Boy & Dog

Finally finished these guys up. You can check them out in more detail here

 They both turned out pretty good. This is also the first time I've gotten Marmoset Toolbag to work out well for the final render. I plan on using it for the final shots of all my stuff from now on. The biggest problem I had with Marmoset in the past, I've found, is I've always forgotten to export my .obj meshes "with" their normals. Because of that, the models always showed up with unsightly seams that I couldn't get rid of. All I had to do was remember to check "normals" in the exporter and BAM, the models come in looking great!
Toolbag did crash numerous times however while trying to apply materials and stuff, but that's probably due to the size of materials I was using for this character (2048). I probably could have scaled those down to much smaller and it would have looked just as good.
Also! When working with Marmoset Toolbag, remember to flip your Green channel on your normal map. I learned that from working in Unity 3D and it's the same in Marmoset, so I'm assuming a lot of engines need that done as well. It's kind of a pain though because 3DS Max doesn't need the normals flipped so I basically have to created two separate maps.
This project is also the first time I've made one of those cool little turn table environment platforms for a character! I think it turned out alright. Making dead dandelions is hard though. They could have turned out better, but overall, I think it adds to the piece nicely! I plan on making one of these for all of my characters in the future.

And so starts the month of June! My goal of making a character a month is going pretty well, to my surprise. The boy and the dog took about a month (started on April 20th). The next project is the leather suited, spy girl! I mentioned in my last post that I'm planning to add some more armor type pieces to her suit. Here's some roughs I did the other day:

Dog face

 It's been about a month since I started my venture towards a new demo reel. The boy character is pretty much done and the dog is coming along nicely. I'm trying to make the dog a little cartoony to match the boy, but he's coming off a little goofy looking at the moment. I've been tweaking his proportions for a few days now, but I've decided to move forward and see how he looks after I get some textures going. Next stop though is unwrapping!!  I plan to have the dog done by this weekend and hopefully get both of these characters rigged by next week. The 3 day weekend this week will definitely come in handy!!

Next month will start a new character. Originally it was going to be the Green Ranger, but I have since switched up the roster and this girl will be next in line:

My portfolio is in dire need of some sex appeal, however I've feeling her to be a bit bland as is. I was digging Scarlett Johansson's hair in the newest Avengers movie, so I'm planning on having this character adopt that style of hair. I'm also thinking of adding some large shoulder armor and other ridiculous things to make her silhouette more extreme. On the other hand, I could just bulk up her legs with more  stuff and keep her top half slender. More concepts will be needed for sure.

Cinco de MAYo

New demo reel is in the works. My gun from before will be a part (a prop for another character) but right now I'm finishing up this character:

He will be part of a 2 character set which will also include a dog (my first quadriped....) so I'm hoping that will work out well. My focus with these two is mostly animation. I want to have some nice facial expressions and fluid movement. This being my first venture into quadriped animation however, I'm not exactly sure how it's going to turn out.

All of my other projects have been side-lined for a bit. I realized a new demo reel is top priority since my current one is at least two years old.

New Stuff

It's been a month. It was snowing 2 days ago and now it's 80 degrees.

I've been working on a comic a lot recently. I've been drawing comic books since I was in elementary school. I drew a lot of books in middle school and they got passed around my school getting generally good reviews. Once I got to high school I stopped. They are a lot of work and I was focusing more on traditional art. College was all 3D modeling and stuff. But I've been thinking about doing another comic for a while now. All of the planning has been building up and I finally found myself in a position where I can start roughing out the book. Here's a sample:
It's basically a super hero story (because that's what comics are suppose to be, right?). It's meant to be a comedy book, but the backstories are kind of dark so I'm not sure how it will turn out. My main inspirations for this are Watchmen and KickAss as well as some Scott Pilgrim. I'm hoping it doesn't turn out too cliche.

ALSO, the videogame project I've been working on with a couple fellow designers has hit a bump in the road. We've been coasting for a while and when we realized we've been planning our game for almost an entire year, we quit. LOL. Not really though. We are just taking a step back on that idea and focusing on something new in order to get our blood flowing. This new title is kind of a throw back to a game we made when we were in school, only this time we are going to overhaul it and make it badass as hell (and it will actually work!!) Here's the character I'm working on for it:

It's a work in progress of course. We got through the basic design phase of this quick, so we want to power through and try to get it done this year.

God help us all

Featured

My one Adventure Time painting got featured in this compilation article on io9.com!

Here's the link: http://io9.com/5893682/realistic-adventure-time-art-ranges-from-supercute-to-soul+crushing

I'm so pumped! They kept the link to my site at the bottom of it too! lol

FLCL vs AT

So I jumped off the Power Rangers painting for about a week so I could take a break. Here is what I have so far.

I'm still not liking the proportions of his human form. I think his arms might be too short. Idk! I'll figure it out!

What I've been working on instead is some fan art that pits Naota and Canti from FLCL against Finn and Jake from Adventure Time. This took a lot longer than I had expected (about a week) but it's done now and I can move on with some kind of accomplished feeling.

I've got a lot of projects I'm working on or starting to work on. I've got my videogame project (which will remain under wraps for the time being), there's my demo reel which I've decided to scrap all of my previous ideas and think up some all new stuff. It's like a breath of fresh air! I will be using my gun too, so I know I have at least once piece already finished.

I would also like to start to do a web comic. I've had this idea for a while now but there is just never enough time to put it together. I want to draw a comic cover for the first issue just so I can get my feet wet. It's called the Budget League! It's a group of odd super heroes. Kind of cliche, but it will be fun! There's also a web series I want to start with a friend of mine. It's a comedy series following around Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai as he attempts to create the new Smash Brothers game for the WiiU.

How many of this projects will come to fruition? Hell if I know.

Tiger Power

Here is some progress on a painting I've been working on for... too long now. It's just a piece of a larger picture but it is the furthest part to completion.

It's frustrating when I think about it because I feel like I should be able to work faster, but when I sit down and try to make something nice, I spend way too long on it. This is most likely for 2 reasons. 1) I have it in my mind that in order for something to look "nice", it has to be "photo realistic", which... i don't even agree with that but it's something I think. And 2) since I can scale a digital piece up, I feel like I have to paint every little detail in high resolution. A traditional paper drawing isn't able to scale up to the pixel, so it's easier to look at it and say it's done. I guess I just have to train myself to not zoom in.

This leads me to my current venture: finding a style. I need to find a nice, clean style so I can sit down and draw characters and other things in such a way that I won't have to spend forever blending things to try and make them look "realistic". I want to get a more "cartoony" style going. Kind of like western, comic book style. Something that's still line art, but extremely close to true human form. If I can nail that down, I can bust out new drawings all the time.

Then there's the matter of 3D. I still need a new demo reel but I'm in a rut with ideas. There's a few models I have started, but I don't really feel like working on them. All of these ideas that I have, I feel they are good and I don't want them to get thrown to the wayside, but at the same time I don't like them enough to sit down and work on them. I need to just say Fuck It and find something that I can really get ingrained with so that I can finish it. That's how I got my machine gun done.

We'll see. I'll be posting more progress on this Ranger piece as it gets done. Currently I feel I will be working on it until it's done, so maybe in another week. However there's always that chance that I will lost interesting in it (again) and put it back on the back burner.

Gotta love art! :D