order your refills for your hitech-c gels of different sizes for way cheaper then at a stationary store.  Also, in early September I was a sponsored artist for the San Luis Obispo chalk painting festival.  It was very hot but I had awesome square-neighbors.  I will be in contact as I can. 
Hope all is well.



Spaceships

Ships on the brain!

Valley of Death

pic i have been working on for the last 4-5 days

worked practically the whole thing flipped the other way, then @ the end I thought it looked better this way..

since im not in class right now, you all are my best critique. bash away ^^

Byzantine era priest

So I looked at a lot of Indian type wedding dresses and byzantine era clothing, came up with this. Felt weird about the color the whole time but just ran with it. would love some suggestions

Fantasy City Final

can't put any more hours into this piece without my head exploding. this is the end result

Titanium Star!

I'm going to be doing a comic book with Victor Gischler (X-Men, Deadpool.  Here is the first promo image!

More info here: http://www.grayhavencomics.com/2012/08/10/grayhaven-presents-phase-two/

Barret Paintover

My friend Jermaine who is a background painter at Nickelodeon painted over my line art for our first assignment (FFVII).  I thought the results were really great and wanted to share them.  His site is http://jermonster.tumblr.com/

My lineart and colors.

Spaceship

Here's my Cowboy Bebop ship.  I'm pretty happy with the shape and form.  I might have gone a little crazy with applied texture rather than drawing in some cutlines.  Most ships in Bebop have animal names (Swordfish, Redtail, Hammerhead) so I tried to give this one a jaguar color scheme.

Fantasy City W.I.P.

piece im working on for my intro to digital painting class, it is still pretty loose. Potentially my final. J-Schier suggested I go into it and detail the crap out of it. I may make it a matte-type painting or something

Bird Dude - Reworked

Reworked my bird guy after suggestions from Carllo. was not able to implement everything he suggested, like a new pose and different armor... but oh well. i wanted the armor to feel more unified

(tentative) art blog

Mentioned this in class today but for the record, my art blog is inkspade.tumblr.com, which is where a lot of my assignments end up (doodles and fanart aren't posted there though).

I may make a blogspot at a later occasion, 'cause that seems to be what all the cool kids are doing, haha.

Mech Concepts

Mechs are hard!!

EDIT: Swimming Mode

Yo all,
Sorry I have been away so long.  Being out of LA has given me a lot of excuses to slack off and have too much fun but I am trying to reign myself in and make some progress.  A friend of mine is putting together a bronze-age/early-man D&D campaign setting and that has given me a lot of ideas to practice digital painting.  all of these are worked off of scanned sketches (like the unfinished portions of the first image) then painted over/manipulated with photoshop.  Going to practice on increasing my color and tonal contrasts in the future.  How are your classes going, guys? 

OMg a samurai

hey all, hope everyones been good.

so yea.. bird samurai. Just finished the line drawing which took forever. gonna render it and add a background, cheers.

World of Warcraft race

My designs are for a rock/crystal race.  They were discovered by the dwarves.  They have high defense ratings, and maybe as you play, they go from being rock/coal to being more stone/diamond.  Players can customize what precious stone they want as skin tone (emerald, ruby, sapphire, etc) I wanted to keep the angles hard and their limbs and weapons weighty.


Males of this race are big hulking boulder dudes!!

Hyrda Final

Harpy WIPs

Catching up on last week's work before I work on a final design. Two out of four ideas:

With the first sketch, I thought about making a creature that was more like a predator than a flying-woman thing—looked at and considered adding elements from vulture anatomy, pterodactyls, etc. Also made it blind and four-legged so the idea is it hunts by smell instead of sight (and on the ground versus from the air), and the wings have a skin webbing on the inside of the elbow joint meant for gliding, not flying.

The second sketch was done with the intent of making a mysterious old woman of a character, except that her face and body would be covered by her wings like a cloak and create an interesting reveal later. Maybe she could be a seer or an oracle or something, like the augurs in Roman religion that watched the movements of birds for signs and omens of future events.

Sooo... yeah. Any advice on what direction(s) I should take...?

I know somebody in the class already designed some harpies, but this is what I wanted to work on last week so I'm sticking to it. I'll post more when I finish the sketches, hopefully later tonight.

Hydra

Hydra Design - the Hydra lives in a swamp and regrows heads so I figured it could be a sort of aquatic plant monster.

Siren WIP

Decided to design the Siren. not sure which direciton i should go in. blerg

Barret Final

Notes?  I probably won't have time to change much, if anything, before class Sunday but the green jacket / green shirt is bugging me a little.  I worry his actual outfit is kind of boring, but also worry that doing too much to it will make the overall character too busy.  Might just noodle with some textures / splatter brushes to rough up what's there a little more.

Yuffie final brainstorm

Starting almost from the ground up with Yuffie for the homework this week. Thought a little more about what Carlo said on thinking about the purpose of the character and so this is the rough direction I'm taking. Left a blindfold on the fullbody version like in his critique to see what it would look like.

So yeah, I don't know if this rough is a start in the right direction or just a horrible flop. Thoughts?


EDIT 2: Took your advice in my second clean-up, Sam. Thanks for the pointers! Looking at those Dr. Doom drawings definitely helped with the hood piece.

For some reason the lines in my last clean-up were all blurry and crappy, so I went back and sharpened those up as well as added some detail (hood clasp, ripped scarf pieces, etc). Gonna do coloring later since I have to be up early tomorrow, ugh. I'm thinking about either a dominant red or dark-blue color scheme for her.

Barret Redesign

This is my first post from Japan. It's a rough redesign of Barret. As you can see it is largely inspired by Sam's ;) Still need to work on his costume and weaponry since it's still pretty much vanilla at this point.

Vincent Valentine

My week 1 HW for Char Design 2

Totally sketchy, not finished at all.

Tifa Redesign 2

2nd Tifa redesign! Still needs some cleanup but mostly done.

Yuffie redesign v3

... giant hairdryer.

I'm still liking the first design the best, but maybe that's just me getting all attached to my first attempt or something silly like that.

Barret Redesigns

Tifa Redesign

preliminary Tifa redesign (haven't figured out exactly what's going on with that glove of hers) with some color slapped on... any thoughts?

Yuffie redesign v2

The second line art sketch for Yuffie.

I don't really like this one as much as the first... I feel like it's still lacking. I spent a little more time developing her props rather than her outfit here.

Yuffie redesign v1

Finished line sketch of my first Yuffie redesign!

I think I like it, but I'm also afraid I might be starting to get into the too busy/too much detail realm of steampunk fashion... thoughts?

Yuffie redesign (costume ideas)

Wow look I'm making a post, you guys! ... at 2AM.

I know I sent the torso pieces out in an email earlier today, but this is what I have posted on the Character Design 2 blog right now. I was working on an eyepiece idea and some practice poses, so I threw those in. Gonna start on actual full-body sketches tomorrow.

Also, thanks for the feedback! I am happy to say that I am NOT adopting AJ's 16-hour work day—I value my sleep too much for that. And yes, I was a little worried that steampunk would be detailed, but I've got a handful of nice references that don't seem to be too intimidating... I wanted to really push myself and do something fun and interesting, and so far I've had a blast researching and working on this project.

And (taking a leaf out of Sam's book) this is what I'm working with:

Barret Redesign

Barret Wallace redesign (in progress!)

Original for comparison....