Artwork

SO! You made it this far! Well, here's the "deal" on the artwork. I'm learning to draw... yup, I haven't had an art class in over 23 years and I decided to go into digital animation. The problem I found was that I couldn't communicate my thoughts efficiently without learning this valuable skill, and the college I attended didn't offer it as part of the core program in digital media. But I managed to get into some basic and intermediate drawing classes and started to learn this stuff. I'll update this page here and there when I produce something worth seeing, and I'll even throw in the occassional Photoshop project for those of you who like that sort of thing.

To view the pictures in full size, just click the little thumbnails below. They are set to around 800x600 viewing area and about 200dpi resolution (unless otherwise noted) so they shouldn't kill anyone's internet connection. The Photoshop images are bigger, so beware of those before clicking.

	Concept Art- "MGS-Heroine"- 04/29/05 This bit of concept art was for a project called MGS-Heroine. The character is based on a video game called Metal Gear Solid, but after designing the initial character model on that basis, we were to customize ours in any way we saw fit. The inspiration for this work was a 1989 Rutger Hauer movie called "The Blood of Heroes". It's set in a post-apocalytic earth-based world, where life is dreary for most, but a few groups of people have found a living by playing "the Game" - a brutal form of football (or kill the carrier) in which the goal is for a five-man team to get a dog skull on a stake before the other team does. Other elements of our concept design included a color palate, which I included as background in my collage, and we were to gather are from online resources and/or books to support our ideas. It was done by compositing some drawings, pictures, and other elements in Photoshop. Image is 740x958.
	Concept Art - "The Robot" - 02/22/05 This concept art shows the preliminary sketches I made while designing my robot for the DaveSchool robot-project. For this project, we were to design a "robot", simply put, but we knew we'd have to build and animate it later. I decided to go with a "steamshovel" theme for my robot, and found a few pictures with which I began the work as demonstrated in the first series of sketches. Further, my robot would be based on an "old man", who had retired and spent his days hunting varmints in his backyard with a variety of comical implements. The best way to think of it is a cross between James Earl Jones's character inthe Sandlot, any of the old men from the Scooby Doo cartoon series, and Bill Muray's character in Caddyshack. When the instructors decided the robot would have to "fit into Robot world", I had to scrap most of the design and begin anew. The theme of the character's personality remained the same, but I moved frmo the steamshovel idea to a water heater, and determined that the character was a retired maintenance man. The jutting lower jaw, the "copper tubing suspenders", the "runny nose", "plumber's crack", and the stooped shoulders were all visuals that I thought might help me animate a believeable character in "robot world". Sketches are in graphite on 9x12 paper, and the images are edited in Photoshop to fit multiple pages onto one image. Images are 1024x768 and 72 dpi. To view the animation model, follow this link to the Animation Site.


	Final Project - Term 2- "Self Portrait" - 09/29/04 The second term of drawing was "Life Drawing", or in layman's terms - Figure Drawing. We worked on perspective and capturing the human form with live models in each class, both male and female, clothed and otherwise. The final project was - and I quote the instructor, "Life Study Self-Portrait". I'll translate that for others - "Nude Self-Portrait". The rules were: "The drawing should deal with anatomy, shading, linear perspective, gesture, foreshortening, and be anatomically correct. Must be life-sized or larger. It also needed to have the entire page drawn - no blank space. Due to the moral majority of people in certain administrative positions, the school could not openly call this a "nude self-portrait". However, being a bit conservative and shy regarding my own body, I decided to use some creativity in the posing part of this project. Some students covered their privates with an arm or hand, others did a rear-view. I chose this particular angle. It was my favorite project to date, and my most challenging. The "white" areas are, in fact, done very lightly with very hard graphite. It was done on roughly 30"x42" drawing paper in graphite. Image is 1024x768.
	Final Project - Term 1 - "Zara's Fortunes" - 06/25/04 For this final project, the rules were that it must contain a square, cube, sphere, circle, cone, and cylinder. I chose "Zara's Fortunes" as my way to display them, and further added in some elements that made drawing the project a lot of fun. My instructor was very big on "the line", so in all the work I've done, all shading and such is done with a series of cross-hatch lines - there is no "smudging" (on purpose, anyway) or using the side of the pencil. It was done on roughly 30"x42" drawing paper in graphite. Image is 1024x768.
	Magazine - 06/18/04 This project was to take a drawing from an old magazine and reillustrate it. I forget the name of the magazine, or the issue, but it was from some time before 1950. Done on 24x36 newsprintin graphite. Image is larger at 1024x768.
	My best work to date. - 06/12/04 This project was to draw a person from a photograph, only upside-down. Supposedly, it works the right side of the brain or something. In any case, you see shapes and lines instead of an actual face. Then, when turned over, this is what came out.
	Practice in shading. - 05/07/04 My intro to drawing instructor is pushing us on "drawing the line" and has been trying to get me to understand shading without using the side of the pencil. This figure is a simple polygon I drew out after messing with some shoulder-armor pieces elsewhere. And then I tried shading the snot out of it. The instructor seemed very pleased with my progress which is why it's posted here.
	Anime character. - 04/23/04 I enjoy anime. I'm not a fanatic about it, but I like the artistry of certain choice media. This little experiment is from a picture of a valkyrie-style character. Part of the drawing class, so far, has been to "draw what we see", so I draw a lot of other people's stuff while I learn how lines are formed.
	Another elf-chickie. - 05/07/04 This one is loosely based off the popular elf character from Everquest. A while ago, they put out a special edition box set in which a 6" figurine was enclosed. I used that as my "model".
	Yet more anime. - 04/23/04 Trying a profile view here. Different eyes, but still concentrating on "getting the line" in there.
	Delyrium. - 04/30/04 Well, that's what I call this one anyway. An online friend of mine had posted a picture of herself at some point and I used the photo to draw this. Hopefully, she'll forgive my beginner status until I can more accurately portray living people. She's really a beautiful person and very photogenic... eventually, i hope to do her more justice.
	Delyrium2 - 06/12/04 My second attempt at Delyrium. I'm noticing that the female hand is difficult to depict. For some reason, men's hands can be blocky, scarred, or whatever - but feminine hands seem to be longer, thinner, more delicate, and smoother... Ah well - practice makes perfect, right?
	Comic Cover. - 09/25/03 Ok - here's the bigger file. The project was to create a comic-book cover (front & back) in Illustrator. I just loved the original Tripping the Rift back before it was a TV hit on the SciFi Channel, and hopefully, the orginal artist won't mind me using his work for class projects. If it's an issue, just shoot me email and I'll take it down. Basically, the work uses a painting of his, and then a layout, text, coloring, and other elements from me. The inside of the cover features similar elements. Now that I'm actually drawing things, I think I'd redo this with my own artwork, but I have a bit more to learn first.

Top