The Concrete Schedule of 2014

      Well then, long time no post.  It occurred to me this last year that I've not made use of this blog as well as I'd hoped I would.  I believe part of the reason for this is that I was not operating with any sort of definite schedule.
      That's why this year, as part of an ongoing effort to add a bit more structure to my life, I'll be making an effort to update this blog every Friday afternoon with that week's sketches and rough works.

      So in this, 2014's inaugural post, I'll be covering a bit of ground from last semester.  This last Fall semester was a very busy, hectic time for me, and as such I produced very few finished pieces of artwork, but rather produced quite a few sketches and smaller works.

      First up is a rough version of one of several sketch cards I'd been working on back in early November.  Just playing around with the pose, really; trying to convey Reina's physicality and affinity for bladed weapons.

      I've also been playing around with how I want firearms to look in Novus Imperium.  Here I was going for very geometric styling, with a simplified profile.  Simplification of designs has been an emphasis for me in the last few months.  By forcing myself to use less detail, I must put greater thought into how that detail is used.

      Here's two lunatics I hadn't drawn in quite a while.  On the left is Gray, and on the right is Phoebe, two of Reina's former squadmates.  These two and Reina all received the same augmentations and alterations.  Phoebe has adjusted well, and is a masterful tactician.  Gray on the other hand is extremely volatile, but is far too valuable of an asset to dismiss.

      Speaking of augmentations, here's an orthographic that I'd done, trying to both iron out Reina's proportions as well as the attachment points for her prosthetics and the positioning of the various dataports throughout her body.

      While considering the possibility of a Novus Imperium comic/graphic novel, I sketched out a couple ideas for splash-page type images.  This one is compositionally very much inspired by Shirow Masamune's artwork in The Ghost in the Shell.

      This is the first of two more-finished works that I'd never previously posted.  I'm quite happy with how the pose and the flow of the image turned out.  Of course, as soon as I'd worked this up I went and began making significant changes to the look of Reina's armor (the topic of a future post, perhaps?).

      And the second more-finished work.  While it's not "abstract" in the traditional sense, it was a very enjoyable stylistic study.

So that's what I've got at the moment.  As I'd mentioned at the beginning of this post, you can expect to see more next Friday.  Here's hoping for a much more productive year than the last.

Cheers,
Geoff

"Welcome to Pandora, kiddos."

So I finally got around to buying Gearbox's Borderlands 2 a couple weeks back and I've been thoroughly sucked back into the world of Pandora.  There won't be any spoilers ahead; the game's only been out a few months and not everyone's gotten around to playing it yet.

Anyway, it's gotten me working on my own team of intrepid Vault Hunters, all of whom are based on mine and my younger brother's original characters.  I've only completed a reference for Reina as The Huntress so far.  But that's what this blog post is about:  The preliminary work on the other members of the team.

First up is Trent as The Veteran, based on Reina's counterpart Trent Valimund.  He's ex-Hyperion (a nod to Roland being ex-Crimson Lance in the original Borderlands) and is roughly equivalent to Roland or Axton.  His Action Skill is to materialize his own heavy renegade version of Hyperion Engineer power armor around himself, briefly granting him additional speed, durability, and melee and gun damage.  I've done a nice ink line head portrait of him, but I've only got a couple small loose pencil sketches as to the rest of him:

The other character who's actually nearing completion is based on one of my little brother's characters:  Introducing Charbelle as The Pseudo-Siren.  A mad scientist obsessed with Sirens, she has fabricated a massive powered gauntlet fueled by Eridium which lets her effect Siren-like powers (albeit more clumsily than any of the six natural Sirens):

I'm unsure as to the exact nature of her Action Skill.  At present I'm thinking she would be able to cause a phase blast to emanate from a targeted enemy, inflicting splash damage on any nearby baddies.

So I guess this is just sort of a peek at what's coming.

Cheers!
Geoff

Comics on the Horizon / Been a While

To start:  Goodness, I haven't updated in like seven months.  My college experience kind of punched me in the face at the beginning of the previous semester.  I won't delve into any details, but some major snafus in the registration process resulted in my unexpected transfer to a different school.  Again, I won't get into details, but I will say that I'm much happier where I'm at now.

I'm getting back into the groove with a fairly short post here.  For one, I've given the blog a visual update with a new (and if I may say so, much nicer) background image.

So.  I've mentioned in most of my posts here Novus Imperium, an SF universe created by several friends and myself.  It's been in development in one way or another for about eight years now.  Do you know how much development can occur in eight years?  The answer is "several metric space-tons."  At this point, NI is basically a fully-formed universe, with its own defined rules and aesthetics.

There is simply so much at the ready right now that I am (very cautiously) considering doing a comic / graphic novel adaption of some of the storylines that have been tossed around over the last couple years.  Right now, I'm planning on approaching the project from a manga-influenced angle (specifically, I've been hugely influenced by the works of Shirow Masamune over the years.  Primarily his Appleseed).  When I say manga-influenced, I don't mean that in every aspect.  Naturally, it'd be in the standard western left-to-right format.  Actually, it'd be easier to show you what I mean:

You'll have to click on that for the full effect.  These are some unlettered test-panels from what may be the first page of the whole project.

I realize that most westerners simply expect color in their comics, but this is a matter of stylistic choice for me.  In reading many of the very tech-and action-heavy SF mangas by the likes of Shirow Masamune and Tsutomu Nihei, I've really come to appreciate how cool stark black-and-white work can look (there are numerous instances, in Tsutomu Nihei's Biomega especially, of panels that simply would not have nearly as much visual impact if they were in color).

Granted, this project is in its infancy.  I don't plan on going beyond that first page until I've got every part of this first story laid down on paper.

So I guess I just move ahead from here and see what happens.  At the very least, it'll be a learning experience, as I've never tried to do anything quite like this before.

Cheers!
Geoff

"In the grim darkness of the far future...

...There is only war."

I've been on a pretty serious Warhammer 40,000 kick for the last few weeks.  I've been using my various ideas and free time largely as fodder for practice with digital painting techniques.  I've been trying to familiarize myself with the "start with a bunch of dark blobs, and refine it from there" method of digital painting.  I started with this one...

 ...which turned out rather well, and prompted me to continue experimenting with digital painting techniques.  This one was followed up by a couple of quicker, rougher sketches:  A Space Marine helmet painted in the Ultramarines' colors, and an irate Ork.

Each of those took maybe a half hour to paint.  I'm particularly happy with the Ork.

The most recent of my fully digital paintings is a portrait of one of my "Stonehides" Chaper Space Marines:

This pretty well typifies the sort of dark, painterly look that I'll be trying for with most of my other WH40k character portraits.

Last up is another image of that first character (one of my original characters, Inquisitor Acolyte Scarlet Winter).  This one is somewhat more my traditional style, having been originally sketched in pencil.  I then scanned it and layed down the base colors (charcoal gray, dark metallic brown, very pale skin tone) in Photoshop.  The rest of the coloring and shading was done in MyPaint, the program I used to paint all of the above images.

With this one, I wasn't so much going for a "dark, painterly look" like my Space Marine above, but rather focusing on the interplay between light and dark tones in the image.

So yeah, I've had WH40k on the brain for a while.  On the plus side, as long as I'm doing 40k themed stuff, I can file playing Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine under "research."  It's a win-win!

Cheers, all.

The Scrapyard: Starship Design

I realize this post is a day late, but I was busy drawing, so I at least used yesterday well.

As I mentioned last week, this will be a longer post than usual, detailing a number of my incomplete and abandoned starship designs.  In middle school and early high school, I did a lot of starship designs for Novus Imperium, an original sci-fi universe created by my friends and I.  At that time, most of my designs were profile-view images, and as such, many of the ships' shapes were difficult to discern.  In the last few years, the number of ships I've designed has decreased significantly, but those I have completed are of much higher quality.  The following are several designs from the last two years which simply were never completed.

This first one is also the oldest, and is a concept for a small shuttle that would be housed on the underside of my previously designed Cirrus.  The shuttle could be deployed in or out of atmosphere, and be used to land in areas too confined for the corvette-sized Cirrus.  While this version of the design never got past the rough pencil lines, some revised version of it will likely be appearing in the future.

This is lineart for the private freighter Aubree's Bounty, originally conceived as an enormous Lego model by my close friend Kevin.  The Bounty had a rough run-in with pirates a few years back, resulting in the ship's scarred exterior and cobbled-together bridge area.  I'm particularly pleased with how the engines on this one turned out.

You might have to click on this one to see all the little details.  This was a short-lived attempt at displaying a wrecked super-freighter.  These massive ships are several kilometers long when fully laden, though only the command and engine sections are equipped with life support.  Most of the ship's length comes from the cargo spar jutting back from the command section, to which all variety of cargo containers can be attached.

Another ship inspired by Kevin.  This is the linework for a Mygean frigate, based on his "MCS Color of Water."  I tried to take general shape and feel of his original, and give it a distinct aesthetic.  In fact, that's something I've been trying to do across the board, giving each faction's ships a distinct visual look.

Based on the previous ship, I wanted to design something else of Mygean make.  This is an older, decommissioned Mygean cruiser, which has been adapted to act as the flagship of a pirate lord.  To give this a more haphazard look, I took a bit of inspiration from the Reaver ship seen in the first episode of Joss Whedon's Firefly, giving it spines, and big sheets of armor just sort of riveted onto the ship's decaying frame.

So that's what I've got this week.  If nothing else, you've at least gotten a glimpse into the sort of creative dynamic between myself and Kevin.  He is, in many ways, the "Idea Man" behind a lot of Novus Imperium.  Many of my starship designs, especially, use cleaned-up and refined versions of visual aesthetics he's established with his sketches.

As far as character development goes, I'm still stuck on the character of Reina Cloude.  I think I may just keep rolling with doing artwork of her until I'm thoroughly burned out on her design and can finally force myself to work on someone else (such as Reina's close friend/sometimes flirty romantic interest Doc Haplace,  who has received virtually no development art whatsoever).

Anyhow, there'll be more stuff up next week.

Cheers, all.

Like Section 9, But Not

Another fairly short post, as I'll be in California for the next few days, away from my lovely computer.

I've recently been doing some work on a character who plays a fairly important role in parts of the Novus Imperium storyline I've been developing, but who until now has received fairly little attention in terms of artwork: Captain Jerid Bannon.  He is a member of "Green Team," an elite group of Karic special forces operatives with police cross-training, tasked with protecting Karic from internal threats (I had initially come up with this description a couple months back.  Immediately after typing it out, I realized that if you replace "Karic" with "Japan" in that sentence I basically just described Ghost in the Shell's "Section 9."  Appropriate, since they fill similar roles).

My latest design for the good captain:

I've tried to improve on his original helmet/face designs (originals can be seen here: Link).  The new helmet especially looks more aggressive.

That's about all I've got at the moment., though readers of this blog do get a sneak-preview of this year's updated reference of my character Reina Cloude, showcasing a new digital inking style:

It's still in the middle stages, obviously.  The full reference will of course be a full-body front and back multiview, with a background.

Previous references:
2009
2010
2011

Stay tuned next Wednesday, as I'll be doing a special extra-long entry on starship design.

Until then, cheerio!

Further Explorations in Body Armor

Short post this week.

I've been expanding on some of the sketches I posted last week, both figuratively and literally, as I used blown-up versions of my sketches as the basis for this.

Just a nice, high-detail redraw of the back of Reina's armor.  I'm pretty much sold on how the upper back looks.  The hips could still use refining.  I've been doodling more ideas for the front of the armor, but the stomach section is still giving me a lot of trouble.

I'll likely have a bit more to show for next week's post.

Until then, good day, all.