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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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 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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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.

Lots of stuff to show from school, first off is gonna be the part of the grand-seven week storyboarding project. I chose to do Andrew and mine`s slowly cooking story Falling Man. For some reason we were supposed to color and detail the frames - god knows why. Anyways, here`s the climactic end battle of the movie in which are hero battles the multi-armed villain without either of their powers, and it ends being really nasty. Hope you guys don`t mind blood… and yes. he`s stabbing her in the throat with his broken bone.

And here`s the mockup for the movie poster. Nice and dark. One man against all the odds.



Next up are the character sheets for Molmar, the suicide bomber mole rat who I`ve yet to have made an interesting back story for yet. Though he seems pretty straight forward to me.



Last but not least we have an illustration project that i hammered out in a single day. I really liked the potential with this one so I`ll be going in and redoing elements very soon to make it a portfolio piece maybe.




And now, I get to start on the Wendigo/Forest Spirit comic that I was originally planning to work on in my total lack of free time as a project - so i`ll see if i can keep updating with progress shots of that as i plug away at it.

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Sorry for the long hiatus - vacation followed by school complicated things. Anyways I’ve been pretty busy with character stuff. First off theres some things for the fantasy universe Andrew and I were brainstorming. We have the merchant you’ll be dealing with - he was initially supposed to be somewhat of a jolly character though he morphed into something a bit darker - so that may still be changed.

Next up is the ocean woman who “was” going to be the side kick but has since been removed from the plan at the moment. Regardless here she is. We were shooting for an aquatic creature who was mostly humanoid though lacked certain characteristics, such as a solid bone structure and instead would rely on a pressurized wet suit to not only give her structure but keep her body moist at all times and non-frozen. Her relative frailty would be offset by her oceanic-crab/seashell-armor which she would wear. Being able to play off her lack of a bone structure she would in times of extreme danger be able to retract her limbs into a solid and nearly impenetrable shell, much like a turtle.

And now onto some school stuff. First assignment of the was a character creation of three unique characters who were visually tied to the same universe and related in some way. This is from a couple year or so old story that Andrew came up with and we’ve been slowly expanding over time. The universe is one in which genetic modifications are a standard part of life and are heavily governed by a super secret ruling faction. I’ll keep it vague in case we go into more details on this potential story later.


Vincent - The Protagonist


Cleo - An Assassin



The Antagonist - Representative of a larger group

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I haven’t exactly been working as much as I have been previously, so it’s allowed me to finally pump out a few more character studies. The first is the result of a little motivation project Andrew and I have cooked up for one another where we choose characters and elements of a fantasy universe to define in great detail then I illustrate. The time limit for each character is roughly three days from development to final rendering. Lets start with a short rundown of the universe and a bit of a rational for the characters outfit:

This would be the hero of the story we’re developing for our ‘character-project’. We narrowed it down to him being a new recruit aboard an airship - so this is kind of like a fantasy Moby Dick (though its only a small part of the story we’ll expand it as we go on). Our hero’s a relatively young man, obsessed with the typical cravings for adventure and riches - and what better way to do that than on board a flying ship hunting enormous airborn beasts for their magical organs? Since the airship spends most of its time at high altitudes hunting its prey, his clothing is a scraped together outfit to allow him to operate in the extreme cold and high winds. The ship that he’s working on features an intricate spiderweb of safety wires which allows the crew to navigate the open main deck with relative safety. Each crew member is outfitted with a heavy duty safety harness and a large supply of ropes and belay’s. Expect more of these very soon:

The next one is just a rendered alien scientist concept. He’s pretty physically weak so he has to roam about in his exo-skeleton armor/survival suit. This guy’s been prone to previous ‘incidents’ as seen by his cybernetic arm.

It’s been a bit busy lately. Got sent down to Lethbridge to help open a new m&m and with the 40 degree heat for a week and a half id just come back to the hotel and sleep right away. So long story short, I’m going to try and keep updates happening a bit more regularly.

Anyways, I’ve got a few things on my plate at the moment including that Wendigo comic, an environmental image or two, just a few more touchups on the ‘Champagne Woman’ and a whole slew of character sketches that are 1/2 done. For now all I’m able to show is the latest character sketch i finished rendering: