Spraystation...

Conan: Down The Well Of Hell!

2012-02-07T05:37:00.000-08:00

Here is a cover illustration for a Dark Horse Comics Conan Cover Competition. I was trying something new for me I lighting from 2 sources + well ambient darkness to give the main figure abit more form in space. I am questing for the holy grail of “pop”.

Then I also sent it in to the awesome concept artist Dave Rapoza, who was kind enough to feature it on the crimson daggers channel during his crimson critters critique paintover livestream. He pointed out a few key areas to improve, so my plan from here is to do another finished piece incorporating Daves adjustments, so as to learn as much as I can. You can view Daves crit here, mine starts 1 hour in.

I am pretty stoked with the positive reaction I have got off this piece; it makes me really want to push myself further with comic art. I hope that my years of being both a reader and an artist have given me a good understanding as to what works on a page and really enjoined working with this character. More to come by Crom!

It Be Piratin’ Time!

2012-01-04T03:48:00.000-08:00

Avast ye lilly livered lackwit layabouts! You be beholdin’ an enchanted magic shirt designed for buccaneers of the cyber seas who be raidin’ the internet ports. Yarrr!

Feel free to vote for this over on threadless :-)

Craps

2011-12-10T10:39:00.000-08:00

My assignment here was to take the classic design of the craps table and make it interactive, in the correct 3D perspective and all in vectors. It was a fun challenge, with lots of mock-ups back and forth between Illustrator, Photoshop and 3Ds Max. I mapped the graphics onto the 3D table object and then used this as a tight reference for figuring out the vanishing point and applying a 3D transform on the vector graphics in illustrator. Then I took the fill from each area and movie chipped them in flash and these then became our rollover buttons.

Stylistically I took my reference from real world tables but I rounded out the outer corners to give a tighter fit and therefore larger playing area and was pleased with the result.

The awesome 3D dice that roll dynamically in flash were built in code Ross Mcverry, he and I tweaked the look and feel of them until they felt right. I played with the surface texture map in photoshop to get a pleasing contrast and the illusion of a red plastic sheen.

Demo play here.

Coffin up the Cash

2011-12-10T10:26:00.000-08:00

This is my take on the comedic horror genre, for which I designed the characters, graphics, animations, and sounds. I was pretty happy design-wise with this project, the in-reels coffin bonus is a quick-passed street hustler shell game and the free-spin symbols had a raven animating to herald their arrival. Kooky.

Demo play here.

Slotris

2011-12-10T10:17:00.000-08:00

I was called in to do an eleventh hour redesign on this Tetris knockoff slot game, as the original graphics we received from a freelancer weren’t too well structured.

Firstly I had to fix the fact that nothing was pixel perfect on the flash stage and that’s pretty important when you have dozens of moving objects colliding. As I recall I had to alter or scrap many nested movie clips each with crazy alignment points and fractional transform values. Fun.

Then I ditched a lurid orange colour scheme in favour of the polished black glass look, which you see on every media player and his dog now days. This the blocks themselves be the centre of attention.

Demo play here.

Gin Joint Jackpot

2011-12-10T09:18:00.000-08:00

Gold Rush Showdown was pretty successful, so I received the green light to do a reskin. I suggested a 1920s gangster theme which would keep the same adversarial dynamic. Researching the roaring 20s was fun. I like to think I would make a good bootlegging hoodlum :-)

Also included here for your viewing pleasure is the beautiful Chinese localisation work by designer Keith Farrell. These games go out in over 30 languages and I think the translations often look better than the original English version.

Demo play here.

Gold Rush Showdown

2011-12-10T08:35:00.000-08:00

I designed the graphics, animation and sounds for this western themed online slot. I was trying to keep it fun with lots of mini bonuses including a quick fire in-reels based shootout with bandits.

This was one of the first projects I was the design lead on, all the way from coming up with the initial concept and pitching it to the client, to working with the flash developers to polish the finished game.

Demo play here.

Blackjack, 3 Card Poker etc...

2011-12-10T03:58:00.000-08:00

These two are some of the many online casino table games I designed the layout for. The table surround was done first in 3D by a freelancer then my task was to map the blasé graphics on and create the interactive graphics. This wasn’t too difficult to achieve, I did a separate render for the table with a square mapped on and adjusted the perspective of the vector graphics as one group to fit the square.

The beauty of using vectors over a bitmap background is that we could alter the background colours easily by either swapping out the underlying bitmap textures or a colour shift filter in flash as we used here in order to keep down the file size overhead.

We also had to create an environment that scaled dynamically to fit any users display. In practice this involves creating extra graphical information on both sides that may or may not get seen on a display anywhere from 5:7 to 16:9 ratio.

I also designed the incidental sounds and ambient track which were rolled out to all these games. I felt the chips and cards should have a subtle difference being placed on wood or felt, and for sliding or being slapped down. The ambient track was a commercial jingle bought from sounddogs which I cut to loop and spliced with a second loop of a conversational crowd.

The lovely parabola animation for the flying chips really enhanced what I like to call “the illusion of quality” and was done in code by the super talented Alejandro Giraldo Niño.

Demo play here.

Vegas Solitaire

2011-12-08T07:03:00.000-08:00

I have worked on over two dozen interactive games in the last 5 years, with lots of great challenges; from designing animations, creating incidental and looping sounds, pitching ideas to clients, working with coders and polishing the end user experience.

Solitaire was a small project which lent itself well to being rapidly re-skinned for many different clients. The flying cards and dynamically shifting right hand navigation were done in code by developer extraordinaire Alejandro Giraldo Niño.

On this project I also designed the look and feel of the interface which then was rolled out to dozens of other games. I came up with the greyish purplish tint to the top and bottom bar from studying many desktop applications and eventually arriving at itunes as a colour scheme that has the right mixture of inviting yet formal, perfect for a menu interface in which any number of vividly coloured games will live.

Demo play here.

Character Design Week 9

2011-11-21T14:40:00.000-08:00

Here is the last assignment for Steven Silver’s schoolisim character design course. The brief was to redesign the first character he gave us in week 1, a yardstick for how far we have come. The cartoon shading is done with two masked luminosity layers in photoshop and could have been finessed them abit more if I had the time. The course has given me a lot of new aesthetic considerations to strive for and I think this last piece is a good culmination of the lessons. I would recommend this course to anyone who wants to progress their drawing skills and expand their potential to push the human form into the cartoon realm.

Paunch

2011-11-14T10:12:00.000-08:00

Paunch is a journal devoted to comics and culture that I co-edited and designed the layouts for. For Issue 1 each cover was individually painted with spray-paint and stencil, which took a while to do but I was very pleased with the result, no two copies were exactly alike.

Character Design Week 8

2011-11-14T10:01:00.000-08:00

In the penultimate week of the course Steven emphasised the importance of keeping a sketchbook. He challenged us to fill a page daily and I don’t doubt that such discipline is the key to his artistic success. As an exercise he introduced the memory sketch: producing a character from the details we remember about a recently encountered real individual. I chose a chubby girl I observed in a London park. She was a rolling cliché; speeding on a scooter seemingly oblivious to the world as she greedily licked at her ice cream.

VUWSA Posters

2011-11-14T08:54:00.000-08:00

There is something magic about seeing your designs and illustrations plastered up on walls around town. I have been lucky enough to see several of my posters displayed in full colour A2 size. They were hugely fun to come up with and I have been told that they contributed to the success of the events. The only downside was inevitably having to chase straggling sponsors to get their logos to me in the appropriate print format.

VUWSA Publications

2011-11-14T08:32:00.000-08:00

In addition to my work with Salient, I designed a number of books, publications and advertisements for their parent company VUWSA; The Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. These were all fun mini challenges to fit around my other duties. I based the course handbook around actual desk graffiti from the many Victoria lecture halls and library booths. I photographed several student meetings and marches and used these photos to add gravitas to the guide for foreign students. The handbook diary I designed around the idea of “notes to self” with each daily memo space being a torn piece of paper with important calendar dates already entered.

Salient Rebrand

2011-11-14T08:20:00.000-08:00

These are some of the internal documents I created for the Salient rebrand. I was focused on making it fun and irreverent with found objects and torn paper in the backgrounds to break up the hard edge of most digital design. I soon realised I was free to float the masthead around on the page because we had our own dedicated magazine racks around town and so were not hiding behind other magazines in newsagents' shelves.

Salient Magazine

2011-11-14T07:40:00.000-08:00

In 2005 I was hired as the lead designer on Salient Magazine, the student magazine for Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. It is widely read and respected for its uncompromising stance and in 2005 we were brought to national attention when we were briefly gagged by court order for exposing an underhanded covert student fee hike by the university.
It was a great job. It taught me a ton about designing for print to a hard weekly deadline as we had to FTP it off to the printer every Thursday night / Friday morning. Weekly print design requires both planning and stamina! I redesigned the magazine masthead and was responsible for all text layout, illustration, photography and typography, as well as the look and feel of the website. It was pretty much an intensive year long course in Adobe InDesign, which I much prefer to Quark. I had a lot of fun designing the covers using a variety of styles and media; I was trying to push vibrant dynamic compositions, figuring that if I could compel someone to pick it up then my job was a success.

Character Design weeks 6 & 7

2011-11-14T04:57:00.000-08:00

During this week I was asked to create turnarounds and expressions for my Dr Jekyll character, as I would provide for the animation industry. I’m getting some great feedback from Steven Silver on how to push my designs further: pull out your shapes, vary the size of objects, draw through your shapes and avoid tangents and the dreaded ladder! Taking his schoolism character design course has really helped me understand the fundamentals of visual appeal and will help me in all areas of design.

The Package

2011-10-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

The Package was a weekly gig guide for Wellington, capital city of New Zealand, published between 1999 and 2007. It folded out to reveal a large format gig guide of listings for numerous bars and nightclubs. It also showcased the best in upcoming and ongoing cultural events and became essential reading for anyone planning a night out in the city. I did a few illustrated covers and spot illustrations and for a time I was their cinema sub-editor, liaising with film festivals and guiding a team of reviewers.

Character Design Week 5

2011-10-30T12:46:00.000-07:00

Week 5 of Stephen Silver's character design course. This week was about taking my Dr Jekkyl character from rough to cleaned up illustration. Steven has impressive control over his brush tipped ink pens. My submission was done digitally in Manga Studio as the postage on one single pen was over 20 pounds!

Mix

2011-10-30T12:19:00.000-07:00

Here is some print work I did for a publication called Mix, a cheeky little booze guide for the inner city sophisticate, outlining cocktails, bars and scuttlebutt. I had much fun designing the covers, and otherwise helped art direct its overall tone and copy wrote a few odds and ends.

Character Design Week 4

2011-10-17T01:46:00.000-07:00

This week the assignment was four pages of practice: ears, noses, hands and eyes... Varying from realistic to cartooney...

Character Design Week 3

2011-10-10T04:52:00.000-07:00

Week 3 of Stephen Silver's 9 week character design class… Firstly a realistic study of a portrait photo, then trying to push that character into a bunch of different base shapes. Then more refinement sketches on my 1950s Jekkyl and Hyde. This week's tutorials were focused on facial construction, mostly building upon the Andrew Loomis style of construction guides. Free Loomis PDFs here, well worth the trees to print out…

Character Design Week 2

2011-10-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

Here is my second assignment for the character design course: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in any era / setting. I based them in the 1950s, going for a nice juxtaposition between straight laced scientist and wild biker greaser outlaw. B movie scientist takes secret formula and turns into gigantic B movie greaser. Ed Wood meets the Wild Bunch.

Character Design Week 1

2011-09-19T05:27:00.000-07:00

I am excited to begin an online course in character design through Schoolism, tutored by character guru Stephen Silver.

For the first assignment we were asked to create a character from a brief. I have tried to convey the character's cheery demeanour through both facial expression and pose. My process began with sketching different face shapes, then I moved to full body poses that I thought conveyed the emotion, then I worked up the “ink” outlines in a programme called Manga Studio. I then went back and sketched fists which were weak in my initial sketch and finally referenced the attitude of some Preston (old faithful) Blair cartooney hands. For the final I worked the fills up in greyscale before adding colour with hue/sat and then finally erasing into a 50% sillo on a new layer for the shading.

Morrigan_001_WIP...

2011-06-29T16:44:00.000-07:00

Darkstalkers antiheroine Morrigan. Yeah, I know the boobs wouldn’t be jutting out if her arms were up like that :-) It's more of a lighting study to see what I could come up with without reference crutches. I'm trying to progress my digital paint mid-game and finishing Spock touches...
I have been listening to Dave Rapozza's live stream as he paints some bad ass ninja turtles. He inspires me to push my artwork further...

Paris Scooter Girl...

2011-06-12T04:54:00.001-07:00

This one took me a while to finish as my computer blew up! Good news is that my new art death star is now fully operational... The linework was done in Manga Studio, the fills were done in Illustrator. Eventually even with 16 gig of ram my version of Manga Studio which maxes out at around 1600 meg couldn’t handle all the layers at 600 dpi (I like to keep fill, shadow and linework separate for each of the multiple objects) so I had to polish it off in trusty old Photoshop...

Dazzler Skating...

2011-03-06T13:48:00.001-08:00

Dazzler: 70s disco version... I’m going for the Samurai Jack no outlines thing, so it makes background colour contrast crucial.
Making this was fun, makes me want to do some more classic comic characters, from before the marketeers and suits blew up their credibility... Tho Dazzler never really had much to begin with...

Hercules Vs Atlas Vs Cyclops….

2011-02-24T05:47:00.000-08:00

Weightlifter Animation
Some WIPs about half way done... Pretty fun project: to get an epic godly weightlifting contest going. First I have to finish the animation with various stages of wobbly knees, sweat and strain towards two outcomes: victory or defeat. The next task is to create two more characters by substituting all the parts. I am keeping the individual shapes deliberately blobby and formless so they can slide past each other with a minimum of weirdness. Should be a fun little game when it's done.

George Warped

2011-02-16T00:57:00.000-08:00

All done in Photoshop. I started having a lot more blurs and gradients but gradually elminated them as I sharpened it. I guess I am just an old vector dawg at heart?

Brando Race...

2010-10-11T09:18:00.000-07:00

This face is based on a photo of young Marlon Brando. I’m doing a project based on greek gods and have to convey “godliness” in a cartoony way, which is proving to be a fine balancing act. The finished piece is a lot cartoonier and mostly buried under a helmet. I love the great iconic faces of the old Hollywood stars, Brando, Robert Mitchum, Rock Hudson... Shia LeBoof, not so much...

Also, it was interesting to me that the more I simplified this icon, the more he reminded me of the Love and Rockets character; Rand Race. All hail Jamie Hernandez: the master of iconic reduction…

Paris Scooter Girl WIP...

2010-10-04T02:26:00.000-07:00

Vamp Bat Witch Girl...

2010-08-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

WIP

Busty Beach Babe...

2010-02-23T11:21:00.001-08:00

This is part of a little web design I did in December 09 for some Christmas cash... It's for a holiday site aimed at the UK youth market and basically the task was to produce something aspirational like the hedkandi girls. Somewhat successful, I threw the vector drawing into painter to try for more of a shimmery light source and then photoshop for more light source work (masking a hue filter out to intensify the highlights) and then gave her a little nip tuck reverse boob job (…client…) via the all powerful liquefy tool…

…in the future…

2009-11-15T13:53:00.000-08:00

Work In Progress: Alien Snake Pt1

This is started outs a muck around in Corel Painter, a weird zig zag of pen scribble that to me connotated a snake. What is this snake doing? Fighting a spaceman, cool. The snake has got some crazy electricity and two pissed off heads to counteract the fact it is going to be squished by the alien exosuit. All pretty standard sci-fi fare, that you would find in the pages of imagine FX, but alas my Painter middle and endgame are not up to snuff yet( I will expand on my chess drawing metaphor in a future rant ) so this idea got shelved as a “nice to finish” …in the future…

Cue passage of time montage and one motivated Saturday I dig out my sketch and have a go with new slant: combing it with the space angel characters for a bit of an Alex Toth homage. My lovely missus came up with a gender role reversal idea where the girl is saving the guy(s) from the snake and the cliff. By taking the Toth channelge I’m pretty much setting myself up for failure here. Hopefully If I just treat this as an exercise I can keep it from being too stuffy. Then I have grand plans to turn the backstory of this image into a wee comic… in the future…

All Mummies... All the Time...

2009-11-01T06:14:00.000-08:00

I spent about a day on this image and have figured out why mummies are not the most popular character: bandages double the drawing time. Cycling around London I think up new challenges all the time, this one was: can I recreate my existing character in a new piece of software, Manga Studio?
(Yes, I can...)

Giants upon Giants...

2009-10-30T18:01:00.000-07:00

I found J. Scott Campbell’s Danger Girl Sketchbook lying around at work and was inspired by his detailed observations on hair massing to give it a go myself… I love finding out what great artists are considering when they draw. Copying one drawing is unimportant, understanding the sensibilities of the artist should be the goal.

We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, even the giants are on other giants…

Comic Competition...

2009-10-24T16:09:00.000-07:00

Here are some samples from a comic I drew for a competition with a newspaper. The story based on a friends drug induced communion with a cow...

Yummy Mummy...

2009-10-24T07:16:00.000-07:00

Here is a character that never found a client, humm maybe this idea has legs?