Isometric town

Midcentury-modern town I modeled and rendered in Cinema4D. Building designs based on Joseph Eichler and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. This was a personal exploration in low-poly modeling and isometric design.

Northman Portrait

Been a long time since I produced any personal work, but I'm happy to have completed something new. I painted this on my iPad, which I'm sure a lot of people aren't happy about, but that's really the only way I can paint now. I simply don't have the time, or even a place, to do traditional work. A lot of this was done on the bus to and from work. When making art on a bus "undo" is crucial! The way I think about illustration and my technique has changed a lot due to my job, where I'm working with 3D software a lot. It has made me think more about light, shadows, and texture than I ever did before.

Because of the process of working in Procreate there isn't any sketches or roughs to show. I made a thumbnail, then scaled it up and painted over it, which is a lot like what I was doing in my acrylic paintings, only without all the scanning and printing.

I apparently love painting hair haha!

League of War logo

Got a chance to make logo for League of War, a game that came out today for iOS.  I made the base of the logo in Illustrator, then took it into Cinema 4D to extrude, texture, light, and render. I had some heavy rivets going around the sides, but ultimately decided they were not adding much to the design, and looked somewhat cluttered.

Doing typography work has become one of my favorite things. I get teased a lot by the 3D artists for using Cinema 4D, but I love the program. It's really easy to pick up, fun, intuitive, and powerful. I recommend it if you are thinking of learning a 3D package, but are really only interested in motion graphics, static images, and film. It's not really ideal for in-game models, although it may be possible.

Shirt pic

I got a care package from Dapper Cadaver with some of the shirts I designed. They look sweet! $13 here: http://www.dappercadaver.com/products/dapper-cadaver-undead-apothecary-shirt-mens.html

I've been wanting to do a large print shirt for a long time now, and I'm really pleased with how this one came out. So nice to have it printed professionally where the the colors are what I specified. I also got this awesome skull in the deal...that's been a long time coming too haha!

Zombies...again

I started a sketchbook drawing while watching The Walking Dead...then I spent way too long working on it. Now it's a finished piece I guess! I think I'm done with zombies forever.

Legends of Slap

Got a chance to do a game called Legends of Slap. It was a really quick turnaround—I did the UI in about a week. I designed the UI, app icon, logo, and the blocks. I didn't design the map, characters, battle backgrounds, or the badges (not shown here). It's in beta and for Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.gree.slapslap&hl=en. There will be some more changes coming out soon, so check it out!

Dapper Cadaver Tee

3 color tee for Dapper Cadaver. They are available for purchase here. Really fun project for an amazingly unique company. I don't accept much illustration work these days, but when the owner asked me to do this one, my mind ran wild with all the possibilities. Obviously I had to do it. The client was madly in love with my Killing Death painting, so basically this was his concept for the shirt. It worked out well.

Fancy Octopus 2

I made this on my iPad with Procreate and the Adonit Jot Touch 4 stylus. At this point in my life I don't have a lot of free time to paint, or a studio area to paint in, but working this way is pretty satisfying and I am happy with the results. The wet brush feels much like oil painting—it's easy to get lost in the blending. It creates some nice soft edges that I never got with acrylic. I can't work on the computer when I get home. Because I'm on the computer all day at work, at home I need to switch it up or I feel sore and stressed, like I'm working a 15 hour day or something.

Lady's Foot Cream

I just let my mind wander on this, which I find very fun and rewarding. I can't stomach making art unless it comes from a place of pure ridiculousness and exploration. I have no interest in being profound or high-concept. This was a random sketch that I took to a way higher level of polish than it deserved, but it made me laugh, and that's worthwhile to me.

Well, obviously I haven't posted in a while! I've fallen into the void that is the video game industry, so naturally nobody sees what I've been doing till 2 years later. Also, I'm expecting in July, so I had to make a baby shower invitation. I like it a lot, but looking at it I can't help but think: "I used to do nothing but record covers for punk and metal bands!?" It blows my mind how things have changed...and how much I've taken to working in vector.

Distillation show

I am going to be in a show at Phidias Gold. Haven't been accepting a lot of shows for the past year, but I took this one because it sounded fun, and the line-up is killer! I took 360° photos that I want to make into an animated gif or something, so that will be up later.

Quests UI

I badly want to get into designing user interfaces for games. I think it's the perfect job for me because I get to do a variety of technical and creative work. For some reason that makes no sense to me, people don't want to do UI design in the games world. You get to do illustration, design, animation, and some light coding—while solving the puzzle of how to clearly communicate information to the player. I think it's fun, but I guess it's not for everybody. This would be an overlay menu for a fantasy MMO like World of Warcraft. It was given to me as a test. The company decided not to hire me because I don't have experience with a specific technology they are using, but have been very helpful and gracious by recommending me to their friends and colleagues.

This was the wireframe. The art direction was to be an edgy, mystical, fantasy hardcore MMO style like WOW and League of Legends. I want to talk about the UI decisions I made, but I think it would become a TL;DR situation. If you have any questions, leave me a comment :)

Head Labs

This is a Flash Project I did a little while back. I had so much fun that I thought I would do a lot more Flash animation projects, but it looks like my life is heading in a different direction. I'm not sure how technical I can get of this blog without losing you guys, but I'm gonna go ahead and explain the project anyway. It started off as an HMTL5 project that was meant to just be for fun and learning. I thought I would do some simple animations in Flash and use Grant Skinner's Zoë air application to export sprite sheets that I could manipulate with javaScript. Well, I ended up getting really into the Flash animation part, and what I thought would be around 25 frames ended up being around 180 (even though it's shot in 2s). The sprites (as you see here) got to be WAY TOO BIG to use, as they are 1.2 MB, whereas the Flash swf was only 143 KB. I probably could have cut down the number of sprite images by programmatically jumping around the frames, but it seemed too tedious. I decided that this kind of animation was not going to work for sprites, and since I basically already had it built in Flash, I continued in that direction. Then in further digression from the goal, I started doing sounds. I had no idea how to do that, so I taught myself Adobe Soundbooth, and got pretty good results considering that I just used the mic on my laptop.

The project lives here: Head Labs Site

you do tattoo comisions for free? for friends? for what? haha u draw pretty well and that would be pretty awesome :3

I've drawn some tattoos for my friends. I am willing to consider doing a tattoo commission if you send me the details, but be warned, it's not cheap! :)

Ask me anything

New Scanner

My old trustee Epson scanner finally started to go, so I had to get a new one. After a lot of research I decided to get an Epson V30 photo scanner. I went totally low end, and I'm glad I did! Truthfully, more expensive photo scanners are WAY more powerful than I need to scan artwork, and often the only difference is a bunch of software that I also don't need. I got this scanner for $75 total, and it scans at over 12,000 dpi. That's over 4 times higher than the capability of the scanner I was using and happy with, but because I never need to scan slides or negatives, I still have no need to to crank it up that high. I'm really happy with the color, it looks dead on, and because it's LEDs instead of a florescent tube, it starts up and scans SO much faster. Take away: Don't waste your money on a high dollar scanner for your art.

Skull Avatar

Skulls are just too fun!

Skull sketch

Sketchbook painting from last week. I am ordering a new scanner, so I just shot this with my phone. I used a new set of liquitex ink I bought, and I like it a lot! Real paintings to come someday soon hopefully. Sorry guys, got bills to pay.

Bossman HTML5 game

Hi folks!

Sorry I haven't been posting a lot of artwork. I'm actually taking my work in a new direction, so I'm building a new portfolio, and I want to debut all the new work at once. This project came up, and I was excited to do it. I've been studying HTML5, specifically for gaming, for the past few months, and this was an opportunity to actually put something out there. It's currently at http://playbossman.com. Our team of 4 made this in 48 hours! Granted, it's buggy as hell and still needs a lot of work. I did the art/concept/sound/level building. Sadly, my concept for the game had to be curtailed significantly to work, and get done in time.

This was for Node Knockout 2011, a 48 hour hack-a-thon revolving around node.js technology. Everything had to be made over the 48 hour period, and there were nearly 300 teams all over the world competing. The other 3 members of my team are in Argentina.

Here's my sketch for the game. No digital files could be created before the competition started, so I just had a bunch of drawings for my ideas. (I think my wonderful scanner is in it's twilight days as you can see by the CMYK sprinkles. I've had it since my first semester in college, almost 10 years!)

The idea was that you would race 10's to hundreds of people through a multi-level maze of bisected office space. The level would be constantly scrolling, and if you fell behind or through the cracks you would be killed and receive a pink slip. You could fight other players in a race to become the boss. The rat race in 8 bit game form.

Sadly, there are still some serious technical drawbacks to HTML5 games that I don't think will be solved any time soon, so this dream could not become a reality, in spite of it's relative simplicity compared to console games. The developers in Argentina worked incredibly hard on this, and I am in awe of their abilities! To give you some perspective, I am also a web developer, but these guys are so good that I didn't even touch any code. None of us had ever built a game before, but they are so talented, that they figured out how to do it the week before, and executed it over the weekend. Amazing!

I stepped up myself. I had only made a screaming doughnut for pixel art before this, but I got it now! We used impact.js, which is a great tool. The level editor is very easy to use, and it's well worth the $99, although we got to use it for free because the creator sponsored the event.

Weekly comic book review

Logo work for weeklycomicbookreview.com. Fun project, good fit for me. I've been really into faux vintage lately, as you can see. I feel like vector art isn't finished until it gets some texture, it seems too slick to me.

I started with something happy. I thought it was fun—not what they were looking for.

I had many ideas, these were some of the more resolved ones: