Designing a book cover ~ The Hobbit

 I love The Hobbit and always wanted to do some concept work for the book. I know I cant compare to the Hildebrandt brothers, but for my class assignment I gave it a try...

After trying out 3 different compositions... I thought this one was the strongest.

 

These are preliminary sketches illustrating some key moments in the book.

Magic Card

Last weeks assignment was to develop an illustration for a Magic Card.  Here's the information I was given...
Art description:
Location:your choice
Action: An older, weathered human battlemage clenches his jaw and looks at his fist as a pale yellow green light shoots from between his knuckles_ he has "caught and crushed" a spell.
Focus: the spell being squashed (not the mage, the action)
Mood: That's enough foolishness
Notes: keep camera tight and focus on the quashed spell so this doesnt look like a creature card.

here are some sketches and the finished product.

concept art

Here are examples of concept work. One is an interior, a garage and a futuristic city.

Matte Painting

So I took a matte painting class with the amazing Bruno Werneck. I don't think I really knew what I was getting myself into because in that class I totally felt out of my element.

Usually my work tends to have a painterly feel to it, which I believe has been acquired because of my fine art background. Now Matte Painting is totally different because there is no room for being painterly in this type of work. Matte painting is a painted representation of a landscape, set, or distant location that allows filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment that would otherwise be too expensive or impossible to build or visit. So basically it should be realistic looking. The objective of a matte painting is to make the viewer believe that this place is real.

So the assignments for this class were to develop a painting using photographs and tools in photoshop to unite these images with appropriate lighting in order to get a realistic environment.


Here are my attempts at matte painting:

Star Wars Cantina Dude

This week in my digital illustration class, the assignment was to come up An illustration of a character that would fit in at the star wars cantina. This is my cantina guy drinking some vino.

study of star wars charaters

Internships and their perks

This summer, I've had the privelege to intern at Film Roman Inc. Every Tuesday they provide a live model for their employees for figure drawing. Yesterday was the first day I attended and wow was I pleasantly surprised. First of all its very intimate, which I cannot say for other figure drawing classes, where I have to stand on something in order to see the model. Also, I was sitting next to the amazing artists Paul Wee and Joe Wack. Paul was nice enough to spend a couple minutes and give me some pointers... and he inspired me to use ink for my drawings.

Feeling inspired by the talent around me last night, I decided to draw some figures of my own when I got home. And I used ink. I keep repeating to myself something Paul told me to remember. "Gesture is everything, if your drawing feels off, then its probably the gesture..."

Concept design for city destroyed by robots...