Actually, I can’t make a very good argument for this. I haven’t seen any of the masses echoing the above statement make much of one either. It tends to swing between two positions. First, with great emphasis, they ask you if you really got it. You know. It takes place in South Africa. The aliens are living in a slum, their second class citizenship enforced by bureaucratic weight and military force. Don’t you get it? I feel like a man who might look at a basic equation, 2+2=4, and shrug. It is certainly what it is, but another man might grab me by the shirtsleeves and shout, “But you aren’t getting it man? Did you even see that 2? Or the other 2? And then the four? It adds up! It all adds up!”.

And so it does.

From here on in, I recklessly spoil the film where I need to. If you haven’t seen the film yet, and want to be surprised by it, then don’t read this.

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Beefin up the ol’ portfolio with some stuff it’s lacking…women + medieval stuff and of course some revised designs for Simon Boy Wizard. The male couterpart to the woman is about 1/2 done and should be up in the next few days. Adios.

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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.

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Trying to do thinner inks… More humans coming soon.

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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.

from Sean Bigham on Vimeo.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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There’s a brief scene in the terrible new Nicholas Cage/Alex Proyas special effects thriller where Nicholas Cage, reputed astrophysicist, is teaching a class at MIT. It isn’t really clear what this class is… whether they’re undergraduate or graduate students. There are space-y decorations around the room, so I guess it could be assumed that it’s some kind of astronomy or astrophysics class. He says, more or less, that he’s going to introduce them to some ideas, that might help get the ball rolling for their term papers.

It is important, here, to use the classic Nicholas Cage voice while playing out this dialogue in your head.

“There are, like, two different ways of viewing the universe, man, the theory of, like, determinism, and whoa, random chance. Determinism is, like everything happens for a reason, and random chance is all of this is the result of random chemical reactions and genetic mutations.”

He tosses around a ball that’s been painted to look like the sun while asking random facts about the sun. The kids in the class know how hot the sun is, and that it has a bunch of hydrogen in it. Whoa! Excellent work! Class dismissed!

Meanwhile, there’s a chalkboard behind him with some hardcore space Calculus that goes unmentioned (but the camera lingers on it for a moment… You see that there? That’s some fucking MATH right there. This guy is a fucking genius).

I can barely formulate a response to this. It should be easy, considering how common this sickness is.

Dear Everyone Who Is Ever Going to Make a Movie,

DO NOT PUT A CLASSROOM SCENE IN YOUR FUCKING MOVIE UNLESS YOU HAVE ACTUALLY ATTENDED A COMPARABLE CLASS YOURSELF. THAT MEANS EVERYONE INVOLVED.

That means, go to a local University or Community Fucking College, and tell them you’re a fucking screenwriter or film director or actor, and ask to sit through one or five of their classes on X (here, Astrophysics… I think).

Right now, the CLASSROOM SCENE is brain-damaged screenwriter shorthand for “I want to say something directly to my audience, but that seems clumsy, so instead, I’ll have a bunch of twenty-somethings stand in for my audience, and I’ll be represented by the lecturer.” It can also be screenwriter shorthand for “I have no fucking idea what I’m doing.” In Knowing, it seems to be a bit of both.

One. University level science lecture, even the most fun and entertaining ones, tend to be pretty information dense. The lecturer tends not to quiz his students on fucking random trivia, but rather, if he’s going to be asking questions at all, it’s going to be something the requires a proper understanding of the material, usually involving problem solving or mathematics.

Two. Gibberish. His entire “science” lecture comes across as pseudo-religious mumbo jumbo, even though it’s stated in the film that Nicholas Cage is an atheist (formerly a Catholic). He says, “Why, dude, is it, like, that our Earth is at the exact right position from the sun for life to survive… did this happen for a reason, or was it, like, you know, random chance?” His students, apparently all members of MIT’s Special Education Program (I didn’t know they had this) have no rebuttal. Lottery winners. Lottery winners must think, “Why me? How is it that I picked the exact right numbers… it must be magic, a miracle.” Whoever wins the lottery always reels at the specialness of their improbable victory, but SOMEONE ALWAYS WINS THE FUCKING LOTTERY. That is a statistical inevitability. With all of the galaxies and all of the stars and all of the planets (we suspect) in the universe (and that, only the universe that we can see), it seems pretty fucking likely that there are going to be some planets formed in the habitable zone with the right basic materials to get this life thing started. We won the lottery, so obviously we’re able to look at our improbable position and marvel at how unlikely it is that we’re all here… but it had to happen to someone, somewhere. He then tells the students that he thinks it’s all just random chance and coincidence. A scientist. A man who by all means, should believe in things only when there are sensible reasons and explanations, has made exactly zero arguments for how all of this can happen without a capital R reason behind it, but he believes it anyway.

His class is enraptured. His MIT class. His class that must have been top of the fucking pile at their respective high schools or colleges across America, now attending arguably the most prestigious science school in the world, are completely satisfied with this, the stupidest science lecture they have likely ever heard. And another scientist has walked into the room, partway through the lecture. He has heard this. He walks up to Nicholas Cage and he says, “That’s some heavy stuff, bro.”

Not, “That’s the stupidest fucking lecture I’ve ever heard, turn in your science gun and your science badge.”

At a point, later in the film, there’s this guy in the woods that’s creeping out Nicholas Cage and his kid, so Nicholas Cage heads out into the woods with a flashlight and bat, and he shouts, “You want some of this?” and then he hits an innocent bystanding Tree with the bat… implying that the “this” in his statement was, in fact, referring to getting hit with a bat. Judging by audience response, this was the funniest scene in the movie. It was clearly not meant to be.

I’m about to spoil some things.

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So. A badly botched wisdom tooth extraction when I was 18 led me to avoid dental care for approximately 8 years. The previously posted wisdom tooth picture was the first, and biggest price paid for my hiatus. As of today’s drilling, I am now officially caught up… the political environment of my mouth has been stabilized by a popular new government.

I tried to drink some coffee too soon after the dental work, and my frozen mouth drooled it all over my sweater. I guess this is what I have to look forward to when I get old.

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I was at a comic book store the other day, picking up the latest trade of Fables (it came out a while ago, but I’m always lazy about buying comic books). There was a brief discussion about the visibility of Dr. Manhattan’s glowing blue penis in the Watchmen movie. I think this may have been prompted by the Dr. Manhattan action figure box standing on their shelf, with a pair of alternate legs (and, one hopes, exposed genitals) barely visible through the box’s plastic window at box’s bottom. The woman at the counter said the penile euphemism “Wang” first, if I recall, but I echoed it, in conversation.

When I said the word, an employee, further down the counter, who had been in conversation with an older Asian gentleman said loudly, to this gentleman, “Wang”, and then looked deliberately at me. As if to say, “Check out this racist motherfucker.” This triggered a moment of reflection.

    Wang is only one of many human last names that have also become a word for penis. Wang, obviously, is a Chinese last name.

    Dong is a Vietnamese last name, and also a word for Penis.

    Johnson is an anglo-saxony kind of last name, and also means Penis.

    Willie is an English first name of German origin, and also means Penis.

    Ono is a Japanese last name, and doesn’t mean Penis. Yet. Think about it, though. “I walked into the room without knocking first, and I saw his Oh No!”

    Jonker is a Dutch last name, and the word Junk is frequently used for Penis (probably also testicles). Jonker is pronounced Yonker, and there is no evidence that it shares an origin with the word junk.

    Ding is a Chinese last name, and the Penis, has, on occasion, been referred to as a Ding-a-Ling. Ling is also a Chinese last name.

    Weiner is a German last name, and is also a word for Penis. Also, it is something that you can eat, sometimes in a bun.

    Cock is a Flemish surname meaning Cook.

It also means Penis.

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No way! I’m still alive! Sorry for the lack of posts. Everything from my New York trip over 2 months ago, to multiple sicknesses and working seven days a week has kind of drained me a bit. But I’m coming back! Slowly but surely. Here’s me getting back into the grind with some quickie head sketches before work at the local market… and me fooling with power armor and aliens. I’m also revamping certain parts of my website soon too as I’ve finally thought of way to (somewhat) effectively combine process with the finals to show a progression.

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For the sake of grossness and nothing else…

The dentist said it was still drillable, but with a useless wisdom tooth, what’s the point?

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Here’s something I hate. Sentences ended with “,no?”. It occurs mostly in writing, mostly in e-writing, on the stupid fucking internet.

“Dark Knight was a great movie, no?”
“Pizza Hut is greasy, no?”
“Being punched in the face is totally rad, no?”

Here’s what “,no?” translates to: “amirite?!?”

Fucking Stop It.

Grow some balls and make a fucking statement, or rewrite your sentence so that it’s an actual goddamn question.

“Dark Knight was a great movie.”
“Pizza Hut is greasy.”
“Being punched in the face is totally rad.”

OR

“Did you think the Dark Knight was a great movie?”
“How do you feel about the greasy-ness of Pizza Hut pizza?”
“I used to think that being punched in the face was pretty rad, but I’m having second thoughts; what is your position, apropos a punch in the face?”

“,no?” is lazy fucking writing, and every time I read it, I feel like I’m being insulted personally. It is simultaneously the mark of a will too weak, too desperate for approval to make a clear, and firm statement, while at the same time too disinterested in the eyes and minds of the sensitive reader to write AN ACTUAL BEARFUCKING QUESTION!

I imagine, in my mind, that anyone who ends a sentence with “,no?” sounds exactly like Alyson Hannigan’s flutist character from American Pie.

Of course, it should be pointed out that the “,no?” ending serves a similar function to the Canadian, “,eh?”. However, “,eh?” has a long cultural history in this great nation, and is a word exactly suited to its purpose. “No” is already a word. It already means NO. By using “no” in the place of “eh?”, one essentially says, “I’VE JUST NEGATED MY WHOLE STATEMENT IN THE DESPERATE HOPES THAT YOU WILL REAFFIRM IT!”

Stop. Stop it you jelly-spined crybabies.

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My friend Jordan recently made a post in which he invents a term, and then lays claim to it. The post is relatively small, and doesn’t really serve any purpose other than marking the time and date and claimed word.

It is, in short, a kind of linguistic submarine patent.

That said, the term isn’t that bad. He calls it the Red Baron Ploy, the use of a particularly standout evil villain to become the defining face of his otherwise vaguely defined countrymen (or group members of some other kind). Red Baron Ploy doesn’t sound very good, however… too many words. And in being so specifically about a black and white good/evil dichotomy, its utility is somewhat muted.

Instead, the term ought to be just “The Red Baron”. The Red Baron is often the villain, or at the very least, the antagonist, but his defining characteristic is his group membership.

A Red Baron can never work alone. The Red Baron is the representative, the face, the avatar, of a much larger group which the author does not characterize more widely (either because the group is so large as to make that unwieldly, or the author is simply uninterested).

The Red Baron is often flamboyant. Is often Jeremy Irons in Dungeons and Dragons o’er the top. It is in his nature specifically because he must become the character representation of tens if not thousands of other bodies (whom our protagonist perhaps slaughters by the dozens [if there are more than tens]). He must think for thousands. He must move for thousands. He must emote for thousands.

The Red Baron is a useful trope, and appears frequently. I recently watched a piece of shit called Death Race, a not-really-a-remake of a particularly good cult film called Death Race 2000. Our protagonist spends most of this malformed asshole of a motion picture in prison. There are fights, there are confrontations, there are various meetings with the wierdly-botoxed female prison warden: there are many events in which prison guards are obligated to appear, and frequently do violence to our cranky english hero. In exactly every single instance in which a guard interacts with any character onscreen (usually our main character), it is the same guard. He’s got kind of a freaky looking chin, makes his face look like a crescent moon in profile. In a prison the size of an island, day or night, at any far-flung corner of the prison, he is the guard to show up with his stick in hand, doing violence and muttering some lame Paul WS Anderson dialogue. He also appears at the right-hand side of our botox’ed warden whenever we see her. He is every guard. He is improbably, illogically sadistic… he is the sadism of every guard combined.

He is a Red Baron. Paul WS Anderson violated every rule of logic or sense just to make him so.

Don’t watch Death Race, though. It really sucks.

Look at the costume similarities between Darth Vader and the Storm Trooper. Darth Vader is a storm trooper in a black uniform and a cape. Also, with magic powers. Darth Vader is a Red Baron, effectively filling the characterization gap of a hundred easily slaughtered storm trooper infantry.

But it doesn’t stop at antogonism and villainy. Mel Gibson’s William Wallace very nearly acts as a Red Baron for all of the Scots in Braveheart, at least the bold, fighting kind.

Where the author chooses not to, for reasons good or evil, represent a large group as a diverse set of individuals, but instead, Superions them into a single, usually flamboyant representation, he has made a Red Baron.

It is a useful trope, with plenty of life left in it. Maybe an endless supply of life, really.

If you find yourself disheartened by the facelessness of your hero’s enemies — choose one of them to follow, one of them to deepen and grow. Let your audience learn to hate him, or love him tragically. Make a Red Baron.

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Well it’s a new year and already there’s a large to-do list accumulating to keep me busy over the coming months. Hopefully I’ll be going down to one job in a couple months giving me mountains more time to do the things i want (like updating) so expect more soon. In the meantime here’s some stuff I’ve been working on recently.

This creature is part of the fungus universe idea that Andrew came up with and I’ve been busy visualizing. He belongs to the Sol-Fungus entity who’s entire existence revolves around spreading itself throughout the cosmos. To look back on the process for this one jump on over to the process blog I’m running with moderate success…


This guy one was an interesting process as I’ve never done something completely from early conceptualizing to finish entirely in Photoshop.

Also… No more creatures for awhile! I plan on working on a slew of human characters and landscapes… stay tuned.

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