Today's 30 minute sketch paint

Today's topic was "Vegetable Golem."  I screwed up the value families by painting the creature before I added the darker background bits.  Initially I had painted it so it was almost a silhouette in a misty fog, but I got kind of bored with that and wanted to paint fiddly bits.  So I did, but kept the value range still very compressed.  Then I decided I wanted some darker background stuff and that's where it went wrong.  Still it was a lot of fun to paint, and I may try another this evening.

"The Veggemancer summons The Greater Snap Pea Goliath...Soon those churlish villagers will know the cost of mocking Crumbfurth Spirule and The Esoteric Society of Arcane Botany!"

30 Minute Paints

These were done for the "Spitpaint" Facebook group in which they post 3-5 topics a day and you are supposed to take no longer than 30 minutes to make a painting of it.  I've actually found this to be tremendously educational.  The 30 minute time line forces you to pick an idea and stick to it or otherwise wind up with a horribly incomplete image (which does happen from time to time) This means you are often kind of stuck with your decisions, and at the end you can see what did and didn't work.  With these, even ones I'm reasonably happy with, I always try to come away from it with a lesson, or something to think about for the next one.  Better brush organization, clearer starting idea, focus on the subject and not spend a bunch of time on the background, etc.

Astronaut Wizard

 Evil Goo

 Halloween Mansion

Too High

 Warden

Proptober Results

New arts! I didn't manage to get a prop a day done, but I did get a bunch and managed to learn a lot.  Also building up the momentum of working on something small and finishable in a session or two of painting definitely helps keep the creeping self-doubts at bay.  Looking forward to taking on more projects like this.

I wrote little one paragraph stories about each of these on facebook. I'll have to see about copy/pasting those in as an edit :)

Proptober!

After seeming Thomas Scholes post about doing a prop a day for October I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon and see what comes out!  Today's prop is a preserved and bottled "Astral Polyp."  I wrote up some text about it as well.

"Shamans of the Danar region are renown for their ability to pluck these psychic parasites off dimensional travelers and bottle them in jars made of a mysterious glass."

"Pyromancer's Death Mask"
Painted mostly on the train into and from work. Artrage with some tweaks in Photoshop.

A super quick lunchtime sketch! (like 15 minutes :P) 

The Necromancers Dream

Painted in Artrage with some color tweaks in Photoshop

The "City In the Eye"

City in the Eye

"Known as the, "City in the Eye" Ossos is more a vast archive and reliquary then a functional city. It's catacombs stretch deep into the curious substrate on which it's built and some say there are vast, naturally occurring chambers and networks of tunnels beneath that stretch for unknown distances. Some say, in hushed tones, that the Cleopteran monks and priests who act as caretakers to the many millenia of records use these chambers for rituals of communion with something that causes those tones to become mere whispers. Those whispers tell of a voice that speaks through time itself. Of a low hum that becomes a buzzing roar, the modulations of which contain knowledge of arcane and eldritch things. Asking on this matter while visiting the "city" is the surest way to cause the good graces of the strange monks to evaporate entirely, and to be "invited" to leave." Excerpt from Titus Graeme's, "Oddities of the Outerlands, a Traveler's Guide"

This started as a cloud sketch in Photoshop on the train into work and developed into this over a Saturday morning of half watching old 80's horror movies.  I came up with the text for it as I was posting it on Faceboook, but the ideas developed alongside the painting while I was working.  As I'll often start with only the vaguest idea of what I'm going to end up with I tend to write an evolving back story in my head as I work on it.  Sometimes things will show up in the painting that will inspire some story and sometimes the story will call for additions or modifications to the painting as it becomes a more solid idea.   

WHOA an update!

Hullo!

It's been a while and I've been neglecting the Yann and it's inhabitants.  The reason I haven't gotten much personal work done is that in addition to working at Harmonix I am also one third of Dancing Sorcerer Games, an indie studio formed by Paul Siegel, Mike Woods, and myself after the collapse of 38 Studios.  We now have a website up here and are hoping to finish our first game, Road of Kings by sometime mid to late summer.

I've also been feeling the need to push myself and my artwork even harder and decided to start following the 2D creatureplanet weekly activity on CGHUB here.  Here's the start of my entry for this week.  The prompt was "Scatterbrain" :)