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.

Here’s an interior illustration for the Oidipus story line – credit also goes to Cristy for the typography and Andy for the writting – thanks again guys.

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There were actually 5 illustrations as part of the last project involving the crab people. Three out of five turned out nice. Here are the last two good ones. For the first, we have the massive monolithic government area/market where i got to experiment with laying down a perspective grid courtesy of illustrator. Turned out to have its own set of problems but was interesting to attempt. The next one i had the lowest expectations for from the initial sketch but ended up turning into one of my favorites. It depicts the crab people riding inside their Jelly fish ‘vehicles’ harvesting their food source of ocean kelp, which hovers slightly above the surface of the water.

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Thus begins the portfolio piece marathon. Here’s the dock area for the crab people who ride inside the jellyfish. This is all going to tie into the overarching universe of the Skywhales which is being tied into several projects at school.

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Here’s all the character designs for the two children’s books. First we have roughs for Simon Boy Wizard in the cave of the Lobster Dragon along with the final renderings. This includes the previously two mentioned characters with touch ups and the fearless Beaver-Woman sidekick, Judith (Who’s actual name is unpronounceable beaver language). Next there’s the two designs Oedipus and the Sphinx. Tried to do something different with the sphinx by making it more lion-like and having a tattoo/colored hair of wings as opposed to actual wings on her back.

Not much to say here – just some character designs for Simon Boy Wizard and the cave of the lobster dragon – I’ll have to see if I have time to do up a character study of his anthropomorphic-she-beaver-side kick… Otherwise – there’s still two more on the way regardless.

I’m quite proud of this guy – He went through lots of revisions then was inked digitally and colored in 2 hours. Kind of a record.


Here’s the final revision of Simon Boy Wizard.

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.

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