We’ll never forget how it ended. All those poor reindeer…

Happy Holidays & Happy New Years!
-Hoa

Oh yeah, the genius stroke to turn the canister into pepperMINT spray belongs to my buddy Kevin. Peppermint! Get It?!!!1111!??HA.

It’s the first week of class in the High-End Fantasy Game Art Creation workshop offered at CGSociety.org. It’s been several months since I’ve done any Lynda.com or Conceptart.org classes, I’m itching to learn again. I’ve been heavy into Javascript and painting the last two years. It’s time to sharpen my 3D game art skills.

The course is taught by Katon Callaway, a character artist on God of War 3. I’m stoked to learn everything I can from his class. I’ve only watched half the videos from this week’s course and I’ve learned a few important practices already.

For our first assignment we are to pick the character we’ll be building through the course. We’re encouraged to pick an existing character/design so we can move forward quickly and not waste time developing costumes or updating our blogs that two coworkers and maybe a cousin who clicks the wrong link from Facebook ends up at. My top 3 choices are Prince of Persia, Mitsurugi from Soul Calibur, and Lion-O from the new Thundercats. I’m leaning towards Mitsurugi cause he has the most interesting costume in variety of materials, patterns, and layers.

I’m itching to get started on the modeling… but alas I have JURY DUTY in eight hours.

Okay, final post on this He-Man illustration. It’s all colored. I got the urge to try and mix in some graphic design elements and halftones. I’m trying to bridge my cartoony t-shirt design style and my painterly style. Maybe I’ll revisit it for a touch up someday, but right now I think it’s time to move on. I’m still trying to find the balance between detailed rendering and simplicity that’ll yield the best results.

I’m back! The internet was out at the apt for a few weeks, but I had time to work on some freelance projects and play some video games during the down time. I also went through at least 7-8 more iterations of Skeletor and decided to settle on this.

I’m not sure if it’s the most dramatic of poses but it’s got the epic-slow-motion-before-the-film-is-sped-up-300-action-movie feel. I think in the rendering He-man’s face is too scared now, so I’ll have to bring back some of the energy as I finish up. We’ll consider this a learning experience and apply said lessons to my next piece.

The Spidey image that I’m so proud of looked nice on the front page, but I don’t think it represented me well enough to be landing page material. It was time to do a fun silly caricature of some sort for the front page. After some trial and error and a dozen sketches I settled on a cartoony/detailed style I liked. It’s an amalgamation of my evolving Photoshop painterly style and my cartoony Illustrator vector style.

I really wanted to go with the sketch of me on a Segway, as a tribute to Arrested Development, but felt it was a bit too whimsical. Comparing myself to GOB Bluth, may not be the smartest professional move to make either. I also thought about redrawing myself in the pose Spidey is in, but the sketches looked too much like I was doing a backflip. I had a dangerous backflip incident while camping once and did not like the look of that image. I ended up going with the one of me in a “read for action” pose with a sketchbook in hand. That is also an Iron Man glove in the sketch. Soon that artwork will see the day of light.

I’m pretty happy with the result that is on the front page now. I think the shadows on the hands need some work (the light source on them is all wrong!) and it needs some texture work. I’ll be touching it up as I also work on some complimentary Flash code for it. Here’s a little preview. I’m going to keep my new Flash skills I picked up building Loud Dog’s gallery viewer last month by building a game “inventory / stat” screen for my caricature. You can put silly clothing on me or feed me gross vegetables through the power of ActionScript 2.0 and XML!

I have important client work to wrap up the rest of this week, but should have the prototype up sometime next week.