Slow going

Hey, remember when I said I'd have one finished piece for this post? That was a lie. A terrible, terrible lie. This week though! Get ready. The next post will have a minimum of three, maximum of four nice finals. Here's a sneak peak, plus something older that I liked but never uploaded until now. These are basically sketches with a little color to make it easier for me to paint.

This is a thing for Fantasy Art, where the assignment was wide open. I really love a lot of sprites and demons and stuff from Japanese folklore, but I guess I steered clear of doing anything directly Japanese for a long time. I'm not sure why. I think maybe it was too dangerous to delve into something I love so much. Also, I think doing Samurai imagery is a little cliche. Samurai are badass. I know Samurai are badass. Let's get on with our lives.




Anyway, I really love kappas, which are water-dwelling turtle-monkeys that have water in a depression on the tops of their heads. They are experts in the art of koppojutsu, which is the ancient art of bone-breaking, which they invented. They also like to kidnap children and rape women. They possess incredible strength, but are drained of it if you can get them to spill the water they keep in the tops of their heads. An easy way to do that? Bow to them, and they'll bow back, the polite suckers. It's a really simple image. There's that Samurai there, right? He's trying to get to that temple over on the right side. There's some kappas in the way. Whatever.

This next one is the second and final assignment Sam Weber's given us for Fashion Illustration. We basically just had to do a poster for any Shakespeare play with no guidelines beyond keeping it proportionate to 24x36.



This is the composition I ended up going with for Macbeth, which is a pretty badass tragedy, though not actually my favorite (Hamlet, holla). This isn't scene specific, it's just trying to evoke the sense of the play. A little supernatural, pretty violent, and a little sad. Dude's trapped by his own conception of fate, is all. This is a painting, and it's just about done. I forgot to paint his crown in, so I'm going to be doing that shortly. It looks pretty ok. Megaprops to the lovely and talented Kali Ciesemier for helping me figure out color things.

This next thing is something I did for Brian Ralph's Character Development class last semester. The assignment was to redesign a packaging mascot that we thought looked stupid. We only had to do one, so I did the Red Baron, who sells frozen pizza and shoots down planes. Afterwards, though, I remembered those wonderful Crest Gel commercials and had to do the whole team and their villain, the Cavity Creep.


Gouache on Bristol, like everything else I was doing last semester. These were crazy fun.

On a separate note, I'd like to thank everyone who has a link to my blog. I'm getting some nice traffic leeching off of your better traffic, so I'd like to extend my appreciation. If I don't link you but you link me, give me a heads-up and I will rectify the situation. I like to help. On that note, if you've got some time, check out the links on the sidebar there for some of the best Illustrators and designers around. It's a pretty solid list.

So, a recap for what's to come in the next post: One (1) Macbeth poster, One (1) Kappa/Samurai piece, One (1) Beast of the Apocalypse, One (1) Quetzalcoatl vs Treesaurus Rex tea party.

Wait. Did I just blow your mind?