Tar Creeper

This is another (smaller) tar creature painted for the latest Hearthstone expansion, Journey to Un’Goro. It's a companion piece to the larger tar elemental I recently posted.

I've included a preliminary sketch. As you can see, the pose was modified a little in the final art.

More Inked Characters

Here are a few new characters I've recently drawn in pen and ink. In case anybody is curious, my method for these is very straightforward. I just start sketching on Strathmore 500 bristol (vellum surface) and once I've arrived at a character design I like,  I ink it using Micron pens. It's a very relaxing process.

Regurgitech

This one has a delightful title, eh? It's another of my favorites among the paintings I did for Activision's Skylanders Battlecast. The little blue creatures with the glowing eyes are called Chompy Rustbuds!

Hoist of the Century

This is my favorite of the Skylanders Battlecast cards I've done so far. They've all been fun but this one provided an opportunity to do a scene with some real depth and multiple characters. It was difficult but rewarding!

Skylanders Battlecast

Last summer, I was fortunate to get involved with a new game, Skylanders Battlecast, which has just been released. It's based on the popular Skylanders video game universe and published by Activision. I encourage you to check it out! It's a free mobile game. The game itself involves cards and battles. You can buy actual, physical cards, digital cards or both!

Now that the game has been released, I can finally share some of the art I've been doing for it. I'll "roll out" some new art every day for the next few days so if you like what you see, please keep checking in.

The first two pieces I painted were Finishing Blow (which features the eagle character Jet-Vac) and Skylithium Scale, which features a gem dragoness named Flashwing.

Both illustrations were painted in Photoshop.

I have loved working on this game so I hope you enjoy the artwork. I'll post more tomorrow!

Groovy Robot

I've reached robot #70 in the series of robot designs I've been creating and posting on tumblr. You can see them all at: http://robotspot.tumblr.com

Since this is #70 in the series, I drew inspiration from 1970s-era design motifs and color schemes, as well as my memories of album covers and movie posters of the '70s. I had a blast designing this!

Transporter Lab: A Blast from the Past

I created this vector background illustration and the odd character at left for a project that never saw the light of day. This is old work (probably from 2000 or 2001) and I had almost forgotten about it but I came across the files a few days ago and thought I'd share them.

This is vector art. The background image was intended to be the front page of a website. A visitor to the site would use a character to select a destination on the screens. The character would then proceed into the green transporter device and the browser would take you to that destination. The whole thing was going to be an online, interactive amusement park for kids, which seemed like a great idea. I was going to design all the visuals but something went awry and the project died before we could get deeply into it. However, this Transporter Lab was fun to create and I got to draw upon my love of old cartoons when designing it!

If I remember correctly, the fine line around the shapes was a request of the client, perhaps so the character would "pop" against the background. I'm not sure. If i was doing this now, I'd use a variety of line weights to add interest.

The character itself was described pretty specifically so although I visualized it, it's hard to think of it as my creation. He's some kind of dot based on a satellite (thus the panels on his back and "radio waves" coming from his antennae).To me, he seems like the kind of weird character that ends up as an Olympic mascot, perhaps the product of a committee.