That's a negative, Ghost Rider, the pattern is full

 Another quick painted sketch. I spent a lot of time using photoshop filters to make something unfinished look more complete. It's nice to get the time to paint a little. I've spent a few weeks refining a location design in maya and starting to a bit crazy from the lack of art in my life.

Happy V-day

After a few weeks of posting last minute, I decided to sit down and try to get it done early in the week. This is a valentine's day card I painted for my girlfriend. She has an extremely grumpy and lazy cat who I thought would make a great cupid.

Blogging is hard business

It's been only a few weeks and I can't believe how hard it to to keep on top of posting on this blog. Usually it's friday night and I realize I've forgotten and i spent the night sifting through my hard drive to find something that isn't too embarrassing to share. I'm not sure how some people are able to do it everyday or even every twice a week. Show-offs.

Here are a few quick WIP/quick sketches I like to do at work when I take a break. For some reason my default brain-off relaxation painting/sketching topic are space ships.

Sci-Fi Blob pt2 - A mech walker inspired from the work on Scott Robertson's blog. A pretty terrible design, but it was fun to noodle around and play with the painting. I would love to have the time to fix the design and finish painting it.

Sci-Fi Blobs - More experiments in process that ended up being some sort of sci-fi space ship shapes. Played with line tool, custom shapes and a few other things. Not quite a workable process but was it was fun doing these during short breaks at work..

More How to Train Your Dragon Art

Here are some more sketches I dug up from my hard drive - mostly graphite tonals and mostly things that never made it anywhere close to the final movie. I had the misfortune of working on all the previous iterations of How to Train Your Dragon as well as working on things for the final movie that got cut. Sometimes if you squint you can see something I designed way off in the background of the movie drifting in and out of focus.

I'm planning to an art raffle away in the next few weeks - prints, original art, etc. Follow my blog and you'll be entered to win.

 
Follow the Dragons Tears - These drawings were from a sequence that ended up not making it. I was really proud of the work the layout department and everyone did on it. It involved a camera move and several rock outcroppings would parallax into the shape of a dragon, kind of like the sequence in The Road to Eldorado with the weeping statue/waterfall. These are both powdered graphite on animation paper. The top image was painted over a bit in ps.

 

Down the River - Nothing too special about this one. Hiccup was to fall in this river and wash away. Once again graphite on animation paper. I had some fun and hid some weird things at the bottom of the river - shopping carts, mob bosses with cement shoes, etc.

 
Olde Viking Shoppes - A sketch for some village shops. A blacksmith, a butcher and perhaps a candlestick maker? 

 
Bridge to the Docks - My boss created some of the largest and most intricate drawings I had ever seen. I had the chance to try my hand at it and this was the second panel of the drawing. I was looking at the Asterix comics for tone and a sense of fun.

 

 

Back to Basics - I found these guys while I was digging around in folders. I did quite a few drawings like the top rock page (they were rejected because it looked a bit like a dog poop). I think they're a good reminder of thinking about the simple basic things - the top image with the grid/form overlay and the bottom with the plotted perspective. I take a lot of that for granted now that I have Maya.