Hey everyone! Long time no blog! I mentioned before that I was plugging away at a big project recently and that's why it has been so long since I've updated. That project is over and submitted so I wanted to take some time to tell you guys about it.

There's an online art school called CGMA I've been thinking of taking some courses at for a while now and I noticed they had partnered with Syn Studio to sponsor an art contest. The criteria for the submission was as follows:

"This epic competition challenges you to conceive of or update a classic tale, design believable and convincing sci-fi technology, and illustrate a key moment in the narrative. You can also depict characters, creatures, worlds, and civilizations at any point in time and anywhere in space. Your goal is to create a unique sci-fi illustration which showcases your design and rendering skills while conveying a rich underlying narrative that has universal appeal. Your final image will be evaluated on it's originality, design and rendering."

Sounds pretty cool, right? Naturally this got my imagination running wild, it was pretty difficult to just settle on one idea and work on it. My gut told me to go with something immediately readable, Alice & Wonderland, but my head had other plans. After spending most of my time working on a project I didn't really end up liking I trashed everything at the last second and started from scratch. I had one day to complete what it took me a couple of weeks of work to get halfway done.

The first thing I did was to make a couple of thumbnail sketches to layout the scene. Here's a sampling below.

The last sketch seemed to speak to me the most so that was the one I chose to develop further. After looking at it for a little while I came up with a story, this actually be came the description of the piece I used for my contest submission. Here's what I wrote up.

Her ship, The Hare, had certainly lead her astray this time. With her navigation systems damaged she had no choice but to make an emergency landing on this previously undiscovered world, and from her first impression it appeared to be anything but wonderful. She found a disused observation tower and climbed atop to get her bearings. Suddenly the clouds in the sky parted, revealing some kind of massive structure, it glowed brightly against the dark night sky. Struts ran up from the base to the top and spilled over haphazardly. This mega city sat there before her, appearing almost to welcome her with a grin. She gazed into the distance, uneasy, it would be a while before her ship's automatic repair functions got it back in working order. She hoped that she hadn't been noticed, every second she lingered she was more overcome by dread. She thought to herself, "This is the last place you want to be, Alice."

There it was, I now knew what I needed to do, it was just a matter of pushing myself to get it done. All of the work began in grey-scale, no color was used at first so that I could make sure the contrast and value of the image was just right. That process took about 8 hours. It was grueling but I had to get it done. After all that work this is what I came up with.

At this point it was about 10:30 pm and I had been working all day, I was absolutely exhausted, but I couldn't give up because I was in the home stretch. Just one thing left to do, color. This would have been easy enough, had I ever completed a digital painting in this manner before, that was unfortunately not the case.

After two more hours of tweaking everything to be just right, I came up with the final image.

It had to be slightly cropped to meet the size criteria, but overall I'm extremely happy with what I was able to produce. I couldn't have done it without my biggest fan and cheerleader, Lee, so I'm extremely grateful that he was there to help me finish this piece. My entry can be found on CGMA's website here. Wish me luck guys, the judging's tomorrow!

So that's what has been going on lately, I've been doing a lot more photography which I should be getting around to posting up on my Flickr page soon. Thanks for reading!  

Hey everyone! It's time for a new post. As I mentioned in my last update there has been a whole lot of art going on lately. I wanted to share some of what I've been working on and explain a little about what it's all for.

I'm currently working on an image I plan on entering into a contest, the criteria are as follows: 

This epic competition challenges you to conceive of or update a classic tale, design believable and convincing sci-fi technology, and illustrate a key moment in the narrative. You can also depict characters, creatures, worlds, and civilizations at any point in time and anywhere in space. Your goal is to create a unique sci-fi illustration which showcases your design and rendering skills while conveying a rich underlying narrative that has universal appeal. Your final image will be evaluated on it's originality, design and rendering.

Kind of a tall order, right? I think it's a pretty cool idea though. I haven't really made a serious attempt at something like this before so now's the time to try.

Since the challenge is to make a sci-fi version of a fairy tale there's always one character that comes to my mind first, the evil queen! That's what I'll be showing off today.

The design inspiration for this character came from a random encounter with this neat little beetle I saw in my driveway one early evening.

I loved the color and the shape of the shell, along with its really interesting legs and antennae. This got me thinking, then sketching, and this is what I came up with.

There was quite a bit of hair on the beetle, which is pretty weird when you think about it, but apparently lots of bugs are pretty fuzzy. Or at least that's what I've found out from taking close up pictures of them. The hair inspired the look of the gown at her hips and the billowing fluffy back of the train. She's not quite complete at this point but this is where I started from.

There has been a lot more work done on this and more but I wanted to take you all through the process to see how something like this goes. I plan on updating at least one more time this week so look forward to more updates on her design and more next time!