Art Dump

This is what happens when I get overly ambitious with a piece and don't have the time to dedicate to finishing it. The topic was 'A Boy and His Dog'. The idea was for a friendly competition between the So Cal guys on conceptart.org (Art Center guys) and the Seattle crew. I was facing off against a friend of mine and wanted to one up him. Well, my schedule didn't allow me to dedicate the time to doing this one right and before I knew it the deadline was upon me and I had less than 6 1/2 hrs to finish pencils and paint on this thing. It wasn't going to happen so I did the next piece in 6 1/2 hrs to at least submit something for it. The judges liked my piece better.. in Daniels credit, he was cramming on his scholarship work and I was busy dealing with business stuff on my end as well.


Quick sketches last week lying in bed, recovering from surgery. These were mainly warm ups for Creature of the Week #45 over on conceptart.org. The concept title that we were given was 'Mover'. Yeah, pretty frigging vague eh? Well, I didn't want to be yet another walking city ala "Howls Moving Castle" so I was determined to do something a bit different and original. I was a bit hopped up on Vicodin doing these.. they looked alright at the time;)

The final sketch before color. You can see which thumbnail I decided to go with.

.. and the final. There's a bit of an homage to James Jean in the color palette and composition that you might not see. Yeah, I suck with paints so I have to resort to color picking from time to time. I got some votes and pretty solid comments from some well known artists over there so that in itself is victory in my book. I'm still learning this whole color thing.

Here's the story behind my concept in case you're interrested:
The Kaibutsu Ichuu Umi anchors itself to coral reefs looking like a small rock island. Swimmers, who can't resist the seemingly carefree fun, tend to fall for the trap. This Kaibutsu patiently waits for the swimmers to climb onto it's head and begin jumping into the water. Once the swimmers have started having their fun the Kaibutsu Umi uses it's tentacles to push the unsuspecting snack into it's large beak like mouth. The other swimmers will go in after their friends to try and find them only to suffer the same fate. The rock then disappears back into the water and moves to another location. Places that the monster has been rumored to be responsible for disappearing swimmers are all in the Pacific Rim.

Life drawing from a session at Art Not down in Seattle back in March.

A character design for the NEG Combat Soldier for the RPG CthulhuTech being published by Mongoose Press (done in January). I went real simple on the colors for design readability. Overall I think this was a successful design, I'm pretty proud of it.
Towards the end of the year you can expect a large dump of CthulhuTech concept art and illustrations when the book is at the presses and I don't have to worry about NDA's.
-Mike V