It's Almost Done...

Sneak peek at the creepy skull piece.

Something Halloweeny

A special piece for Society6's seasonal Halloween event.  Deadline is Oct. 2nd, the plan is to have this finished by Tuesday afternoon.

Final version coming soon...

Work Sketches #2

Monster-hunting in a supermarket's labyrinth of a ceiling.

Belated Osprey

Osprey sketches I forgot to upload last week.

The Sniper, Part 2

Pencils are all but done on The Sniper.  Inks coming soon!

Slow Posting Ahead

Posts may be slow this week, ye olde retail job suddenly got busy.

Horse Week

Horse week this week.  Only cows are tougher to draw.

Big Spider Alert...

It's been a year or two since I painted in acrylic...too long.  Way too long.  I forgot how fast you can go with them.

That orb weaver spider right there is a little larger than a quarter.  She's living in the tomato plants right now, growing fat and happy off the juices of flies and bees.

Bird Week: Moderate Success

I stuck with my one-bird-sketch-a-day schedule about...half the time?  Could be better...could be worse.  Very happy with the barn owl painting, at least.

Sorry.  I couldn't resist.

The Sniper, Part 1

This past week has been problem-solving and laying the groundwork for the next painting in the series, The Sniper.  In an interesting twist, this took longer than The Challenger, even though I had a concept already.  The problem?  The concept I had was somewhere from six months to a year old, long before I’d seriously thought the robot-paintings-as-series concept through.

Version 1, where the pelvis is the star.  Whoops.

The main issue with updating the composition was matching up the story in my head to the actual painting.  This robot, Sunspot Crusher, is piloted only by the one lady pilot, Iris.  Years ago, a betrayal by an ally cost her her first robot and left that scar on her forehead.  It left her hurt and suspicious, and now she works alone, fights alone, with survival as her number one priority.  That story was what I wanted to hint at through the painting’s composition.

Version 2, it's getting there, slowly but surely.

Version 3–lots better!  Those control arms look a lot like exercise machines, though.

The main problem with the old composition was that the painting centered on Sunspot Crusher’s pelvis. Obviously, that wouldn’t work, so I moved things around.  After a few tries, I had Iris and Crusher focus on a single target outside the picture frame.  That united them, and gave the composition the sense of purpose and drive I’d been looking for.  I added the control panel and the fancy joysticks to Iris to make it obvious she was piloting Crusher, and faded Crusher’s feet into the background and threw some tank wrecks in there for scale, and boom, finished.

Version 4...PERFECT.

In Part 2, I will be under way with the real painting.  Stay tuned!

Helicopters and Mechs

Apache studies for The Challenger, and some mechs, one wielding a rocket flail.

You thought I was joking about the rocket flail?  Think again...

Sketches from the Breakroom

Doodles from the workplace.

Drinking coffee straight from the pot strikes me as weirdly hilarious.

There is, in fact, a little three wolf moon going on there...

Society6 is Go!

You can get the cover of Battle-Nauts as a print, iPod skin, or card on my Society6 now!  There will most definitely be more available soon, I'll keep you posted.

Pair o' Peacocks

This week is birds.  I will do at least one sketch of some avian or other every day.  No slacking off this time.  Today's color sketch is a peacock, which actually resembles a peacock, a pleasant change from my usually dismal adventures in non-lineart digital painting.

Society6

Been craving a giant robot or astronaut on your iPod case?  Your wait is (almost) over!  Be on the lookout for a link to my Society6 shop, coming soon...

Bleh...

Head aches, eyes ache, neck aches...these might just be my lack of sleep catching up with me.  Off to bed now.

Some noses simply refuse to be drawn easily.

13 years ago...

13 years ago, on September 11, I was at school when my teacher gathered the class together and told us that terrorists had destroyed the Twin Towers in New York.  I was just old enough to understand something terrible had happened, but I only grasped the magnitude of the attack years later.  What I did understand at that moment was my dad was on the east coast, and he couldn't get back home.  We spent several anxious days waiting and worrying until he returned.

I have a lot to be thankful for, that my dad did come back.  I wish it could be the same for many other families who lost their loved ones.  This is dedicated to the civilians and firefighters who lost their lives lost on 9/11/01, and to the families who suffered from the attack.  May they rest in peace.

The Challenger - Finished!

One down, four to go!  From start to finish, this took about 10-12 hours, concept to finish, over the course of 3 weeks.  With what I learned from this, the other paintings out to go a lot faster.  Time-lapse video footage may be coming soon, if I can figure out iMovie.

Teaser

Photo preview of the painting, full image will be up soon...

Still Sketching...

More sketches for you all while I finish up The Challenger.

Old Ideas, New Iterations

Dug through my old sketchbooks and redid a few of the ideas, including a band of robot heroes, and a climate-control battleship.