Long but fruitful weekend

I don't have much time to type, but I wanted to just quickly say that the Gnomon Workshop seminars I went to this weekend were tremendously cool. I'm so inspired and pumped up from listening to all those artists and watching some of them draw - it's always great to watch Feng zap out an amazing drawing in just a few minutes. Someday I will be that fast.

So here's some quick little environment thumbnails that I did over the weekend. This is where most of us concept guys start. The drawings are tiny, like 2 inches wide or smaller; you're seeing them blown way up because I scanned them at hi resolution. I love doing these little things, they're so much fun, and this is where so much of the "design" work gets done. After this it's just drawing it larger, adding details etc., which can actually get pretty tedious.


Lofty overview of city at night


Futuristic mall? train station? Dunno!


Oh, you know he's a tourist.


Generic Sci-Fi Tech Hallway number 143. Seriously, I draw lots of these.

Since I really need to do more personal work so I can have a nicer portfolio book, I'll most likely clean a couple of these up and paint them.

And finally, I'm really quite amazed that someone will pay me to sit around and draw spaceships all day. Because that's what I did today. If you had told me when I was 6 years old that I'd be able to do that for a living, I would have laughed at you. Well, maybe I wouldn't, but all the adults around me would have. That job description really didn't exist until after Star Wars happened. So, thanks George, for creating me a job! I can forgive you for Episode II now. But not Episode I. Nope, sorry, you'd have to actually hire me at 3 or 4 times my present salary to draw spaceships all day before I'd soften on that one. :)

Made it, again

New comic is up. This one was relatively quick, which I can attribute to relative simplicity combined with I got started on it so late last night that I just had to whack it out as fast as I could. I really need to try to not do it all in one night.

Haven't been doing much else artwise besides work stuff, the weekend and all week this far have been full of other things. Tonight I gotta do the laundry and wash dishes so probably not much happening tonight either.

This weekend I have a 2-day seminar thing at Gnomon starring Syd Mead, my instructor Feng Zhu and a bunch of other entertainment art luminaries showing us how they do their stuff, which I'm really looking forward to. Then I have Monday off, which is quite pleasant. I'm not sure what I'm going to do on Monday yet other than sleep until at least 10am.

Like Clockwork

And yet another comic gets up "on time," yay! Actually I should put them up Wednesday night late so you east coasters can see them first thing, but I didn't finish the art on this one until a bit after midnight, so I didn't want to stay up to update the site. Well, at least I did indeed get it up on Thursday. I'll be happier when I get past the "setup" strips, because I have a bunch of comics written and all I have to do is draw them, plus I can jump around a lot more. I've been writing and drawing the setups on the same day, which is a bit more demanding.

Here's a little bonus, from my sketchbook:

Idle Time Scribbles

Sometimes I get a few minutes of "down time" at work and I just sketch. Here's a page. :)

Wow, Another Comic!

Yes, indeedy, it's Thursday again and comic #2 is up. Sorry it's a tad late, but I couldn't put it up last night, I ran a bit long on recording, bills and laundry, and needed to go to sleep. I don't have the fancy CGI stuff running yet so I have to do the updates by hand. I'll get that all working before too long.

Another new project too, I'm doing a couple of commissioned sketch cards for Mike in NC, one each of Batman and the Hulk. Fun! It's been a very long time since I drew either of those guys... I was looking through some very old art that I did when I was 7 or 8, and there's a few of Batman in there, drawn all kid-like with felt tips. Don't worry Mike, I've gotten better since then!

Still cranking out characters here at work. I had to re-do one of them to make him look younger and hipper, which was kind of a bummer since he's probably my favorite painting of all the characters I've done for the game - something like 45 now. He still looks cool, but I liked him the old way better. More grand and dignified. He does have cool snakeskin boots now though, that's a plus.

Right, back to work...

(This post was written at 10am my time, but I couldn't get Blogger to post it until now, 6:40pm. Weird)