Valkair, for James!

Here is the first pass on a quick character design/paint for a friend of mine. I am using  this as an opportunity to work tonally in three values, as I never pushed that before on a character (only thumbs and environments in the past). I like it, but its a much slower process for me to go in alla prima without a drawing before hand.  More on this later.

Here I am with this guy right now. I am really not feeling the pose anymore. I think I am going to go in and do something else with the arms, they are looking static, not threatening. Oh well, have to do it! 

Map revision

Here is the map, after revisions based on a meeting with the recipient. I hope this gets closer to his desires, but I am ready to make whatever changes necessary to get it fit his exact needs. 

one hour speed paint #2

Another speed paint from the same book as yesterday, Passages , by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher. Amazing book. I am looking forward to doing about 5-6 more from it before moving on to new subject matter for my exercises.

Detail.

Karo man from Ethiopia. 

one hour speedpaint

Speed paint of an African bride from the Berber Tribe. From a  photo in the book Passages by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher. At 50 min I gave up... I did not think I could make it better without another 2 hours, so I did not push it.

my mom bought me the book about 12 years ago to make some painting from it. Better late than never.... I hope!

detail. 

Anwyn- a map for a friend

Here is a first draft WIP of a map I am making for a friend of mine. He will use it to enhance his D&D game. I said I would do this for him about 5 years ago, and yes, I am just getting to it. I have no excuse.

I will be reviewing it with him today, getting feedback, and making the necessary alterations  based on our discussion.

Nod rule set first print

My first full rule set, the Land of Nod, is complete. I had a lot of help form my brother and a very good friend. This is the second or third draft, and needed to be printed as a working prototype to hand in for a portion of my Thesis requirements at San Jose State. The hard bound book was printed at Blurb.com, and they did a pretty nice job!

Peeking in on the inside of the cover. This draft of the book needs a couple more passes to finish off some of the rules and fluff sections, and get art in. While its playable now, it needs some solid testing, over a few months, before I am ready to finalize anything. 

Here is a peek at a page of mutable profiles, and their special rules. The game focuses heavily on the composition of your force, rewarding those who love to seriously customize their game play experience- an option that is becoming more and more rare as games become more and more streamlined.

Behind the rule book are some early prototypes for a force's roster sheet. They are laminated for ease of use during game
play. 

Here is a quick example of a draft of a layout detailing one of the missions in the book.

Sneak peek of some of the deployment zones for an included campaign. There is also a first look at an old world map of Nod, though much of this has changed at this point. 

A first draft of some fluff in a page layout.

First draft of a model and its stat line. Rules are not set, but this gives you an idea of  how the information will be arranged on a page. All profiles are broken down on an easy to use chart later in the book.

Some early art for one of the models in the book. It has been used for the character page above. 

The printed pieces have arrived!

Here is the unboxing of the pieces. Excellent packing from moddeler.com.  Just FYI, the printed plastic is the most britle  material I have ever worked with. It makes resin feel like steel. This is definitely for prototyping and positives for a mold, not for handling or play at all.

Laying out the pieces. Everything is here except the head. The head will be given a slightly thicker barrel on the gun , and the second prototype will also feature a thicker cannon.

Here it is on some WHF bases to give it height. It has a Rackham figure on the left, and the Barbarian Dude on the right.  TBD is gigantic next to the Rackham figure. The clockwork tank is a nice average between them. Though I intended it to fit in a 35mm world, the hull fits a bit better in Rackham's 28. That may change when the claws are added on.

Here I am starting to tac on the legs... The ift is so precise that  it does not allow for much, if any, of the material to share the joint. This is  a job for glue, but I cannot do that until I have the second prototype in my hands.As soon as I have the second I will glue and paint this up for pictures.


I'll keep you updated!

3D printed pieces finally done!

 Quick update!

The 3D pieces are finally done.
Moddeler.com was a joy to work with, and I cannot wait to pick them up tomorrow morning and start assembling this thing right away!

Here is a quick shot of an earlier work in progress, before texture and other touches were completed.

model WIP update

These first two pages are ideations and exploration to come up with an idea for a fighting vehicle for the humans in my board game. I wanted to mix a feeling of nature with a lot of gears and not make it feel too steam-punk. I shot for a crab, and was also inspired by Da Vinci's famous tank design. 

Here is the basic feel I ended up at. With the design behind me it  was time for pages and pages of call outs, details and  other drawing that just figure out where things go. Working on this has really taught me that you cannot "hide" behind drawings. Everything needs to be figured out on a level I have not had to think about in the past. Note, designs have changed enough that this is no longer intended to be a "steam tank" despite earlier designs and the title.

Here is one page of designs and details. There are many, many more. 

Here is the tank right now, in Maya. Lior Taylor is the 3D modeler.  This still needs textures and details and some smaller items sculpted. The pose is pretty close to set, but there will be some tweaking before it is done. This kit has a deadline of 3PM tomorrow in order for the printer to get it out by the end of the week! 

Here are some details of legs and the claw, much earlier in the modeling  process.

And BAM! Here is the first actual printed bit I have ever made! Its a leg at the earliest point in production. It is still without detail, texture etc, and is more than twice the model's planned size. This will be for a 35mm scale- to give you an idea, the body of the tank will be approx 5.2 inches diameter, and about 2.2 inches tall. This leg, with a quarter next to it for scale reference, is almost 7 inches long!

A grotesque amount of time has gone into this in the past month, I am glad it is almost done!
Stay tuned for pictures of the final print later next week! 

Completed table.

Added two kinds of flock, all over the place. It really tied it together. Did the bridge with chips of door skin to look like slats, and mosaic tiles to stand in for masonry, sand in the recesses- then washed it with a watery mix of whatever acrylic was on my pallet to desaturate the color. Then I mixed up a batch of bar-top with teal acrylic to fill in the brackish water pools. BAM! The board is done, and in 8-10 hours of drying, it will be ready to play on. 

Close up of the bridge, the brackish water and some flock. I like the reflection on the water in this one, but hate that I  can see places I missed with flock. Oh well, save it for the next table.

One more close up to compare with the earlier WIP from the last post.

Game board design/ fabrication WIP's

So, taking the most successful design from the previous post, the next step is making the full sized board. The board is 3'x 3' and will be used for game testing and display. It is pretty rough at this point but it is getting there  I am not completely happy with some of my transitions, but my budget was very limited for this project- I used mostly found objects and old paint to get this to where it is now. 

The first step is quickly constructing the quay-side terrain out of old pieces of 1' thick polystyrene  Its pretty poor construction material, but it gets the job done and keeps the board light. Its glued to a piece of door skin to keep it rigid.

The second step was getting a bunch of garden rocks to fill in several places to boost the texture and help break up the surface.

More surface texture... sand. An old diorama trick. It fills in the gaps between rocks and the surface. It looks good painted, too.

After sealing the entire thing a fast coat of spray paint lays in the first pass of color. his is very quick as tightening up happens later with a brush.

Second pass of paint. Glazes and then dry brushing. Glazes bring all of the colors together, and makes the garish colors a bit more subdued. Dry brushing helps to pop out some of the surface details like the rocks and the sand.

3rd pass with color. Total working time so far is about 6 hours. Just picking out specific rocks to break up the value range and help feature key areas. This is fast, as final table flocking will overlap any inconsistencies and mistakes. At this point the colors all harmonize and the board is looking close to complete. the next steps will be final highlighting, inking, flocking and finishing off the bridge, which will get slices of door skin to show off wood grain. Finally I will pour resin in the muddy areas to represent water pooling up in the riverbed.

Quick detail shot. I am really looking forward to the finishing touches to complete this piece. If I get extra time I will glue black felt around the edges to clean them up. I am shooting for the whole thing to come in around 8-10 hours, depending on cleaning up the sides. 

I'll get the final pictures up as soon as its done this weekend.

Game board designs

These are some game board designs I just did for a project I am working on. The top can be converted to be a set design, with an optional thrust section for actors to perform in the round. All done in Photoshop.

Portrait on a shield

This was a shield I painted for a Christmas gift exchange with old friends from the SJSU A/I graduating class of 2012. It is a white elephant style deal, and I drew Paul Yula! The theme was crow (corvus in latin), so I went for the literal approach, and stuck his head on one.

Here is a detail. Its acrylic on aluminum. I am currently trying to get better pictures, these ones reflected too much flash, washing out the blacks. I printed out font from PS and made a stencil for the lettering. If I remember correctly the shield was about 19'' on each edge.

Better shot for color, but horrible in general. I just did not get great shots of this project before I sent it off. I miss painting in acrylic! This was a lot of fun to do, and a nice break from the norm...

1st project WIP for a class led by the legendary Barron Storey

 The project is meant to teach us to communicate through our work. We use a process for generating images called "bits". This has us creating many smaller works of art and compiling them into one composition later, allowing us the chance to focus on every item individually. He stresses that we use different media and push our comfort level. I gave it a strong effort, even moving with a concept I hated, but keeping it as it was the first thing that sprang to mind.

These are icons I made to glue into the collage on the final piece.

This is my 2nd rough draft. I chose to use this composition and move to a final. This is 14.5x 9'' on illustration board.

This is my final after about 4 hours, including all prep and drying time. It was amazingly fun to get outside and really work large again! I have not been able to do this in a few years. When my wife came home she looked at it and exclaimed "it looks like Owen". I agree.

Here is the piece at this point. It was not reading the way I wanted to so I started gluing down cheese cloth to obscure the less important elements- pushing focus to my primary and secondary focal points. that was still not strong enough so I connected them with a line of string, attempting to force a path for the viewer's eye. I may need to lay down some more cloth before Tuesday. I want to sit on it for a bit before I move again, though.

It is 33.5x 16'', print, acrylic, collage, and a ton of other random mixed media on wood panel, at this point.