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.

Concept Art - The Dark Tower

Illustration - The Savior

Slight update of my character's design. Still working away at the artbook for this as well as a comic book series. Pretty excited. Stay tuned.

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!

Character Concept - The Reaper

This is a quick character concept. This guy is awesome. Can't wait to paint him in action.

-Chris Shehan

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

Fanart - Lucy - LMS

So I dunno if you've read Dan Luvisi's Last Man Standing, but I do know that you need to. It's a game changer as far as art books go and the art and story are epic enough that they got picked up by Paramount for a movie, soon after publication.

This book itself is a big inspiration to Badassery Studios and it inspired us to do an art jam based on the book. Here's mine. Everyone else is still working on theirs.

I chose the character named Lucy. In 2008 when I was starting to take my art seriously, Dan had posted an image of this beautiful character, wielding two guns, falling from a building with the face like she was more calm than she'd ever been. From there he created a world of characters and eventually his book. The main character is pretty awesome, I'll admit. But I've sort of had a crush on this character Lucy since it was at the same time I was starting to really work on my art.

So I hope you enjoy Lucy. There are a lot of WIPs and Detail shots of this painting on my Facebook in the WIPs album.

-Chris Shehan

Comics - The Savior panel

A panel from my upcoming comic.

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

Lighting and Atmosphere - Grasslands

Here's an older speedpainting I did from mid 2011. I wanted to share this because this was one of my first attempts at some lighting & atmosphere techniques and I recorded the process. A few people have asked me about lighting and atmosphere so I figured I could talk a little bit about it here. I tried to put commentary on the video, but I couldn't figure out how to get it to work, but the video demonstrates it a little bit at the end.

I always try to get some sort of interesting lighting scheme. Sometimes I get realistic lighting, and sometimes I prefer to get what's called "stage lighting". Meaning you normally wouldn't see lighting like that in real life, but it works great for compositional purposes. For example, when you see a movie and a person's face is fully lit from all sides, yet so is the person they're talking to who's facing them. Where could that light possibly be coming from? Or to a more extreme level, when you play a video game and there's always a light in the direction that you're supposed to go. Where as in real life it might be harder to find that door to the next area. The lights are designed to lead your eye a certain way, lead your character a certain way, or set a mood. This is "stage lighting" because it's fake, believable light that serves as a compositional tool.

In the example above, I didn't necessarily have a purpose for the lighting, but it was more of a test to see if I could get some sort of mood and atmosphere with it. To achieve this I paint the character and the background in fairly flat, darker colors. Once the values are all there I use a "color dodge" layer in photoshop to paint some hot spots on the robot. I hardly use "color dodge" anymore and I don't recommend it unless it's used VERY lightly. After that I make a new layer and set it to "screen" and with a soft brush I start painting in light coming from the top right. "Screen" layers are GREAT for lighting and atmosphere. The reason is because a "screen" layer mixes the color you've chosen with the background, but also lightens the background and diffuses it as well. In real life, atmospheric perspective does the same things. Like when you see mountains that are far away, they are usually just a blue silhouette. The blue in the atmosphere mixes with the colors of the mountain and also the dark and light contrast fades away as well. After adding the lighting with the screen layer I then add a shadow layer set to "multiply". I pick a blue color for this to not only compliment the yellows and oranges, but to show the shadow is much cooler than the light. This happens in real life too, you'll notice a lot of times shadows have a blue or purple tint to them. "Multiply" layer is almost the exact opposite of a "screen" layer. It mixes colors with the layers below, but it darkens them. Great for shadows. This not only balances the composition but makes the light seem brighter and hotter than before.

Lastly, for added atmosphere, I always like to throw dust and particles into the atmosphere. Showing different levels of particles in the foreground, mid ground, and background gives the feeling of depth. Rain, snow, bubbles, dust, fire embers, all of these help make the subject matter seem like it's in a 3D plain rather than a 2D one.

So I hope that all helps! I'll do a more in-depth lighting tutorial later on so watch out for that. And last, but not least, here's the video of this painting.

Hud Concept

Here's one of my concepts for a character named Hud. He's the main character in an upcoming sci-fi epic from Badassery Studios. More updates on the project to come. You can read a full 24 page comic featuring Hud here. The comic was created on 24 Hour Comic Day and was completed in 21 hours. I Livestreamed the entire event so people could watch me attempt to create a comic book in 24 hours.