Illustration - Tex Mechs

This would probably be a movie on the SyFy channel. I did this for the Bloodsports Challenge over at Crimson Daggers. I had a lot of fun with this. The topic alone was fun to mess with. Western meets mechs. I love crossing two worlds like this. It's fun and interesting.

I had never drawn mechs before. So I was excited I'd get to try. It's harder than I thought, but funner than I thought as well. The design might not be great, but for my first mech design I'm definitely happy with it. The design was heavily inspired by Ashley Wood, as well as modern military tank design. You can see the painting studies I did of military vehicles below.

I definitely want to experiment with more mech design because it's interesting and something I should learn anyways. Playing with shapes and functionality is a great exercise. You'll see in my design process I used silhouettes at first to get a good idea of shape and form. Which is what mechs are essentially.

Process

Designs

 

Composition Sketches

 

Studies

Illustration - Wolf Blitzer: Full Moon Quarterback

I did this for Bloodsports which is a challenge held by Crimson Daggers. Crimson Daggers is a free online study group that I recommend all digital artists take part of in some form. They help you improve by doing critiques, live drawing all the time, and challenges like this that force you to learn while also helping you create an image for your portfolio. So it's a win/win. Even if you don't "win".

For this challenge we had to pick between 3 ridiculous topics. I chose Wolf Blitzer: Full Moon Quarterback. No limits, you could take it literally or not, the only rules are you have to show your studies, sketches, and reference, and the image has to have a background. They require studies, sketches, and reference in every challenge to make sure that were learning and not just entering art. It's like when your math teacher says to "show your work". Which is great. And I did learn. A lot.

I never used to do studies for my finished artwork. I'd just go. But studies actually help A LOT and now I'm doing them all the time. Why are studies good? They force you to understand what you're painting, and how things work, to bring a more realistic feel to your images. For example, for this challenge I did studies of a football player and a couple movie stills from American Werewolf in London. This way I had fresh on my mind the way a lit stadium looks, how a football helmet, football uniform reflects light, textures, what cool werewolf transformations look like, and so on. So then when I get to painting from my mind, everything is easy. There's no struggling. And I know the image would have looked much different without the studies. I remembered the way the werewolf's hair looked, the way the football players looked with the bright stadium lights, the way I painted the grass. Because I understood it all I could easily apply it to a painting from imagination.

Here's a detail shot of the face.

And here's some of the studies I did for this piece. (1-2 hours of painting each)

Process