Illustration - The Thing: Artbook

 I was honored to be apart of the official 35th anniversary artbook celebrating John Carpenter's The Thing. I'm a big fan of Carpenter as well as that film in particular. This is my first time doing something official for a big IP, so I hope I did it justice. You can buy The Thing: Artbook here.

Art Dump

I haven't posted here in a while, but I've still been drawing. So I'm just going to dump some of my recent paintings into this post and I'll try to be more regular with posting after this. I've been busy :). I hope you enjoy!

Creature Concept - 009

Never really tried my hand at creature design, other than a few attempts here and there. I see some great stuff out there and I'd love to be better at it. Here's a quick one. A few hours.

-Chris Shehan

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