Since I’m in the process of re-evaluating my portfolio I’m going back in and redesigning a few characters from the past year. This will be the start of Wendigo-John-Franklin. The original design was pretty tame and was pretty hard to read so im redoing all the linework and placing him in a more menacing/creepy pose. Still a bunch of word to be done on him though he should be done in the next day or so.

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What can I say, I have a bit of free time these days. Here’s another pass at some more silhouettes and some quick speed painting tests for a commission involving birth trees (whoops no birch trees in that first one oh well.) First one is from reference the rest are not.

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Well its almost been a month since my last update and alot of stuff has happened between then and now! First off I attended the San Diego comicon and got to meet many of my long time heroes: Geof Darrow, James Jean, Kent Williams, Chris Sanders… a really invigorating experience. After that I had less than a week to pack up and move back to BC where I’m currently residing. Over the next while I’ll be redesigning various elements of my portfolio for submission to various companies. In the meantime, PRACTICE.

Random silhouettes for alien space creatures.


Fungus-ey creatures for a new project Andrew and I are working on.


Random face sketches.

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** Scroll to the bottom of this post for video goodness **

The problem with the way most video cameras render an image is that their sensors are terribly small. The average sensor size is 1/3″, a tiny fraction of the size of a full super 35 film frame, or even a 16mm film frame. The image captured is essentially a cutout of the image you would see with a larger sensor, for example:

You have the exact same depth compression and depth of field properties with the large sensor, just a smaller view angle. So a wide angle lens for a traditional format becomes a long lens for consumer/prosumer video… but it still has the geometry and depth of field characteristics of a wide-ass lens. There is a subtle wierdness that comes from this, and many people are able to pick out that material shot on 1/3″ sensors is video, even when the frame rate and shuttor speed and other properties are brought in line with film, although they may not be able to express why.

There are several companies that produce professionally engineered devices to resolve this problem. The trick is to render the lens’s image on a full sized frame, and then record that frame with the video camera. The frame being recorded by the video camera is 2 dimensional, so the depth of field and geometry characteristics of the video camera’s ultra-wide lens will have no effect on it.

All of these devices, however, cost well over $1000. So instead, I mounted an old Minolta SLR camera to a piece of wood. And then I ripped the back off of the Minolta, glued the mirror into the open position, and glued a piece of unmarked ground glass where the film frame would normally be.

I then screwed a macro lens to the front of my Canon HV20 so it could focus on this frame right up close, and then I mounted that to the wood as well.

The horrible masking-taped construction paper is to block out light that isn’t coming from the lens itself… I really should find a way to make it more attractive.

And the end result, although The Beast itself is ugly, is fairly attractive, I think. I had nothing and no one better to shoot, so I’m afraid you’ll have to watch the family dogs fighting.

And here, without further ado, is The Beast in action:

Untitled from Andrew LeBlanc on Vimeo.

My modified main portfolio is now fully up and running. It now includes all pieces found in my physical portfolio and along with some new ones I’ve been working on recently. Light Box integration is now complete and makes it so much easier to update the beast.

I’m pretty sure this one is a wrap. I could go back in and touch up a few more things but… I’ll call it done. This is going to be the first piece to kick off my new portfolio which I’m planning to work on over the month of August. I’ll see if I have time to finish one more concept piece before heading down for comicon in about a week and a half.

Also comments are now back online for everyone to leave at their pleasure with a new and improved anti-spam features installed – thanks Steve.

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Well School is all done and I’ve started a few side projects to keep me busy until I land something. Here’s a little something i whipped up playing with the new cintiq….

UPDATE (June 30)
Ok, so I’m not happy yet on this one so I’m going to make it an in progress piece and post the process here. We’ll start with this one:

After some feedback i dropped out some of the larger, unnecessary chunks of detail and simplified large portions of the creature. I’m still not totally happy with whats going on with the back decorative pieces so those may change. I’ll post an update on this one soon.


I’ve started breaking up parts of the creatures exoskeleton and beefing up the legs. The vestigial wings have been temporarily/permanently removed for now.

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I have the kind of body type where everyone assumes that I’ve lost weight.

I don’t know what this means.

Let’s say, for example, that I haven’t changed my net mass in approximately six months. Let’s say I last saw you five months ago. Let’s say I saw you today. You’ll say, statistically proven, without fail, “Holy shit, you’ve lost weight!”.

I haven’t been able to figure this out. I am able to predict it, clockwork precise. Why? How does this happen?

I need to keep my jelly in check. I am aware of my own jelly. I am aware of the jelly reduction that common sense demands.

But anyone I haven’t seen since at least February: “You’ve already reduced your jelly! You are a jelly reducing machine!”

But there is no jelly reduction. I weigh the exact same. There is something about my body type.

I posess some kind of nostalgia fatness. Some kind of fatness where people remember me fatter than I really am. Such that, even if I’m still kind of fat, people are all like, “Holy shit, you’ve lost weight.” It’s wierd.

Wierd science.

It’s kind of… demotivating.

Well, here’s the explanation for me being MIA the past month and a half. This is the final split between 3 classes and was done with the aid of several Bioware employees offering crits. The proposal was for a game that would allow you to fly around in giant zeppelins and hunt `Skywhales` for their magical blubber, specifically a moby dick esque one that has recently killed your father. This would eventually lead to your facing off against the REAL villain who’s an insane Greenpeace nut who’s been manipulating the whales to become more aggressive. Enjoy.

The Greenpeace villain Charlotte, who`s become infected with the genetic modification material that the Crabmen (yes from the previous project) used to modify the worlds` jellyfish creatures. So she`s slowly becoming a jellyfish-human hybrid while totally losing her mind.



This is Charlotte fully mutated into her final monster form and one of the crab man militia.



The jellyfish that fly around, land on ships and stomp on dudes in order to ingest them.



A Skywhale with ship size comparison. This was the last thing I did for the project character wise – rushed this out the door in 2 days. Really had to push these guys hard and fast in order to make them interesting and make them not `too` whalish. So they ended up being a bizzare combination of whales, dinosaur head bones, porcupines, elephants, sloths and traditional Japanese dragons combined with colors reminiscent to tropical creatures like poisonous frogs.



And the environments… For the interiors i wanted to do banal areas in which the main character could talk to the crew to increase moral and learn about back stories and possible locations to travel to or explore ingame. The interiors are of the engine room and the ‘Helium Ballast room’.



With the exteriors I thought it would be interesting to show an overview of the blimp as its docking with one of the sky-cities and then some cool perspective for a dramatic whale sitting as a crew member repairs one of the Zeppelin’s engines. I actually forgot to save the final version of the last one there so I’ll be reuploading this one later.

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Here’s the two kid’s book covers- both have turner out quite good so I’ll post the two of them. For the two of these i decided to choose similar books to mimic in the layout and design. For the Lobster Dragon, since it is naturally a parody of Harry Potter i thought it would be appropriate to model the book after that series. As for the Oedipus book, Mike Mignola served as a major influence and i tried to work with alot of allusions to insinuate what would happen to the guy in the book.
These were actually put together as full book jackets though I’ll only post the covers since they were the only areas that were illustrated. Enjoy.