You are stuck. Probably, there are still images vivid in your mind, but you can no longer link them together. They are no longer a part of any story. In your desperation, you start, for a moment, to write about a man sitting in front of a typing device similar to your own, suffering from a lack of productivity similar to your own. You are not the first to attempt this. You will not be the last. You have been told a thousand times to write what you know, and, at this very moment, not being able to write is exactly all that you know.

Wait. Feel yourself out, get a sense of your body, your environment, your feelings. Surely, you must know at least one more thing, you must know something beyond this most tired of cliches.

Your stomach growls.

You know that you are hungry.

Every character worth the words that make him wants something. Your protagonist must want something badly enough to propel him through the hell to which you are about to send him. You know about hunger. You know about wanting…

A delicious turkey sandwich.

So you are downstairs, in the kitchen. You’ve pulled the good bread out of the bread box and inspected your two slices for mold — better to risk moldiness than screw up good bread in the fridge. From the fridge you’ve retrieved your grainy German mustard. You smear it on thick. Lettuce and tomatoes are placed on the table, but not married to the sandwich; you eat a slice of each separately. Turkey and Mustard and Bread… a holy trinity of tastes… they deserve no flavour interference.

Lastly, you open the meat tray, and lo: There is no turkey there to speak of!

For every protagonist that wants, there must be a universe that conspires against him. You see, where you expected thick deli-chopped turkey meat, waits thin, grocery store roast beef slices, slick, and dull to the tongue. You must make a choice, eat now, in mediocrity, or move forward, overcoming whatever increasingly improbable obstacles rise before you.

This wouldn’t be a story if you settled.

You take your half-made sandwich carefully in hand, and in your trousers you stuff your Glock, and a keen butcher’s knife. You open your kitchen doors, and make your way into the woods. Somewhere, over the eastern hills, the prophets say, lies a field untouched by the hands of man, home to turkeys enough to feed man until the end times.

You walk for hours, over boulders the size of houses, and through hollow logs twice size of office buildings. Something had better force you to act, to make a decision; something must challenge you. You arrive at a river.

The river is as wide as an eight-lane highway, and roars savagely. You kick off your shoes and roll up the cuffs of your trousers. You raise the gestating turkey sandwich high above your head, and step into the water. You are barely ankle deep when the water’s tug begins to affect your balance. You are not more than an eighth of the way through, and the water is above your belly button. You strain on the tips of your toes to keep the sandwich as far away from potential sogginess as possible. This, a mistake. The water drags you off of your toes and then under. Your body tumbles and you thrash your arms wildly.

You are sitting on the riverbed, opposite where you entered, if a little downstream. Your clothes are soaked, your hair is soaked. The soaked sandwich disintegrates in your hand.

All is lost.

You rise to your feet, and check your trousers. You still possess your glock and butcher’s knife. You begin to walk. At first, each step is strained, deliberate, but you pick up speed, purpose. You enter the woods. The ground slopes upward.

If you didn’t face certain defeat and keep going, this wouldn’t be a story either.

You happen upon some grain, sprouting from between two rocks. You take your butches knife and cut it at the stem. You grind it up between two stones, and add water by squeezing out your soaked shirt. You build a fire, and this evening, you bake bread.

The next morning, after travelling even further up the hillside, you encounter a wild mustard bush. You squeeze out the remaining water from your soaked trousers, and grind the mustard seed. After letting it sit for a while, you spread the fresh mustard onto your fresh bread.

After a full day’s climb, you reach the top of the hill. The sun has just dipped below the horizon, and all life is bathed in the purple-orange glow of magic hour. The trees open up to a field. Before you a rusted wire and wooden stake fence barely stands. The wire has decayed enough to split in several places, and many of the stakes have toppled over. All of it, is nearly completely overgrown with weeds. In the middle of this grassy clearing stands a lone turkey.

You draw your glock and point it at the bird; you can feel the cold steel of the belted butcher’s knife against your skin. Your bread is fresh, your mustard is fresh, soon the trinity will be complete and you will feast on the finest freshest sandwich every assembled by the hands of man.

Your finger squeezes the trigger. And then, you are overwhelmed by the turkey’s majesty.

Its tail fanned like a peacock, it’s feathers striped like a bold tiger, it’s face decorated with the wild colours of a gaelic warrior, all in the subdued tones of the puritans. The turkey is the most regal of all galliformes. A pilgrim king.

The glock lands lands among the weeds, unfired.

You fall to your knees and weep.

Trying to do thinner inks… More humans coming soon.

A couple more things I’m working on – or rather the evolution of last weeks too WIPS. A bit more fooling and they’ll be all done. Also another reproduction of one of Sargents’ studies.

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Something I dug up from my last year of school – though sadly not the version with the explosion at the end – oh well. Thanks goes to andy for shrinking this sucker down for me, enjoy.

PS the fighter bays are on the bottom. And its rendered sexier now.

This post is a bit all over the map. It starts with a finished version of a capitol ship i sketched in an earlier post, then a completed turn around that i had 1/2 done for school for a run cycle (hooray cartoon characters). A couple of in progress characters I’ll be pushing further and rendering out in the next couple weeks to boot then we have a study of the work of Sargent I think I’ll be doing more of these master studies to work my colors further… Then there’s my bus/lunch break sketches for the month, enjoy.

Here’s a couple more things. The backview for the Modern Bioshock Big Daddy is done – I may need to add some dials to the gun but otherwise this one is at last done. High fives!

Also here’s a quick coloring of the girl with the gun that was posted in the last slew of uploads.

For the last day of my wcb work week I’ve revamped my main website and converted the whole thing to delicious css. That’s right, not a single damn table. It took awhile – but eventually I was able to reteach myself everything I’d learnt in class 3 years ago. Which wasn’t very much to begin with, but it allows me to build a descent site. The infamous intro page is BACK! I was also finally able to add titles to my images so you can know what they’re supposed to be.

Alas it is time to go back to regular work… hopefully I can find some way to maintain this recent ambition.

I’ve been pretty busy the past few days courtesy of being kept off work thanks to a self inflicted fractured toe – HIGH FIVE! But seriously. I was able to go back to a few projects I’ve had on the back burner or have been meaning to start up. So here we go. To start I’ve decided I’m STILL not done with the big daddy redesign and may even have a couple more beyond this to go and have started on the back view – I’ll post that in the coming weeks. Anyways in the new version the pincer arm is now fixed up to be more bad ass and the weird part of his left arm above the gun has been tubified.

Remember that horrible spaceship i whipped up to try and apply to bioware with? It was pretty sloppy and I’ve been milling over a redo of it for awhile now. So I took the time and sleeked it out into a cooler starship. It still retains some reference to Mass Effect ships – but made sexier…


Also if there’s one thing my portfolio is seriously lacking at the moment its women. So here’s another prelim sketch I’ve started for the heroine of the sol-fungus story. She’s a military trained translator who belongs to the human survivors of the epic ’sol-fungus’ incident in which a self replicating biological singularity occurs on earth and devours the solar system. Armor and such is kept to a minimum but features a pressure suit/flak jacket combo just in case things get crazy.


And here’s a bunch of sketches from my joyous bus rides downtown to work every day.

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A few things have been happening as of late. To start I’ve recently gone in and done a major overhaul of the artwork adding in process for most of the creatures and a variety of touchups here and there.

Next up I have by first published work for the Kaakuluk, Nunavut’s Discovery Magazine for Kids as a two page interior spread. As a first experience with having to work with both an art director and a cultural adviser it was pretty interesting and went relatively smoothly. The final piece was a bit taller and had floating caribou parts awaiting integrated design work which I’ve removed from this version. The illustration is of a traditional hunting scene involving an Inuit tribe showing all the ways that Caribou are used within their society from food to tools.

Thought it would be a fun to try and redesign the Big Daddies from Bioshock with a bit more of a modern take. I tried to keep some of the basics of the character the same while adding a bit of an extra flavor. The tesla coil seems kind of impractical but seemed like a neat modern/futurish weapon that could be tacked on – possibly used for over the top welding? Working on the little sisters next and possibly a big sister since i detest their new design so very much…

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