It's been a while...

Happy Holidays everyone!

Sorry for the lack of posts lately... can't believe it's been over a month. I've been real busy working at Zynga but it's been a blast so far. We just had our Holiday party on Friday and it was amazing! Aside from all the fun I had hanging out with friends and making new ones, I was told that in a couple weeks when we come back from the Holidays, Zynga will pick me up as a full time employee :D woot woot! Oh and I couldn't make a post without posting some art, so heres a CHOW I grinded out this evening (yes yes there are many issues with it).

Oh and the topic was some sort of interdimensional surveyor or something - the story they wrote for the breif was pretty cool.

That big news I mentioned...

Just letting you guys know that I got a job (3 month contract to hire) at Zynga, doing 2D art for their Mafia Wars game :D. Because of that, I'm moving back to the bay area on Friday - woot!

Also, I was invited to join a speed painting blog called SpeedSpot which was a pretty damn cool surprise. Take a look - there are some really incredible artists posting there :)

A sketch...

Just testing out a 'new' brush I made from watching a tutorial vid on Dave Rapoza's blog. There isn't anything too special about it but it's pretty cool to sketch with - and I used some old brushes as well.

Hopefully I'll have some big news to post soon... :D


Edit: ... and another sketch - I really need to get back to UEC if I want to have any chance of finishing haha. For some reason I'm just way more interested in characters this week.

UC #4

Did some quick color work on 18...

UC #3

Today's sketches...

UC #2

2nd Unearthly post... By the way, the topic is "Last Level" - I forgot to mention that in the last post. Anyways, I'm still exploring ideas for a final image and we are allowed to submit 3 finals. I have some work to do!

Unearthly Challenge

Hey art people - I just wanted to let you peeps know that Gameartisans.org has started their Unearthly Challenge, which is an environment challenge almost as big as the dominance war. I highly recommend joining if you are interested in 2D concept design or 3D modeling. http://www.unearthlychallenge.com/2009/en_index.php

If you join and apply yourself, I gaurantee you will better your artistic ability, learn important presentation skills, and get better at giving/recieving feedback. If you join up, let me know so I can follow your thread as well!

Here is a link to my thread as well as my first thumbnail page.

http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/showthread.php?t=11454

something new...

So here is something that is sort of new... hope you like it.

Also a couple things... I just wanted to let my friends know that I am in fact looking for a job now so if you know of anything 2d (maybe even 3d) related, please let me know! I'm mostly interested in full-time but contract is cool too.

More importantly, I'm probably going to be an uncle in a couple hours!! My sister's baby is almost here and I'll probably be scooting off to the hospital again real soon. I can't wait to meet her!

Between being an uncle and looking for a job my plan is to get back into some weekly challenges. Conceptart.org currently has a really awesome CHOW topic but I might miss it this week, we'll see. I'll also be doing their COW (creature of the week) as well... As much as I feel I need to work on my human anatomy, I have probably ignored monsters for a bit too long hehe. Anyways, till next time~

Kyle

Jeff's 5 items or less... and more!

After completing an art test about a week and a half ago (maybe I'll post it sometime...), I took a little break from being creative... This was a fun challenge to get me back into gear. If anything looks really bad I'm blaming it on being sick this week!


Here's a couple random things... This environment was one of my previous thumbs that I liked and wanted to work up. I think I started coloring it the night before I got my art test and at this point I likely won't keep working on it... so here it is! The other image is a warm-up study I did a while ago.

...and more practice.

I got a bit more confident with what I was doing while working on these - I started enjoying them a lot more too. I really like some of the results so I decided to let the image remain pretty large. I will probably do another page for fun and work up my favorites to colored illustrations.


A random but fun use of the above madness...

Practice, practice...

Practicing values here as well as other things... It was my goal to work fast and I mostly succeeded, though I did probably noodle a couple things to death a long the way. I'll probably try doing a page of thumbs every day for practice. The page with the larger images was done before I decided to work smaller... I'm not trying to say they are better than the others~

Also I think the Unearthly Challenge on Gameartisans is going to begin soon. It's kind of like the Dominance War but for alien landscapes - sounds interesting.

A couple new things...

Random stuff for fun.

Persephone

I don't think I've posted this before, but since I couldn't think of a good way to integrate it into my current portfolio site, here it is. This was my portrait sculpture final back in sp of 08.

More...

Here's some of the contract work that I did for CloudPlay. For some reason these files are a bit on the large side and compressed fairly poorly :\ Let me know what you guys think!

Maps: (scaled down to roughly 30% actual size)


Posters:

Units:

Back to business

Getting back to my portfolio, I put together some images tonight that I will be adding to my website real soon. I'm awaiting to hear if I'm allowed to use some of the work I did for Cloudplay Games (formerly Cast Iron Games). But, I am very pleased to be able to finally show people Shiva from The Offering - the animated short that began it's life a year and a half ago. I cannot wait to see the finished film. On a side note, if anyone with the right access can get me a full shot of him I'd be in your debt!

More to come!

Oh yeah - my Strangers in a Strange Land entry won first place :D

Also, if anyone can recommend a better font to use on my images please help me out!

Chow 166 'Pride and Prejudice'

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The task this week is to do character designs for either Fitzwilliam Darcy, or Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. I've read as much as the wikipedia summary on this novel, so I don't quite know who these characters are. Anyways, heres my start - I'll post more as I go, though no promises on finishing as I'll be out of town this weekend.

Btw these challenges are a lot of fun - if any of you other art people have time you should join up.

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=163014

WIP - I'll be in the bay area this weekend so I'll get back to this Sunday evening.


/old

Just for fun, heres a WIP spread of how far I got this evening.

Chow 165 'SuperCute'

Heres my entry for Conceptart.org's character of the week #165... I hope I score a few votes :D

Art community competitions...

I wrapped up my Strangers in a Strange Land entry the other day, so here it is. The voting for that one starts on the 12th I think... There aren't really any prizes, but it turned out to be a fun reason to keep building my portfolio. Because of that, I decided to take the plunge and start becoming involved with conceptart.org. There is no denying how big that site is, so it's as good a time as any to start posting there.

I jumped into conceptart.org's character of the week competition (otherwise referred to as Chow). The deadline is Monday so I have half the time people normally would... but I don't have a job so I should be ok :P Interesting topic too - Super Cute! ... that's definitely out of a comfort zone for me. Anyways, here are my first thumbs for Captain Lilly of the Lollipop protectorate~

step 2...

Website and other stuff

I realize I haven't posted much in the last week... I've worked a little on getting a website up and running [here]. It's still pretty simple and rough, but I had to get that rolling. It showed me that I don't have nearly enough art to actually put a portfolio together (that I'd be satisfied with). Consider that gallery temporary if you take a look. Also, any crits on web design would be good to hear... I know there is a small design glitch in IE - it doesn't kill the site but doesn't look quite how I want it to.

Aside from that, I decided to read The Fellowship of the Ring finally - awesome! I can't wait to read the other 2 if I feel like I have the time...

Next, I did a little drawing today. I'll probably enter some small mini comp on Gameartisans. The topic is pretty wide open 'strangers in a strange land'...



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Sketches and Studies #7

Just having some fun and experimenting in Photoshop.