les vampires noir et blanc

So here's the final inked piece for tomorrows ArtOrder Challenge. Not sure if I stand much of a chance with the competition, but I'm glad I entered all the same. I'm a little unhappy with the sort of sloppy line quality I ended up with; I'm still not very comfortable with inking digitally, the tablet just seems to restrict my basic hand-eye coordination enough that I can't make the kind of subtle changes in line thickness that I normally love to do with brush and ink. In the future I think that I'll stick to real-world tools for black and white work and edit them on the computer.

Vampire Sketches

I always like to see other people's sketches and early prep work, so I thought someone else might be interested in seeing some drawings for a black and white piece I'm doing for the next ArtOrder challenge; from thumbnails to final drawing. When I don't have to turn in preliminary work to an art director I tend to work in a much more chaotic fashion at the sketch stage; as you can see here I'll draw over the same drawings repeatedly, adding limbs and changing poses in the same space. I'll post the final once I've (digitally) inked it.

ArtOrder Tuesday challenge

New ArtOrder challenge has been posted; there are some really cool pieces up this week. Mine was posted up a day late by accident, so I need votes more than ever! Do it for the good of America; or whatever your country of origin happens to be. Or vote for one of the other talents on display.

Okay, enough excuses now; I promise that tomorrow there will be a post with honest-to-god art in it.

Movin'

Haven't posted for a little while because I just finished moving to Portland, OR. Still getting settled. I've got lots of stuff in the pipeline though, so don't fret.

Tiefling Bikers

A rather weird challenge this time; I'll let Jon explain himself in his own words:

So here is the challenge:
Pick one of the D&D races that I've previewed here on ArtOrder
Deva, Dwarf, Dragonborn, Eladrin, Elf, Gnome, Goliath, Halfling,Human, or Tiefling, and deck them out in their coolest biker gear and give them a really cool chopper that would be fitting for their race. Have some fun with this one, and we'll see where it goes.

Alright man; I just follow orders here...

So I chose to do a "Tiefling" biker (and his 'old lady'), as it seemed the natural fit for an outlaw gang member.

Now you may be saying to yourself : "The engine on that bike doesn't really make sense, you obviously don't know anything about motorcycles", to which I would reply that YOU obviously don't understand the mystical realm of fantasy in which this exists. Clearly the thing runs on Dwarf blood and magic; so standard combustion engine physics don't apply.

You might also notice that if the rider were in even a minor collision he would be thrown into an array of sharp spikes, but I think it's obvious that safety is not a major concern for this guy. He collects human finger-bones for god's sake.

I'm pretty happy with how it all came out, but I wish I had picked a less static pose for the male biker; other than his gross moustache, he's kind of boring right now.

This is actually for next week's challenge; I haven't finished my piece for this week yet. I might end up skipping it altogether because I'm not all that happy with the progress I've made so far...I've still got a day, so I might find the time.

ArtOrder Tuesday challenge

The latest ArtOrder challenge has been posted.  I'm proud to say that my silhouettes were used the most by other challengers, which is very cool.  Thanks to Tariq Hassan, J Lonnee, Mike Faille, Chad King and Peter Mohrbacher for their great renders.

Swing by ArtOrder and take a look at the new work; give me a vote if you feel compelled.

Skywhales

The 4 big tentacles crush and devour food, the the longer ones are used to sense and immobilize prey.

Prep sketches and a weird contest

I've been working on this for a little while, but think I need to start over and take it in a new direction.  There are some things I like about it, but it has a completely different feeling to what was intended.  It all fits into my unofficial motto though: "quit early; quit often"  I enjoy restarting pieces from scratch until I get them the way I want. 

 This is mostly due to my bad habit of jumping the gun on new projects and sometimes not doing sufficient prep-work when I'm excited about starting the real piece.  I've gotten a lot better about it, but every now and then I'll still charge ahead before I'm ready.  Sometimes it works out in exciting ways, but more often than not I'll end up back at the drawing board; with a very detailed color-study.  At least I get a blog post out of it now though.

I saw this Scion-sponsored art contest at http://www.kongregate.com/collabs  

The grand prizes are actually pretty good.

If you don't know, Kongregate is a sort of collaborative Flash-games site; and has the sort of user base that you would expect.  

This art contest is all over the place; there aren't any submission rules or standards, you don't need to provide any real profile information and it's being voted on by what I would assume is an audience of primarily teenage boys killing time in Comp Sci class.  There's already a lot of plagiarized work up there and I can't imagine that there's going to be any way to prevent all fraudulent voting.  I think the winner will be decided more by whoever has the biggest social network than anything else.

 I put a piece up just to see what would happen with it; there seems to be such a tide of new submissions coming in that entries are buried pretty quickly.

I really do not envy the curators that have to sort out that mess.

ArtOrder Submissions

I've been sending in art for the weekly tuesday challenges at artorder.blogspot.com.  It's been a lot of fun and has gotten me working in ways that I probably wouldn't if left to my own devices.  It also makes me feel like I have something to do while looking for a job.