Quick Update from California

Hey, been a while since the last post. Unfortunately, no sketches for this update. Been occupied with helping my grandparents downsize to a smaller home, and while I have done a bit of doodling, there's not been much time to get quality images of those sketches to a computer. I'll sit down and pop a few photos over from my phone at some point for some real content. Time's been split between sketching, finishing Return of the King, and raising a Pokemon team on SoulSilver to my liking when I've not been moving things about or cleaning.

Jason, I swear your Gyarados is on the way, it was started over a month ago now and I just haven't had a point where I've been able to sit down and finish it.

Also still have the technique experiment monster on hold, as well as all that Gears of War redesign business. That may sit on the sidelines for a while longer now that another Gears game has been announced.

That's all for now.

Oh man, update, I need to update. Okay, just need to find where I left that last process image... Aha, there we are.

I'd been planning on getting another post up sooner, but things have gotten a little distracting here with a trip planned to happen in a few days, among other things. Excuses, excuses. In any case, here's what progress there was the last time I worked on this guy. Took me a little while to figure out exactly how to progress, but I'm liking where things are going so far. We'll see what happens!

Should have some airport sketches sometime in the future as well, though I can't say when. It may be a month before I have access to a scanner for any work in more traditional medias. Not that I don't have plenty of digital work to catch up on.

Photoshop Crashed

More progress on my monster! Or, there would be more, if Photoshop hadn't frozen up and wasted several hours of my time during which I'd been playing around. OH WELL.

There's at least this, which took somewhere around an hour.

Have to get past my frustration at the program crash. Then I'll have more progress on this guy. Yeah.
Need to get back to that Gears of War redesign, too. Hmm.

Monster Guy

Started scribbling the other night in photoshop after browsing around on conceptart.org looking for new and interesting techniques to try. Let's see how this goes! Hopefully, I'll learn something new, or at least expand my abilities a little.

The first rough sketch. Just getting an idea of the action and taking the monster's previously-established build into consideration.

Much further along, after a few corrections, including several times of re-posing his left leg, and hammering in details. Started to get some linework in, doing so as quickly and tidily as possible.

For anyone interested, this is the tutorial I'm looking at and trying out.

Idle Scribbles

Between wasting time with Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and getting my time wasted being sucked into things around the internet, I've been mulling over creating my own Minecraft texture pack. It seems like a pretty big challenge, from what I've seen, or at the least several hundred hours' worth of work. The toughest bit so far is coming up with a visual direction. I've seen so many different texture packs I'm not sure where to begin with ideas.

So I started by sketching interpretations of Minecraft's most iconic monster, the creeper.

You know, I really need to look into getting a new scanner. A better one.

So far, I'm enamored with the idea of a "window" in the Creeper that would show a pile of gunpowder and a lit fuse. I've always thought of Creepers as these bizarre constructs rather than living things.

After the jump, an unrelated monster!

Storyboard Results Round 3

All right, here we go: the last of the storyboards. Again, Mass Effect 3 has been a major distraction, this time because of the multiplayer mode. I enjoy just about everything about that game except the ending...
You'll notice that the last several pages of storyboards are just flat tones; at the time, due to some rather heavy time constraints, I had to aim for speed at the cost of rendering any shadows and highlights. I'm all right with that. I may yet go back and add those extra details I had to leave out.

As before, the rest of the pages after the jump.

Storyboard Results Round 2

Mass Effect 3 delayed a post again. I'd make a ranting aside about the ending, but that's already been done several thousand times elsewhere. Enough to say that it was bad, and Bioware made some very poor decisions at some point in development that were contrary to what they had said previously.

Now on to the second round of storyboards! As always, there are some I am happier with than others.

The rest after the jump.

Storyboard Results Round 1

Delays, delays. I got Mass Effect 3, it's been taking up incredible amounts of my time. Occasionally I pry myself away to do other things, like eat or sleep or make a blog post. So here's the first chunk of those storyboards I did, now that I'm not completely occupied by the game. Some of these panels I'm happier with than others, but time restraints called for speed at the time. The notes weren't added again for much the same reason.

The rest after the cut.

18-35

Got wrapped up in drawing these for a while and not posting anything, so the rest of the storyboard roughs are after the jump. The finals are done, too, (save for a few that were left as flat tones due to time concerns) but I'll save those for tomorrow.

Even More Storyboards

Rough boards, pages 14-18, after the jump.