New Promotional Material Taking Off

You may have noticed a change at the top of this blog. I've changed my header image, as my retro futuristic airplane project is coming to a close, taking it's place on my social media profiles, as well as a new design for the back of a new batch of business cards. The front part will get some minor changes to the information presented on it.
Going to let my eyes rest for a couple of days, take another look at these, and if I don't spot any mistakes I'll order new cards.

 Some progress shots:

Speed paint dump:

Not Resting On Laurels

I have not been completely slack in my art making. If anything, I've turned on the afterburner.
I post to deviantArt or Tumblr far more frequently, check those out if you haven't yet.

The situation at the day job has gone from bad to worse. The part time job has turned full-time as far as hours go, but without the benefits of such. My calculations show I have made less than minimum wage for November. Not sure whether night shifts will earn a higher salary, we'll see when the pay slip comes in on the 10th, I guess.

All this extra work is leading to a lot of stress and fatigue, but I realized that making more art is my best bet to get out of it, so I've decided to dedicate an additional half hour or so a day to it. I've learned that giving myself small goals such as that is the best way to stay motivated and working.

Been using the time to model an airplane / spaceship design I came up with for the back of a new batch of business cards. Started with some speed paints to visualize the idea, moved on to silhouettes and found a retro-futuristic design I liked, fleshed it out some more, tried different patterns on it, and taken it to 3DS Max.
I got the basic shape down, and I'm currently working on the hanger environment for it to sit in, but might came back to refine the shape once I see how the lights work on it.

  For my speed paints, I decided that after a year's worth of them, it would be worth while to do studies from my growing photo library, with the occasional completely imginative work.
A few favorites:

I need to get back to art

GDC Europe and Gamescom did not disappoint. Met friends from last year, made a few new ones. Showed my portfolio around, exchanged business cards, expanded my Linkedin network and came home with plenty of swag.

Already planning on how next year will be better. I need a bigger bag for all the freebies, might try to contact people ahead and see if I can score more free stuff - the kind that goes to the media and business guys. My feet will and back will be sore, but there isn't much I can do there.

It's been super busy at work since I returned. Only 2 operators to cover 2 shifts per day, people on vacation because of the holiday, a secretary that was so fed up with the way she was treated she quit and with new stores coming in with teething problems, I haven't had time to do more than the daily speed paints.

Hope the new operator is integrated quickly and I'll have some time to work on my own projects.

I may even take the advice I was given and try to freelance, or do some pro bono illustration... We'll see.

The sensor ship didn't quite make it into the portfolio. I mainly blame the extreme perspective. At least I got a nice background out of it.

Enough chatter, time for the speed paint update:

Temple by Moonlight

Brought my final floating temple illustration far enough that I'm happy with it (almost, watching it on a different screen has brought a problem to the surface which I'll get rid of before this I post this.)
I was hoping to use the rest of the week to polish off the sensor ship image, but it just isn't working. I suspect the extreme perspective.

Yesterday I was informed they now want me to pull a shift everyday, which leaves me with precious little time to work on my portfolio. It's going to be crunch time to pull it all together, print it out and rework my website (I believe this is the 4th time, though this will be more functional than cosmetic.)

Also planned to design custom tuckboxes for my copy of Race for the Galaxy, to which ended I painted these 3 spaceships. After doing the green one I feel I can do better with blue, so that might be out, and I also need a yellow ship to match all player colors. I'll also need to work on the background to pull it all together and some typography. Don't know how I'll get around to it now.

Before this mess at work was finalized I found time to do something silly, with a study of the Pharaoh of the Fish

I'll stop with the daily speed paints when I'm in Cologne for GDC Europe and Gamescom, but here are my faves since I last posted.

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: