Rainy Days

This thing kind of gradually pieced itself together as I went along. I pretty much started by putting in a stairway and some hills - I knew I wanted that much, but the rest wasn't planned out at all. I only had the urge to do some sort of mountainous scene. It probably ended up all stormy due to some wishful thinking on my part. It feels like my whole state is burning up because of wild fires! We've got too much smoke in the air, and haven't had any storms to blow that junk away. It's driving me nuts! Anyway, hope y'all like the result.

Lost Woods, Master Sword

When I finished that last post, I felt like drawing a forest scene.  It started out as a speed painting, and as I was fine tuning the thing it seemed like the Master Sword should be there because it reminded me of the Lost Woods from Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.  So this was the end result!

Frog / Glenn

Did this while I was playing Chrono Trigger.  So what if the game is 16 years old?  I think we should make it a law to play through it at least one time a year - that's how great it is.  They just don't make 'em like they used to, that's for sure.  Here's Frog with the Masamune....'nuff said.

Tupac and Snoop Dogg

Alright, so Tupac Shakur wanted to change his professional name to Makaveli in 1996.  It was a reference to Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian philsopher/writer.  Fun fact: The Black Panthers based some of their ideas on his writing, that's where their "by any means necessary" motto comes from.  That's probably why Tupac came up with the new name.  Anyway, I thought it would be cool to try and mix the two together - ol' 2pac looking like a guy from the Renaissance period.  Oh yeah, and Snoop Dogg over there was definitely a no-brainer, heh heh

KRS-One: The Blastmaster

 

Here comes another one, KRS-One!  The guy has the nickname of "The Blastmaster" because of the way he would win rap battles.  When I first heard the nickname, Ironman instantly popped into my head.  Yeah, THAT guy fits the description pretty well.  So, lo and behold, Krs-One in an Ironman-esque super suit!

Rakim: The Microphone Fiend

A couple of months ago I was reading about all of these rappers with clever nicknames, and I came up with a new idea.  I thought it'd be entertaining to draw some of these guys and kind of mix their respective nicknames into their character in a literal sense.  This is the first one - Rakim.  He always loved to call himself the "Microphone Fiend".  He probably wasn't prepared for this, however.  I turned him into a REAL demon/fiend, yet I still let him keep his rapper look a little bit.  I've done this with 2 other rappers and I'll get them posted soon. At the moment I'm actually working an Eminem one.  Stay tuned, everyone...

Bear Chopper

The bear biker is back!  Just thought I'd color it up because I enjoyed doing the design so much.  In reality, I had to meet a really cut and dry deadline with this one and I had to blaze right through it.  Of course, I'm tempted off and on to go back and polish something up over there, tweak something over here, etc., etc.  There are tons of things that I have wanted to do it, especially with the things I know now, but I decided I wouldn't touch it again.  Keeping it like this makes it feel more loose/free, and I like that.

[Photoshop CS5, Wacom Bamboo tablet] 

Abed Nadir caricature

Abed from Community!  What a great show - if you haven't seen it, I definitely recommend it.  The main goal here was to try and get some good sinister looking light effects on him to make him look evil.  He's not really evil in the show (or is he?), but if his Abed-powers were turned to the dark side he would surely be a force to be reckoned with.

[Photoshop CS5, Wacom Bamboo tablet] 

Bullet Time!

Man, that last file dump was exhausting.

Alright, here's what I'll do from hereon in:  I'll update with maybe one or two each day until I'm all caught up with the stuff I've got as of today.  No more sketches, time to start posting some digital paintings.

I learned a lot when I did this one - about atmospheric perspective, textures, and color choice.  I stuck with warm colors to draw the eye towards the main focal point (the dude's face), and cooler colors to gradually push everything else back to create some depth.  Happy bullet dodging, my friends!

[Photoshop CS5, Wacom Bamboo tablet]

Sketchbook 2012

Ok, here goes the first sketch dump.  All of these are selected pages in chronological order from my first sketchbook from this year.  Medium used for all of these are a mechanical pencil and a touch of white charcoal.

- first few were mainly for figure practice.  The best poses always come from breakdancers, shaolin monks, streetball players (in that order!).  I pieced these pages together into one big scan, hence the wacked-out borders.

- Probably my favorite thing to do is draw caricatures.  Don't know why, but I end up drawing rappers half the time I do it!  Why is that?  Here we've got Jay Z, Snoop Dogg, 2pac, Kanye, and 50 cent.

- Alright, here we go.  When I want some off the wall idea I usually ask one of my roommates to give me a random subject to work off of.  I asked for a random time period, and for a few animals.  The result was this: a raccoon, frog, rabbit pirate crew.  Had loads of fun doing it, which is probably more important than anything else.

- Haha, these guys showed up because of that same game.  The challenge was ''rats in the 1920's''.  BOOM baby!  Had no choice but to bust out the rat mafia.  The rat Al Paccino on top with the tommy gun is probably my favorite.

- Gotta get the cityscapes/landscapes up in here, too.  This was based off of a couple of photos somewhere in the northeastern U.S, probably Boston.

- This one here if I remember right was from Bryce Canyon in Utah.  I'll probably color this one in photoshop later because the colors in the canyon rock were gorgeous.

- heh heh....don't ask, what was going on, ok?  I drew the guy in a weird perspective at first then decided to throw in a background to make it work.  I liked the effect so much I painted the thing later.

- yep, you guessed it...it's a guy horrifically being turned into tree against his own will.  Shame.  There he was calling to me for help and all I wanted to do was draw him.

- once again, shaolin monks have some of the best poses for figure drawing.  Love these guys!  I may have overdone the folds a little on the top one, but I'm happy with it.

- and there's another one of 'em...I should probably do some more soon.

-  my professor once suggested to us that we try mixing references together to try and better understand what was going on with the skull structure and all that jazz, with humans as opposed to other animals .  That night my buddies and I saw an episode of Futurama where Jack Nicholson had been transformed into an ape.  soooo I kinda thought I'd try it out just for a laugh or two...

- drawing old geezers is super fun.  Plenty of detail in the face, lots of stuff to pay attention to.  I just like doing portraits in general, I guess,

- so......penguin on a hang glider.....good stuff.  Just having fun, really.  No other way to explain it.

-  I had the urge to do some city scenes again.  First one was my own composition, no photo references.  My focus was to play with the shapes in the buildings to make them feel more alive.  The other one was a mix of photo references.  I was going for more of a European style there.

- obviously practicing figures again.  Turns out gymnasts are great references for some really unique poses.

- I hope those of you that come across this site are into the show Community.  Then you'd recognize these two guys right away - Abed and Troy!

- more caricature practice.  I tried exploring how just the shape of the head can be manipulated to make someone look unique.  [Keanu Reeves, Jay Leno, Alfred Hitchcock, Tom Cruise]

here I took that principle and practiced it with body shape as well, in order to design some characters.

- shopping cart jousting?  Yeah, I did just do that.  Don't tell me you've never thought of doing it.

- I might be lying to you if I told you that I've always wanted to draw a bear on a motorcycle.  But come on, you've got to admit that most biker gang members look like bears.  It was bound to happen.

- so I found myself drawing yet another rapper (Rakim) one day, and I slowly started turning him into this demon like creature.  I finally got my hands on some Prismacolor markers, which had never used before, and I thought it'd be good practice to do the shades and highlights on this guy.  I've still got work to do, but the markers are actually fun to work with.



WHEW!  The FIRST file dump is finished.  What a doozy.  I pray nobody was injured/disfigured in the process...

The Blog has LANDED. Almost.

Alright, ladies and gents!

I've been putting this off for a long time, but it looks as though I've been sucked into the blogging world.  I hope to be able to at least mildly entertain the extremely fortunate souls that make their way to this page.  Don't worry too much, I won't be spewing forth all kinds of nonsense (I hope!) like most personal blogs - this is strictly an art blog.  I finally made the decision to get this going in order to get more acquaintances and feedback for my work (let's face it, deviantArt doesn't cut it), and perhaps inspire some people along the way.  Please bear with me as I get content up onto this thing - the first few posts will no doubt be very lengthy file dumps!  Feel free to critique/comment on anything.