Letting Things Go

I have been reworking another speed paint I liked, but decided things weren't clicking just right. The perspective has some deep rooted issues, and the composition ain't great, so I'm letting it go at this stage:

I've also started polishing my Silverhawks, but that's also a bit on hiatus, as I figured I need something showing more progress as expected from a concept artist, utilizing my contemporary skills. I want a minimum of last year's work in my portfolio ready for GDC Europe. (Waiting for volunteer applications to open up for 2014, I've already booked my flight and hostels, with a couple of days in Dusseldorf.)

A Dieselpunk vacuum tube night fighter is the idea that came to mind. I just love aircraft and I'm going to have fun with the lighting. Here's where I'm at so far:

 

 Speed Paints:

More Silverhawks

Lost my job a couple of Saturdays ago, as my boss can no longer afford the control room. Mom is naturally concerned and hoping I would find something else, even though she knows I'm planning to go to Germany in August and South Korea in September.

I'm enjoying being unemployed though, so I'm not sending out resumes with much enthusiasm.

You would also think I would spend more time on my portfolio, but I tend to procrastinate as usual. Never been very good at working from home.

Been working on more Silverhawks redesign stuff, from adding more characters to working on the Miraj - from more thumbnails to a painted model.

Also did a page of random landscape thumbnails when I didn't feel like working on Silverhawk stuff

And as usual, speed paints:

Unearthing Architecture

After completing the Leoptiofis Oracle, I thought it would be a good idea to go with something different and design a space ship. I see I haven't posted any of the work I did on that, and there's no time like now to amend that, so here's the preliminaries, thumbnails based on sensing organs, from an eyeball and tongue to the inner ear and olfactory sensors:

Trying to plot the perspective for a beauty shot proved frustrating, so I created a 3D model to help me, but trying to render it to fit my style has me stumped.

I dug up some environment thumbnails I started a couple of months ago, of a temple on top of a floating island, part of the Leoptiofis project, half of which are in the following image. I added more thumbnails to see if I can come up with more ideas, picked a favorite and fixed some of the perspective (which still needs work) and threw some colors on it.

Going to keep working on it.

As usual, I have also continued doing a speed paint everyday, here are some of my favorites from the last time I posted:

CC: Plant Enemies

Taking a break from the environments so I can look at them later with fresh eyes, I shifted towards drawing thumbnail silhouettes of walking plants, inspired by the first enemies you see in Captain Comic 2. The first 3 are based on the in-game sprites. For the rest I have been thinking about the plant life cycle and how it might play if combined with animal locomotion. I was also thinking about jungle life, to fit with my initial environment studies.

Scrappy game jam

Last week a group of friends, lead by my friend Allen, came together for the weekend to work on a game. As part of the group, I had done concept art and tiles for the level. After our composers played the music they had made for the game we decided to head in a different direction as far as environments go, but maybe I inspired ideas by doing these.

I have done concept for our protagonist, Scrappy, but Ellis, one of the other artists, has taken on the task of fleshing him out.

Finally, I worked on enemies. Again, most of these will be thrown away as we work out the mechanics, since Scrappy is supposed to collect parts from downed enemies changing his abilities, but it may inspire ideas in the rest of the team.

We are also planning to have a flying mid-boss, as well as one underground.