Assassin Devil

Another ArtOrder design; I'm happy with how the armor turned out in this one. Not sure about the mask though.

ArtOrder Tuesday challenge

Just another ArtOrder submission; I wish I had more time to work on these, but at least I'm getting faster in the process.

Artorder Tuesday challenge

Unfortunately because of a backlog of portrait commissions, I haven't had as much time as I wanted to work on illustration work; but I've still managed to get an entry together for this week's Artorder challenge. I was bummed out that I didn't get things together enough to submit for last week, especially after finding out that Todd Lockwood was helping to judge the entries. He's a fantasy illustrator I've had a great deal of respect for since I was quite young; I actually met him briefly at DragonCon a couple of years ago, and he was about the nicest guy you could meet.

Anyway, I had to rush this piece a little at the end, but I think it came out fairly well. Challenge was to paint a book cover mock-up featuring a Mind-Flayer locked in combat with a female Drow (Both are monsters from Dungeons and Dragons).

That's why the action in the piece is shunted so far to the right (to fit on the theoretical front cover).

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.

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.