no extra charge for awesomeness

i just watched this Russian movie that was by far the most heavy-metal thing i've seen since Legend. it had all the trappings of your standard wizards and warriors type pic but with a new spin on things. definitely less "by the power of grayskull" and more "tonight we dine in hell." but basically the entire thing was like a storyboard of heavy-metal album covers.

i'll break it down for you, as i don't expect any of you will actually watch it. but if you will, spoiler alert.


our hero is a solid bad-A with a pet bat, he's called 'Wolfhound.' he's an escaped slave and looking for the man that killed his parents and his entire clan. and he travels with an girl and a blind wizard that he saved from prison.


as if it couldn't get any better, he becomes the body guard of the princess, who also has the key to setting free some kind of all-powerful druid demon god.


so this guy is after her, and consequently the plot thickens, because he is also the guy who wiped out Wolfhound's clan. he's also known as 'The Wolf' (hence Wolfhound), because he and his followers have wolf tattoos, (vs just being called something like 'Skull-head'). oh and, at one point in the movie Skull-head's hand gets chopped off and he gets a new METAL-HAND! and is even more unstoppable.


then there are random characters like this, who looks a whole lot like the Virgin Mary, but isn't. the overall visual theme of the movie is very pagan. she's just some lady that apears to Wolfhound and gives him magic dust.


such magic dust comes in handy when you're fighting the fog-monsters, and you've taken shelter in a mini-Stonehenge (but bigger than a mini foam 10-inch Stonehenge). if you've run out of options, make the rocks glow.


but most metal of all is the climax. Wolfhound has already been mortally wounded in the fight to defeat Skull-head, but he still has to fight the unleashed druid demon god (that's a pretty sweet rock tornado thing). he calls on the gods of his clan ala "sword of Odin give me sight beyond sight" and "excuse me while i whip this out," out comes the powersword.




Wolfhound saves the day, uses some dust to heal his wounds. Scores the princess.


and pet bat takes the cursed druid-demon-key to dispose of it somewhere over the rainbow.


SA-WEEET!!

fig dump

the latest batch of figure drawings from the Bridge, the U, and Todd's house...
i picked up a bunch of funky colors to branch out from the usual black and bottle green. these are all about 2-3 hrs a piece.

speed

a quickie. started this at about 400px across, to keep the play on form. then it grew a little to be able to play with the lights and colors. what you see is the working size.
ended up with this undersea-ish thing.

24 hr Comic Book Day!

So here it is, my effort undertaken in the name of 24hr-ComicBook-Day. A big thanks to Derek Hunter for hosting our crew. There was pizza and madness and mugi-cha. It was fun, and long, definitely an interesting experience, and a great one to be had.
If you're not familiar with the concept, the name is pretty self-explanatory; you get together and for 24hrs as the face on the clock runs, you do comics. There are 'official' rules and all concerning page count and in what time period you create your story, but we just did it for the kick of it. We started at about 10am on a Saturday and finished up Sunday the next morning. Then we all died.

A bit about the pages below: Knowing that the event was coming up, and that I would go from 60-0 in no time if I didn't have a story already in place, I had previously done some homework to supply names and dates for a premise I had in mind. The story was inspired by a Nova documentary about 'astro-spies' during the Cold War.
Also, I only did 15 pages instead of the whole 25. I figured to shoot for something manageable that I could be done with by event's end, instead of getting into what I already knew would be over my head. There are only 14 here, because 1 really sucked, and didn't add to the story.
As you will see, my layouts are pretty minimal in design, and highly dependent on the text-bodies. I don't have the calligrapher's touch so the text is digital in-post.

Well, without further delay, enjoy. I'd love to hear people's thoughts.

nube

so these are some new attempts to push myself beyond the my usual 'floating object' kind of thing into more realized illustrations/paintings. constantly i'm coming across stormin artists that are so completely inspiring and yet at the same time humble me to the dirt. maybe one day i'll be able to touch the tiger's tail.

tank

part of my latest sci-fi project.
i started off doing a bunch of thumbnails to get a design working. then when i got to one i liked i did a quick junk-poly 3D build to see how the design held up in the round. a few refinements later it evolved into this guy, which is then great to spin into a good position for a paint-over with perspective already established. then it was all about trying to get a feel and impression of texture and mood. next, a technical drawing to see exactly how it's built.

drawnight

some diddles from a few weeks ago.
an aquarium little vignette complete with tiny fishies, and some crazy roman-esque landscapes.

more

kindof ended up with a sci-fi-noir kind of thing. we'll see what comes next.

soldierin'

some varieties

more cowbell

so Tyler Stott and i have joined forces on a creative adventure into the future. kicking ideas at each other to motivate each other to churn out all sorts of cool crap.
right now we're still boxing around forms and trying to spin out ideas for future-militaristic outfits and weapons; ironically neither of us has ever really taken on this industry standard.

bridge art

this was drawing 'attempted' over a few weeks down at the Bridge Academy.

this one was the main one i worked on over the majority of that time, slowly, carefully, lifeless.


and once i was done with kicking that dead horse, i busted this out in about 40min. i like the marks and the lively-ness, but it definitely needs refinement. if only i had a few weeks to work it...

robo

little doodle from DrawNight the other night, painted it up, didn't turn out that bad.

ghost highway

the latest.
this one actually took about 3 sessions (1.5 hr ea). some days you just don't feel it y'know.
threw in a little John Erickson on the lights. actually my favorite moments in this one are the mountains and the horizon behind them.

fig

a few random drawings over the last few weeks.
you know how just when you're feeling like you're making a few gains, everything suddenly seems to worse and more disparaging than before, yeah...

graf

went and saw some cool paint down in Benjamin. the train was like a mile long, but we only saw about half of it. great variety of styles.

some details:


burn em down:

great juxtaposition: