Here’s the rest of that assignment - with the Wendigo/Fantasy-Creature-Hunter-for-hire by the HBC John Rae. As far as a game concept goes, i thought id make it interesting in that he would sport a flintlock-shotgun with a side-attachment flintlock incendiary grenade launcher. Now that’s a gun.
Its surprisingly tough to make a guy with mutton chops look bad ass and not look like he’s just a heavily armed drunk stumbling out of a bar. His process was a bit tough as i was working less with a silhouette in the final and had to find a balance between making him appeal to a modern audience while retaining a look reminiscent to his era. Some ranged from him becoming ‘too’ cool to looking ‘too’ old fashioned and I found a nice even ground between the two in the end. Tried to focus on cleaning up line quality for the pencil ones so things communicate easier.

Process work.


John Rae - Front Side Back view.


John Franklin - Front Side Back view.


In another class we’re working on some children’s book stories. For one of them I’m teaming up with Andrew to do a proposal for ‘Simon Boy Wizard and the Cave of the Lobster Dragon’. First part of course is to create the characters to which I’m trying a different style for. Here’s something a little similar to stretched out Psychonauts characters. He’s supposed to be a total self absorbed coming of age prick who’s been kicked out of magic school and has set out on the road to prove himself as able to solve problems that confront him not with his utter lack of magic skills but his whit instead. Here’s a little sneak preview

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First Assignment of the new year is a redesign of 2 historic characters. We’re given to opportunity to twist history a little bit in order to make the characters apply to a video game setting. Here we have John Franklin, famed arctic explorer who ended up getting stuck in the ice with his crew and forced to resort to cannibalism before dying of starvation regardless. Changing it up a bit, I have Franklin as the only survivor of his crew after he feeds on his companions, transforming him into a powerful Wendigo. Of course, we need a nemesis and that will be John Rae, who originally found Franklin’s remains - this time though, Rae has been tasked with seeking out and destroying the explorer a la Vanhellsing - but less lame. I’ve only got Franklin done at the moment but this will be one of those front, side back deals so stay tunned. I’ll also be posting the process on this one, something I’m going to start doing more often here.

I started off thinking of Franklin in a ragity, torn up captains outfit which slowly evolved into a multi-layered-arctic-homeless-man look. Finding that there was just a little bit too much visual noise, i tried two variations of silhouetted figures which would stand out more clearly on an arctic landscape. I’ve always loved the idea that transformation into the Wendigo was a disfiguring one and that out of desperation the victim would try and conceal it, hence the bandages and handkerchief. Sort of like a bizarre attempt to maintain their humanity even though its obvious the victim has totally lost his mind.


Final colored rendering.

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Decided to go about the arduous process of updating the look of my portfolio page tonight. So a more refined feel, my email is actually listed now, a bunch of old stuff has been removed and the Baron piece added. Small changes will be getting made here and there but this should be just about permanent now. Get ready for the influx.

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Time to get my ‘A’ game on. Last semester to pump out work to a quality that will put all my previous work to shame. I’ll be posting alot more character stuff as the next 4 months go on.

We had to do a WW1 themed blog entry for my character classes blog. This was heavily influenced by the work found in Mignola’s ‘Baltimore’ in which he does lots of spot illustrations. Really quick - done with brushpen and photoshop in about 30 minutes.

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