Starting 2012 with a Bang

When I started this blog my goal was to be an illustrator for a property like Warhammer, M:TG, or L5R and slowly move my way out of games.  There was a good 3 months last year where I had my nose to the grindstone, buying up art videos left and right and doing weekly Conceptart challenges.  It was thrilling, frustrating, rewarding, and humbling all at the same time.

But games just kept creeping back into my system.  I'm still working on the game Prison Architect with the fine folks over at Introversion, and I felt like the network I had built in the indie game world was just too substantial to put to waste.

So I finally decided to make a game.

After years of encouraging developers to make their own games (as IGDA Manila head) I'm finally taking the leap myself.  I pitched the idea a good friend of mine (who I feel jumped at the opportunity to work on something/anything aside from his startup company) and he surprised me with a build of the basic game on my birthday.  We plan on rolling something out by the end of month and then just seeing what happens next.

Not sure how much I want to reveal about the game right now, but take a gander at the first few graphics above and start drawing you own conclusions!

Legend of the Five Rings : Introspection

I've long wanted to have some of my artwork on CCGs like L5R. On many of the podcasts and art blogs I frequent, they advise aspiring artists to create work that suits a specific property and only show that specific work.  The argument is that an art director will not want to waste time wondering if you'll be a fit for their property, so if you can show it to them beforehand with some ready-made work, it'll make it that easier for them to decide to hire you.  This is the first of what will eventually become a set of L5R card art that I'm looking to present to the art directors at Alderac.

For this piece, I was inspired by the Daibutsu, or Great (ie Large) Buddhas of Japan, since neither of the previous versions of the "Introspection" card featured any kind of statue.  Since the butsu or Buddha doesn't actually exist in Rokugan, I figured I'd make the statue a representation of Shinsei, the wise monk of Rokugan who was advisor to the kami.  To be honest I don't know enough about Rokugan yet to know if there are such statues put up to honor him, but it doesn't seem like a stretch to imagine that there are such statues in place.  One interesting thing about Shinsei is that according to legend he has a crow as a permanent companion.  Instead of including the crow in the statue, I though that having a live crow perched on the statue's shoulder would be more interesting, sort of alluding that crows have an affinity for the statue, while at the same time giving the viewer an additional sense of the scale of the statue.  I've pasted my piece on top of the original, while also showing the original to the right for comparison.

This is the first of what will be five (I thought it was apt) pieces that I will complete over the next few months then submit to Alderac entertainment.  I'll be working on them on and off in between my current projects so I don't really have a deadline for them, but hopefully I'll have them done before the middle of next year.  Not sure what the next card will be, but if anyone has any requests I'd be happy to hear them.

Meteors! UFOs!

This piece was created to be cut up into promotional banner ads for a game.  Unfortunately for me the client didn't like the final product (though I was paid in half).  I had no hand in the design of the character, which is essentially a guy in a white shirt, jeans, chucks, and a long black trench-coat.  The biggest takeaway from this piece is that trench-coats are hard to draw in motion, and only look cool on Gambit.

A Tale of Two Werewolves

After posting about the Monster Stand-Ins project last week and looking at my werewolf painting, I realized just how far I'd come in the past year in terms of my artwork.  To show that off, and to hopefully help people learn from my own past mistakes, I decided to dredge up an artwork that I'm frankly quite ashamed of now, in order to compare the two pieces.

The artwork on the left is a werewolf that was created in November of 2010.  Let's take a look at what makes it a weak illustration, ignoring the obvious difference between the styles (ink and painted) and my own improvement in rendering.  The werewolf on the left is very stiff.  In fact if you reduce the pose to geometric shapes you'll see that his shape can be divided up into a few triangles.  This makes him look like a cardboard cutout, and visually is not very interesting.  Related to that is how his shape doesn't suggest any kind of movement at all.  While this may be okay in some cases, this again leads to to a very boring image.  If your illustrations can suggest any kind of movement, it's always better than if they're still, with the exception of a character whose foundation is sitting still, like say, Jabba the Hutt.  Lastly while I used hatching to try to suggest a 3-D form, once again his pose and lack of movement keep me from really suggesting that he exists in a 3-D space.  I've posed him in a 3/4 view but I might as well have had him facing straight to the front for all the good that did me.  Illustrations are also supposed to tell a story.  What kind of story is being told here?  Nothing.  He's a werewolf being menacing while standing behind a full moon.

The artwork on the right is a much more recent work that I created in November 2011 for Monster Stand-Ins.  It's the superior artwork to the werewolf on the left for a variety of reasons.  First of all his pose is much more fluid, but at the same time it's still easily composed into 3 distinct shapes.  His form also shows a lot of movement.  His body is twisted up so that while his lower body is almost in profile, the upper body is in 3/4 view, almost front facing.  This suggests that he's in the middle of a sharp, twisting motion from walking to the side (the right) to suddenly looking toward the front (ie towards us).  This twisting motion, as well as the positioning of the two legs, also helps to suggest form, and makes the werewolf feel like he exists in 3 dimensions.  Lastly, the way he's posed conveys a story.  In my head at least, the story is that the werewolf has been wandering the forest, seeking his prey.  Suddenly he hears/smells/sees something to his right, snarling and drooling at the thought of his prey nearby.  While it is questionable whether or not I ultimately succeeded in telling that story, the point is that I was thinking of  story, and that informed my choices when painting this piece.  In fact, I was actually snarling at the monitor every now and then just to get into the mood of the piece and push it even further.  I did none of that in the previous werewolf piece, and I think it shows.

I hope you all found this little self-critique useful, and once again I'd like to ask for your support in making the Monster Stand-In project a reality.  I will likely learn a lot more in the process of creating those monsters, and I will happily share whatever I've learned with you in return!

Spacechem voted one of 2011's top indie games by Gamasutra!

My longtime friend and artistic idol Chris De Joya pointed out to me yesterday that Spacechem is one of the top indie games of 2011 as voted on by the Gamasutra editors.  While I've always maintained that my art is the least important aspect of the game (I'd rank it design first, music second, art least) It's always still a thrill to see it getting press on sites like Gamasutra.

As I like to do whenever I post about Spacechem, here's a little concept work from 2010 when we were first working on the game.  This mining boss is one of the first you'll "fight" against in Spacechem.  I drew upon industrial machinery when concepting for this, as well as mining vehicles in RTS games like Command and Conquer.  I'd also forgottent hat I'd actually  used Google Sketchup to help me better visualize the machine before drawing it in Photoshop.  While the Sketchup concept and the final product aren't 1:1, it's amazing how useful Sketchup as a free software can be for conceptualizing objects like vehicles and buildings.

By the way, even though Spacechem was nominated in this year's Indiedb awards, it still needs more nominations to find out where it ranks in the top 100 indie games of this year.  The whole Spacechem team would rally appreciate it if you could click here, then click on Puzzle Compilation, then click on Vote!  While you're at it go on and check out the other fantastic indie games on the list.