OUT WITH THE OLD

After six years my old tablet finally kicked the bucket. Since it was right around Christmas I decided it was high time to get a new one. I had my eye on Wacom's Intuous and now that I own one... man, is it nice!

I painted this green fellow during a "let's try out the new tablet" session. The Intuous has way more levels of Pressure Sensitivity than my old one did which results in more control (Apparently technology moves forward over a span of six years)! I'm really excited to use this new tablet on future projects.

~Chris

SHAPE BOX

One exercise I really enjoy doing is creating a box, filling it with random shapes, and then seeing what they evolve into.

~Chris

LINE ART

11 Second Club, December 2009

Here's a fun piece I've been working on for the 11 Second Club's Dec. 2009 competition. I've been studying up on storyboarding recently and I wanted to put my knowledge to the test.

I would have just embedded the videos here on the page except they get cut off by my blog's layout and I can't figure out how to modify it. I really like this template, too, so I stubbornly don't want to change it.

~Chris

Just For Laughs: Gags

Bumpy Ride

Poor Posture

Reference is useful

I've been trying to visualize a character of mine for a while now. He's a young boy and the setting is the late 1800s. I got a book from the Library called "Children's Clothing of the 1800s" which helped out immensely. The image on the left is drawn from the book, and the image on the right is my treatment of the character.

~Chris

A Morning Stroll

Hey man, remember the 80s?

HE'S GOT A KNIFE!

Old favourites revisted

In my quest to create a new design portfolio I've gone back to some designs I did a few years ago for a game we were working on in India. I really enjoyed drawing the characters back then, but I wanted to see what else I could do with them from a fresh perspective. These are all new drawings. I was watching some great design videos on youtube by a guy named Jason Chan and I really liked how he put three or four characters side by side, all slightly contrasting one another. I still have some rendering work to do on the left-hand side character but I wanted to post this, as I'm pretty happy with it so far.

This is all drawn directly into Photoshop on a Wacom Tablet.

~Chris

Had a less than great day today

Daily Character Design: Office Fish

Okay, I cheated today. I already had this character banked away but I hadn't developed him past a certain point.

~Chris

Daily Character Design: Fat Football Player

PROTECTOR

More Thin Man Design Exploration

I realized, after modelling the head of this guy, that I was in the clutches of a wave of excitement and that I was getting ahead of myself. I had to take a step back and remember my priorities so now I'm exploring the construction of this guy and trying to come up with the most appealing combination of shapes. There's still lots more exploration to be done but I like where these are heading.

More to come!

~Chris

Homeless Wizard WIP

A little further along. I had to play around with some different layer types to be able to see my colours accurately but still have the light values underneath. In the end the Hard Light option was the best.

More to come.

~Chris

Thin Man

I'm trying to translate this character design into 3D. So far the head has been a fun modeling challenge. Since the energy of the character's face is emenating from the tip of the nose I started there and extruded back to create the rest of the head. It was my first attempt at this method and so far I really like it. The hair is a separate piece of geo. I'm probably going to have to come up with a different name for the character though as the Thin Man is the name of that really creepy and really cool monster from Pan's Labyrinth that has its eyes in its hands.

I hope to post some more progress soon.

~Chris

Another Homeless Wizard

Pencil and Photoshop.

I'm working on some character designs for my portfolio. Somehow I came upon the idea of, "What if homeless people were actually Wizards?" and am now exploring some possibilities. This guy was my favourite from the first batch so I'm going to paint him up nice and post some WIP's along the way.

~Chris