3/11/2014 Tac-Mage

The persistent challenge facing the modern mage is the need for a consistent mana source in an ever changing combat environment and the stealth needed for the mage to finish reciting his spells without being detected by the enemy.  With the patented BakTac™ Ghillie suit system, you can carry your favorite mana rich vegetation on you at all times. 

The BakTac™ system allows you to create a mini Eco-system you can pull from whenever necessary.  Add high mana generating poison spiders and black adders to the mix for on the fly sacrifices needed for spell boosts when encountering pinch situations.

Paired with the TuffTome™ digital display spell book, the modern mage now boasts the most compact magic systems in history, ready for any challenge in the modern battlefield.

9/16/2013 30 Day Challenge: Day 4

Getting better with economizing my space.  I'm going to try buying some new inks and use some of the new pen nibs I bought a few months ago.

I find myself getting a bit stuck in trying to create far back grounds.  Once I draw an interior, I find myself not allotting enough time into thinking about what's happening beyond windows.  I know how I would deal with these problems if I were painting, but pen and ink being so unforgiving...

Anyway, the journey continues!

2/4/2013 Shit that's goin

I'm going to post a few desk shots as well, but just to shake it up a bit, I'm posting some FAN ART!!!

Seems like I'm in a bit of a marvel kick these days.  I thought it'd be cool to do some Spiral fan art over the weekend.

Dance, you sweet lady, dance!

I'll be honest, I first fell in love with Spiral from watching people play her in Marvel Vs Capcom 2.  She has a bizarre dance for an idle animation, and she has really weird looking moves.

Readers who have good memory will remember I talked about my attraction towards weird fighting game characters.  I wondered for a while why she was so weird in MvC2, and one day I ended up on her Wikipedia page.  Apparently she has to do these elaborate hand gestures and dances to conjure up her cosmic powers, allowing her to teleport, skip dimensions, summon swords, etc.  WHICH IS TOTALLY AWESOME.  And that's pretty much when i fell in love with this character.

Last week I was passing by my co-worker's desk and saw this.  Pretty old news at this point, but I haven't been paying too much attention to what's going on in comics these days.  Spiral's part of the Uncanny X-Force!  I was stoked to see her again!  Seems like she's some sort of raver in the series, which is kind of a cool/silly re-imagining of her cosmic dances, but either way I'm actually interested in reading an American comic!

-------------

As promised, here are some more desk shots.  I'm finally done with the "build-up."  NOW IT'S TIME FOR ACTION!!! I still have a ton more pages to finish before this chapter is done.  But hold on to your horses, it'll all be worth it in the end!

Close followers of this blog will have seen this page develop over the past few posts

Also, I'm working on another drawing project (doing the spiral fan-art has inspired me to do an ink painting.  More on this in the future.)  I dug up one of my old sketchbooks.  Finding it still had a few blank pages, I started to sketch in it.  But while I was flipping through it, I found a drawing I haven't shown anyone!  This is a really old drawing, but I was so psyched to see it.  I remember this drawing took me almost a week to finish, and I had to look at a TON of reference for it, too.

I'M DEFINITELY DOING MORE DRAWINGS LIKE THIS!!!

1/21/2013 BACK FROM THE DEAD

Hopefully my delusions of grandeur have come true, and millions of people read this blog.  And those millions of people must have been wondering where I had gone.  I'm certain many people have come up with theories on how I must have died in an adventure with vikings.  These theories are surprisingly far from reality.

This is what is commonly referred to as a mess

This is pretty much where I've been spending all my spare time.  Since moving to Seattle, many things have happened, but one of those things is that I've had to re-write the story I've been working on.  Thankfully I have a good buddy to bounce ideas off of, and the prologue that I have finished inking doesn't have to go to waste.

Storyboards are really not pretty, and for the most part embarrassing to show to people.  That's why I've been neglecting posting this whole time.  Storyboarding is a slow process for me, and I've had to sketch out a lot of pages.  But now that that's done, and I'm doing work on actual boards, I have stuff to show that I'm not terribly embarrassed to show!

ATTACK OF THE LETTERS

More after the break!

Some updates on what's going on

I've posted about going to and coming back from Korea, but I've been pretty absent from the blog since.  So here are some updates on what's been going on!

I've been swamped with work every since I got back.  It's gotten to a point where I've made a laundry list of things that need to get down, and I've barely even made a dent in it.  My father has asked me to do some product illustrations for him, which is impossible for me to refuse, seeing as he raised my pitiful ass.  So there's that, and a slew of other projects I need to get done before I get back to the fun paintings I so love to do!

Anyway, I've atleast had time to rearrange my room a bit so i can do some larger drawings.

I've cleared off the entire drafting table to make room for a nice diptych, and also...

I've made space on one of my walls so i can draw some really big drawings as well.

----

For those who are in the competitive fighting game community, you might know a little legend from the third strike days.  His name is Dr. Sub-Zero.  AKA John D. Rockafeller.  This guy was one of the main reasons I decided to join the fighting game scene.  He really convinced me how fun and interesting it was being part of that community.  He was incredibly funny, and charismatic.  I found myself hypnotized and allured to this quirky community, and I have to thank him because I met some great friends indirectly because of him.

I found his old old podcasts through gootecks (whose podcasts taught me a lot about the technical aspects of fighting games), and I was sad that he wasn't active anymore.  Well, after years of waiting, he's back!  He's being doing Live podcasts again, and they are hilarious!

This is basically a long winded way of me saying that I ended up doing a design for him!  And I was super happy to do so! 

Hey, if you ever get the chance, tune into his show!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI1HSdEwV-c

 

My mind at night

Finally finished this painting.  I'm super happy with how it turned out...


BUT...



Sadly things didn't work out the way I wanted it to.  For those who have been keeping up with the previous posts, I've been working on this painting as part of my blog redesign project.  Originally I had thought about putting this painting behind the header.  So my logo would almost seem like it was part of the scenery, but alas, after trying it out last night, I've realized that it was a massive disaster.  I had to down res the image and compress it to the point where it looked hideous, and not to mention the header getting lost in a massive pile of neon mess.  Hahahaha, oh boy...   No matter, atleast I got a pretty painting out of it.  Now I'll just have to come up with an even BETTER idea...

Stay tuned, this battle is not over.  This blog will look amazing sooner or later.  THIS, I PROMISE!

3/12/2012 WIP

just chipping away at this one, almost at the finish line! 

3/10/2012 WIP

Still moving along with the blog redesign.  I've finally got something down that I'm happy with.  Much work is needed to be put into this piece, but I haven't posted in a few days, so I thought I'd give everyone a preview of what I've been working on! 

3/6/2012 WIP

Sorry for the lack of good lighting on this one.  I like to use a camera instead of a scanner, because i end up working too large for the scanner bed to take my image.  But it makes digitizing my pencil drawings a little difficult when lighting situations are not optimal.

Anyway, I'm ditching the city skyline painting for my blog redesign, and it's going through a bit of an evolution.  I won't end up using this pencil drawing to start my painting either, but it was a good exercise.  The end product is going to be related to this, but you'll have to stay tuned if you want to see where this is going!

Drum Machine

It's been a while!  I've been so busy with work, I seemed to have neglected posting!  From now on, I'm going to start posting in-progress shots as well as sketches, so I don't leave this blog unattended for weeks on end.  So check in often!

I've also been entertaining the idea of bringing back the LiveStream.  I had a lot of fun running those streams, and oddly enough I learned a lot of new techniques and ideas for paintings while running those streams.  The only problem was that towards the end of my streaming "career,"  I just had zero to a couple viewers at most, and it started feeling silly even bothering.  If anyone knows how to promote something like that, please send me some advice!  As long as there are viewers, I'd love to start running those again.

This painting came into being because I wanted to draw more robots.  I've been becoming more and more interested in robot designs that are more on the dumb side.  By that I mean designs that are redundant, or serves no purpose.  For example, I would describe a human piloting a robot that rides a bicycle as being hilariously dumb (sweet, a new idea for a painting!).  I just wanted to design something that was a clustering mess of mechanical parts, and this is what came out!