10-03-2011: "a cyborg badger!" - Greg
10-04-2011: "babaa cannon. obviously." - Nelson
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Shock Brute: Finished Pencils
Bit more progress today. Procrastinated for too long. Just about done with pencils and clean up. Then on to the last phase.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Young Thalamus Sketch
Trying to imagine one of the characters of this story I'm working on... young version of Thalamus, a monarch tellurian with a birth defect (no hind-body). Being unable to reproduce, he/she (tellurians are hermaphrodites) is pushed into taking on a military role (note the "eye" between the hemispheres... a mandatory modification for any conscript), the first of the many, many horrors that will scar and twist the character into a "villain" (kinda' loathe to use that term... too black-and-white) later on.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Sketch a Day
Going to attempt to do a sketch every day, each being a response to whoever makes a suggestion first on the relevant Facebook posts.
Today:
"A banana." - Val
09-26-2011
"A penguin... with a tommy gun." - Val
09-03-2011
"A kitty!" - Val
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Shock Brute Sketch
WIP. Started strong... getting a little busy, though. Was thinking about genetically modified "brutes" used for the front lines of some... thing. I dunno'.
Looks a lil' like Ifrit or something, the more I look at it. Damn.
Looks a lil' like Ifrit or something, the more I look at it. Damn.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Art Fuel: Zero Over Zero
Stemage has been functioning as my art fuel for awhile now. He just came out with a new album about a month ago, Zero Over Zero. You should head on over there and purchase a copy, help out this amazing artist! You get both a hard-copy CD, as well as an immediate download of all 20 tracks.
"Most 'guitar albums' are lead albums. This is a rhythm guitar album - I think. It’s a wild rotation of rock genres that have inspired me over the years, and it's a love letter to Romero and Savini in the end - inspired by Dawn of the Dead from 1978."
"Most 'guitar albums' are lead albums. This is a rhythm guitar album - I think. It’s a wild rotation of rock genres that have inspired me over the years, and it's a love letter to Romero and Savini in the end - inspired by Dawn of the Dead from 1978."
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Another thing
Lost stuff
Was digging through papers and found a small collection of unfinished stuff from... well, I'm not sure when most of these were. Some were done in college, I think, and some were done just a year or two after moving here. Just went ahead and melted them into a sort of shitty collage rather than post them all separately.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Abandoned Biosphere Comic
For the last few years, I've been working off-and-on on a book. Originally, it was going to be a collection of short stories all tied together in the same setting (certain characters/places would make cameos in other chapters), the chronology of which was going to span from the beginning of the main species' evolution, to the (supposed) final crunch of the universe they inhabited.
The thing was, one of the major themes of the book was that this species (for now referred to as "tellurians." Concept art can be found on one of my other sites) had very little access to ferromagnetic materials; the vast bulk of their technology was biological in nature. Machines were actually genetically engineered creatures with little-to-no higher cognitive functions. Imagine a coffee table that moves on its own and is covered in human-like skin and you've got the basic idea. Biotech becomes so common that literally everything surrounding these creatures is alive, but it's absolutely normal to them and they take it for granted the same way we do our own technology. Their cities are massive fluid-filled sacs resembling organs, their homes giant cells that can be altered dynamically by tinkering with its nucleus, or reproduced through a sort of mitosis. To look at a tellurian city would be like looking inside an animal body with a powerful microscope.
This visual doesn't lend itself well to text alone.
I've kicked around the idea of doing the book as a comic instead... but I want to describe how everything works in exhaustive detail, as per your typical hard sci-fi book. Half the fun of science fiction for me was reading the authors description for how far-future tech would actually function. It's hard to put all that inforomation into a caption or speech bubble, though. Shirow Masamune sort of did it in his manga by putting annotation on every page, and an appendix in the back... but I'm not sure that would be very well received. So I'm leaning back toward the idea of a novel with accompanying illustrations.
Anyway, to the point, here's some early thumbs/roughs from when I was seriously considering the comic route. They're from two different stories. One would have detailed the early selective process in tellurian evolution (the creature responsible for which was shown in the previous blog post). The other story involved a young tellurian's first exposure to a stable reality construct, an entire solid-state universe contained within an almost infinitely dense sphere... a black hole, if that's how you want to think of it. Plug into it, and the user can share the experience of any pattern in that universe that results in a cognitive feedback loop (a la Douglas Hofstadter).
Blah! Too much talky. Pictures, now:
The thing was, one of the major themes of the book was that this species (for now referred to as "tellurians." Concept art can be found on one of my other sites) had very little access to ferromagnetic materials; the vast bulk of their technology was biological in nature. Machines were actually genetically engineered creatures with little-to-no higher cognitive functions. Imagine a coffee table that moves on its own and is covered in human-like skin and you've got the basic idea. Biotech becomes so common that literally everything surrounding these creatures is alive, but it's absolutely normal to them and they take it for granted the same way we do our own technology. Their cities are massive fluid-filled sacs resembling organs, their homes giant cells that can be altered dynamically by tinkering with its nucleus, or reproduced through a sort of mitosis. To look at a tellurian city would be like looking inside an animal body with a powerful microscope.
This visual doesn't lend itself well to text alone.
I've kicked around the idea of doing the book as a comic instead... but I want to describe how everything works in exhaustive detail, as per your typical hard sci-fi book. Half the fun of science fiction for me was reading the authors description for how far-future tech would actually function. It's hard to put all that inforomation into a caption or speech bubble, though. Shirow Masamune sort of did it in his manga by putting annotation on every page, and an appendix in the back... but I'm not sure that would be very well received. So I'm leaning back toward the idea of a novel with accompanying illustrations.
Anyway, to the point, here's some early thumbs/roughs from when I was seriously considering the comic route. They're from two different stories. One would have detailed the early selective process in tellurian evolution (the creature responsible for which was shown in the previous blog post). The other story involved a young tellurian's first exposure to a stable reality construct, an entire solid-state universe contained within an almost infinitely dense sphere... a black hole, if that's how you want to think of it. Plug into it, and the user can share the experience of any pattern in that universe that results in a cognitive feedback loop (a la Douglas Hofstadter).
Blah! Too much talky. Pictures, now:
Monday, February 21, 2011
Blargh! Good enough. I kept putting off finishing this thing because I thought I wanted to make a better background... but sometimes you have to know when enough is enough. Better to finish it, and move on. A lot of things I'm seeing I'd like to make better, but I'll just try to remember them for the next thing I work on.
Now... finally... sleep! *thud*
Now... finally... sleep! *thud*
(huh huh... it looks like a penis!)
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Current WIP
So much for the incomplete concepts... maybe I'll post those eventually, but I'm not really feeling I could describe the backgrounds too well. So instead...
Current work in progress. Still in the very early stages, and up to this point, I've had to do each piece of the pic on separate pieces of paper (because I don't have any big enough). I then put them together in GIMP with the intent of printing it back out and finishing it that way. But... not enough ink in printer. So I'm stuck having to do the rest of the drawing with my crappy Graphire 2 tablet. This may take awhile.
Currently too human-looking. Still need to add: Insect features at base, replace hands with claws, and expect blood to be everywhere. May add the corpse of a victim. Yet to decide. Probably will go with a simple background.
Thanks to Val for letting me take a pic to use as a reference. This is a habit I need to get into, more.
Yes. I do play a lot of SOTN. Sue me.
(please don't sue me)
Current work in progress. Still in the very early stages, and up to this point, I've had to do each piece of the pic on separate pieces of paper (because I don't have any big enough). I then put them together in GIMP with the intent of printing it back out and finishing it that way. But... not enough ink in printer. So I'm stuck having to do the rest of the drawing with my crappy Graphire 2 tablet. This may take awhile.
Currently too human-looking. Still need to add: Insect features at base, replace hands with claws, and expect blood to be everywhere. May add the corpse of a victim. Yet to decide. Probably will go with a simple background.
Thanks to Val for letting me take a pic to use as a reference. This is a habit I need to get into, more.
Yes. I do play a lot of SOTN. Sue me.
(please don't sue me)
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Precursors
Here are a couple sketches that came before the tellurian monarch pic. One problem I had with the original sketches was that they kept looking too much like a xenomorph (that is, the creature from the Alien movies). I can't deny that Geiger indirectly influences a lot of what I do; after I saw the Alien movie as a kid, I had nightmares for years about that thing.
Was throwing around ideas for the Gnixxian Assassin contest on ConceptArt.org's Creature of the Week contest. The challenge was to create a creature that was intentionally bred for use in assassinations on a lush jungle planet. Started with the idea of a giant predator that, despite its size, could move utterly silently and then bite its target in half with its crazy beak.
There were a couple of CoW (Creature of the Week) contests that I intended to enter, but never got around to finishing any of the entries. One challenge was to create an "8th Wonder of the World living in one of the other 7." Tried to go with the Temple of Artemis, and go with a creature based on the Artemis of Ephesus... a statue that had lots o' boobs :P. So I made a bunch of multi-breasted serpent creatures. I won't post those here :P But this was one of the better designs that only had two breasts.
Another challenge I meant to enter was based around the idea of a "cosmic pet show." Design a creature so insanely beautiful, it wins best of show. Well... how about a translucent, emerald-colored insect thing? Here was the attempt...
Which ended up becoming...
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Was throwing around ideas for the Gnixxian Assassin contest on ConceptArt.org's Creature of the Week contest. The challenge was to create a creature that was intentionally bred for use in assassinations on a lush jungle planet. Started with the idea of a giant predator that, despite its size, could move utterly silently and then bite its target in half with its crazy beak.
Eventually decided to go a different route... very small. A creature I called the "flying sarcophagus ant." One type of ant I learned about actually creates living nests around their queen by weaving their bodies together. Trippy! So I thought, how about flying ants that create living nests around prey, simultaneously trapping them while eating them? End result...
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(although it ended up looking fucking giant... oops)
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I gave up, though, because all the sketches looked too humanoid, which is against the CoW rules.
Another challenge I meant to enter was based around the idea of a "cosmic pet show." Design a creature so insanely beautiful, it wins best of show. Well... how about a translucent, emerald-colored insect thing? Here was the attempt...
I then changed its face to a bird's, and gave it a peacock tail... it looked awful, and I gave up.
First Post
Have a huge stack of doodles, some of which I may post over the next few days. Here's a few:
Here's an idea I'm knocking around for the next piece, once I'm finished with the thing I'm working on, now. Just some quick thumbs. I'm going to be (hopefully) getting some reference pics, for once, and do a redesign then. It's been a long time since I've done a human(ish) thing.
That's it for now. Maybe more tomorrow.
Here's an idea I'm knocking around for the next piece, once I'm finished with the thing I'm working on, now. Just some quick thumbs. I'm going to be (hopefully) getting some reference pics, for once, and do a redesign then. It's been a long time since I've done a human(ish) thing.
That's it for now. Maybe more tomorrow.
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