ARRRR!! Pirates Game Released!

Hey all, our new game Pirates of the Caribbean: The Legend of Jack Sparrow for the Playstation 2 is now in stores!

This is the first game released that I've worked on as concept artist. Along with the art director Miguel and my colleague Kevin, we created concept art for characters, environments and the various weapons and props you'll see in the game. As you progress through the game, some of the unlockable bonus content includes art by all of us.

It's based on the first movie, Curse of the Black Pearl, but since the story is being told by Jack himself, he exaggerates rather outrageously and you get to play his "tall tale of the sea." It's good fun, pretty easy to play, and it looks great considering it's on PS2. If you have kids, they'll definitely enjoy it, but it's good for players of all ages.

So please support our 14 months of hard work! :)

Official site
Seven Studios site

I have to find out what the policy is, whether I can show the art I've done for it in my portfolio. Oftentimes the publisher doesn't allow individual artists to show the pieces they've done - they are, after all, property of the publisher. What I do here at work is work-for-hire, I don't own any of it. Hopefully I'll be able to show you some of it. If not, I'll find out which pieces of mine are in the bonus content and let you know what you have to do to see it. :)

Meanwhile, still working hard on The Sopranos game. Life's all good, I've just been busy as usual. Getting ready for SD Comic Con, where I'm planning on having ashcans of Just A Bit Off... for sale. I might give a few away too, ya never know.

ARRR Mateys!!

To Draw, or Not...

Apparently there will be no new Kindergoth book for SD Con this year, either. Sigh. It really bothers me to say that. Kindergoth is really just too cool to let languish. I don't even care if I don't draw it, the damn thing should get produced. Sigh.

So I'm trying to figure out if and/or how I can draw the KG story that I wrote and have the whole thing finished by SD Con 2007. That's 96 pages over a year - about 2 complete pages per week. I don't know if I can do it without putting major dents in my weekends and probably straining my relationship with TGF. I don't know if it's worth it.

Maybe I can do it in three issues instead of four. That would be 72 pages... a bit less time put in and I could take more care with the art, do a better job. However that lessens the ability to make it a graphic novel.

I still don't know if it's worth it. I feel like I want to do it, but I don't know if it's a good idea. I doubt I'd see much money from it, if any.

Maybe it would be a better idea to do my own damn book, if I'm gonna spend that much time on something. At least it would be something I own! It's sooooo much work, though. That would be a lot more work than KG, especially since I'd have to write it all.

I dunno. I'll give it some thinkin' time and muddle it out.

In any event, I'm shooting for having an ashcan of Just A Bit Off. I need to get on a cover for that, don't I. So much to do, so little time...

Gotta rattle the cage a bit...

No, the event in the comic today never really happened, and that girl is entirely fictional. Even if it had I was never such a jerk that I would have called my buddies over and wrecked her place. I didn't have that many friends anyway! Besides, my exes had far sneakier ways of keeping me from playing guitar...

I'm tired and bored with doing this camera stuff we're doing at work, so I took a little time to do some recreational painting:

My portfolio really desperately needs updating, so I figured I'd start by turning some of the drawings in it into really sharp paintings. This one is based on this drawing, which is a sort of fanciful rendering of my imaginary future starship yard where I "build" my imaginary starships. I borrowed a bit from Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: Final Odyssey, and decided to put my shipyard at the top of one of his huge Towers that go from the surface of the earth all the way up to synchronous orbit, about 22,600 miles tall. Seems like a good place to build starships, huh?

So this is a huge bay at the very top of the tower, where tenants like myself own or lease sections and can fix them up as they see fit. The hole in the roof allows the ships to fly in and out, the whole interior of the bay is open to space. So at this stage, I'm just setting up the basic architectural structures and figuring out how the sunlight shines in through the open hatch and then bounces off to light other surfaces. There will be other lights in the painting, but the raw sunlight will be the brightest by far. There won't be any atmospheric haze, so the cast shadows will be very sharp, with light reflecting off the brightly lit surfaces and lighting up everything else to a lesser degree. I think it's looking okay so far.