Make something cool everyday

Here's some characters I've been drawing for the Flickr group 'Make Something Cool Everyday."

Internet

Happened across a local internet cafe today so I thought I'd do the sensible thing and blog. Here's some kind-of-but-not-really-old sketchbook sketches, as captured by my cell phone.

Speedpainting Friday

So I decided to start doing the speedpainting thing we do at work on Fridays. Here's my first couple.

The Tootsy Rollers

My design for the Tootsy Rollers junior roller derby logo.

Blue Wolf

Just a quick little computer painting.

More Paints

Saur

I'm still a little new to using Painter 9.0, and painting in general, but I like how the brush strokes turned out on this one.

I was bored.

The Dominance War II

This past month or so was the second year of the Dominance War, a 3D game character modeling competition spanning four online CG forums; Polycount, CGChat, CG Society, and 3DTotal. I work at a game company, but I mostly do animation, so I thought entering would be a good chance to brush up on my modeling skills. I heard about the war from two of my co-workers, Gabe Jackson and Eli Heuer, both of whom entered as well. I went for the Polycount side - you can see my progress thread here.

There were a few things I was taking on for the first time with this model, mainly Normal Mapping, which can give a low-poly model the appearance of something much, much higher-poly if done correctly. It was used extensively in Doom 3, and is becoming an industry standard. You can see the Normal Map below with the other textures, it's the blueish-purple thing, and it's job is to control how light effects the model to create the illusion of added detail and smoothness.

I designed General Atrox, battle-ravaged warrior from an ancient and endangered race of giant lizard. They once ruled the galaxies with thousands of colonies on various planets, but have since been systematically eradicated by an unknown force. General Atrox hopes to find revenge somewhere on the battlefield of the second Dominance War and bring his race back to glory.

Line Test

I thought I'd get back into some of the ol' 2d stuff in Flash. Here's a scene in which Munchy, icon of popular breakfast cereal Crunchy Bunches, shields innocent and hip children from harmful radioactive waves with his very own cereal. Thus is born: Glow-in-the-Dark Frosted Crunchy Bunches. Available for a limited time only.

"Creative Process"

I posted my final year animation project from Digipen on YouTube. I worked on it with Stephen Philpott, who did the models and textures, while I did the animation.

Zoo Sketchbook

A few sketches from the Woodland Park Zoo yesterday. It was cold and wet, but all the animals were out and more active then I've ever seen them at that zoo. Maybe they were exercising to keep warm or something.

Lizardz

s'more stuff

I got Painter installed, so I've been coloring things up and generally experimenting with the program. My favorite tool so far is the the Chunky Oil Pastel. It gives a great traditional look to things.

The Giants

Above is a rough sketch of the the race of Giants. Below is the finished Avan design.

Avans

Another character design for the same project. The Avans are the bird-like race in the rough sketch above.

Below is the finished version of the Spartans.

Spartan warrior design

I've been designing a few characters for a friend's project and I recently began finalizing some of them. Here's the design for a Spartan, roughed out in Flash. I'll refine the lines and add color soon, and I'll put up some of the others as well.

The Untamed West

Unlike a lot of artists I know, I tend to sketch a lot of the same thing over and over for quite a while, rather then skip around stream of consciousness style. Right now that same thing seems to be this cowboy character.

I like to think he's some sort of trick shooter, by the clever name of Rick Shay, who abhors violence but can split a hair off your head looking through a mirror at forty paces in a rainstorm. At least that's what I like to think.

Mario Kart

I've found myself playing a lot of Mario Kart DS lately. It can be sort of addicting. I ended up sketching Mario, and he's pretty fun to draw. There's a few things I think could still be better about this piece. For one, I wanted more line of action to show up in the characters, but it got a bit lost when I added the blocky karts. The sense of movement also isn't quite as fast as I envisioned. I didn't spend enough time on the background, so it's a little boring. Line work could be better too. Beyond that, I'm pretty satisfied with the volume, detail and likeness of the characters.

Here, also, are some of the warm-up sketches:

Yar

I missed International Talk Like A Pirate Day with these, but here are some pirate sketches anyway.