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

Steam Crunk

I finished my gun finally! I just got done adding it onto the site: HERE

That above render was rendered out in Marmoset Toolbag, which I finally got to work!! I'm so glad too because it looks really nice. Much better than inside 3Ds Max.

I'm moving on to other projects. I've got a few characters already started that need finishing. Namely the Vampire Bat Boy and the Vumpire which will fill out the more "cartoony" characters in my new reel. I started a model of Awesome Kong a while back and I'd really like to finish that because I want to attempt to use some physics on her hair braids and the leather straps hanging from her waist. We'll see if that actually happens though :D And I am determined to make a character that is depicted as "Steam-Crunk" which is basally like Steam-punk except it's with blinged out, gangster rappers. So, envision Lil Wayne with a steam powered grill! EH!?

I'm also currently working on a top secret game project with a friend. It's going through some changes at the moment but it was originally going to be a 2D, side-scrolling platformer possibly made in Flash. But now we're rethinking and we may attempt to do it all in 3D. Unity might be the ticket if we go that route. Either way, the idea is pretty cool and I think it will be pretty fun if it ever gets made. We're shooting for a free to play release so, that's something to look forward to I guess, but don't get your hopes up LOL

Machine Gun Projection

Here is the progress on my Mini-Beryl. I got the normal and the AO projected and I am currently cleaning those up before starting the texture. It's close to being done!!

The gun is a little over 1800 tris (900 polys)