Well now that Game Chef is up and running...

...I can post pictures of my entries! Go check out the contest over here if you're interested. There are neat things going on over there.

(Game Chef is going to keep me pretty busy until next week, so this might be it until I'm done trying to pull a game out of my brain meats in not enough time.)

They broke with tradition this year, and for ingredients had artists do sets of images to be used as inspiration for games to be designed. I picked 'women warriors' as my theme. I wound up being really, really happy with the final result. I look forward to seeing the finished games that are going to be using my artwork!

I'm happy I was adequately able to convey in black and white how absolutely garish Egyptian jewelry is. Having seen it in person in the Cairo Museum, it is rather appalling to Western sensibilities.

This was cleverly cropped to avoid showing that I suck at drawing horses.

Easily my favorite image of the whole set. I love, love, LOVE her face. She is so totally saying 'I am about to f*ck you up'.

Marker sketches

I've been working on improving my marker technique recently by going back and coloring mostly-finished sketches in my sketchbook.

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This is actually a concept sketch for the as-yet-unnamed webcomic. This was mostly a color test.

This is my character from our current game of In a Wicked Age, Baila - the war sorceress. IaWA has been all kinds of fun, and I've gotten to do lots of fun things with Baila - including spawning a demon baby! Whee!

I'll probably wind up pirating certain aspects of this design for a character in the webcomic.

Thou Art But A Warrior Illustrations, Part Two

These are the other two color illustrations I've finished for Thou Art But A Warrior. I'll probably keep it to three for the interior, to keep costs down since it's going to be a short book. But I'm super-happy with how they turned out.

My goal is to make TABAW a very art-rich text. With me doing all the layout, game design, and art, all it costs me is time after all!

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I tried to vague up the angel's clothing, simply because I couldn't find any good resources for artwork of Islamic depictions of angel clothing. Oh well. It turned out pretty badass anyway. (Though the wings were a trial.)

The colors took forever to get right with this one. Super-saturated colors are hard to work with. But I like the result. Very dramatic.

That's all that I've got for TABAW for the time being, but I've got tons of other things I've been working on - including the long-planned webcomic. I've started scripting pages, so I'll be posting concept art for that now that I feel confident this is a project that will see the light of day.

Back online, new images

So the past few weeks have been pretty productive in terms of art-production, what with having no computer and all. I've been going back through my sketchbook and re-drafting sketches done during the initial stages of working on Thou Art But A Warrior. The goal is to clean them up sufficiently to use them in the final book, along with the finished color illustrations.

These are relatively low-quality scans, because I plan on working on these further to clean them up.

One of the things that excited me the most when I started doing research was the beauty of the padded surcoats and the chainmail armor. The armor from this period was just as beautiful as it was functional. I've been having a lot of fun with it.

I've been trying to maintain a balance between Arabs, Moors, and Christians in my illustrations. It can get pretty challenging trying to differentiate, but I think I managed well with this one.

There's something weird with the face here. But I like the pose, particularly the hands. So I'll probably salvage it.

Keep watching this space for new stuff. I'll be updating frequently as I go through my artwork and update my portfolio and revamp my website.

Things will soon be up and running again!

My new computer finally arrived today. We still have to figure out how to network between Vista and XP before I can get my computer set up all the way. But there will be new stuff soon!

Brief update

So my computer is still dead. Five year old motherboards are hard to replace, so my new computer will likely beat my new motherboard. (It was time for an upgrade anyway.)

I've been working on a lot more traditional media stuff, pencil and marker drawings. A lot of these have been illustrations for Thou Art But A Warrior, but there's other stuff in there as well. And I'll be posting artwork that I'm working on for the Game Chef contest once the contest deadline is past - since it's supposed to stay secret until then.

Also, once I have the new computer I'll be able to push through all the website updates I've been wanting to do.