5/11/2008 - Adorable Alien
I finally finished that piece I was working on for the CGSociety Challenge (see the lots-of-entries below. Here's the finished painting.
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4/28/2008 - Value and Color
So here's how that piece I posted earlier is turning out. Here is the greyscale version and then the same with 2 added layers, one for the left light and the other for the depth fog.
Here's a bit about my process to turn the image on the above left into a full color image:
(If you want to see it, right-click or control-click to save or view the full-size image.)
Here are the rough colors, from the last step above:
And lastly, some shots of the characters in progress as I refine them and their clothing:
More later as I paint more...!
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4/15/2008 - Isn't he adorable?
I've made a change with my CGChallenge entry: The candle-lighting ceremony thing wasn't working, so I decided to expand on the concept of big aliends finding us wee humans really cute. Here's the layout in progress:
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4/9/2008 - Cthulhu Unbound
Permuted Press has finally announced their 2-volume collection of H.P.Lovecraft-inspired stories taking place in less traditional settings. They used "Wage Slave" as the cover to the second volume - a perfect piece to show Cthulhu out of his habitual milieu. Here's the cover mock:
(Sorry, they didn't have a larger image.) You can see more book details on their blog. The books release late this year.
In other news, I've started work on my entry for CGSociety's latest "Uplift Challenge," the goal being to draw a piece showing human and alien interaction. Here are some rough sketches of what I'm doing so far:
More updates soon...
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4/1/2008 - Dominance War revisited
I ended up deciding that the previous character I was concepting just wasn't "me" enough and went back to the drawing board to come up with something more fun. This is who I came up with: Sesslyth, an amphibious eel-creature who is also a powerful mage. He fights evil robots with the help of his sidekick Ezekiel the Octopus. For the final Dominance War contest entry, I needed to submit one posed color shot, a monotone model sheet, and a monotone character development sheet. Here are my finals for those:
Enjoy!
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3/1/2008 - Dominance!
GameArtisans.org is sponsoring an annual contest called Dominance War where they set up a battle scenario and everyone's supposed to enter a combatant who will be dominant in that fight. It's basically a bit character design contest. This year they have divisions for 3D and 2D entries so I'm entering in the latter with a concept design piece. You also have to enter on a team, so I'm part of the CGSociety battalion. You can visit my thread, but here are the sketches I've posted so far:
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2/24/2008 - Sparky Armageddon
It's another new Cataclysm character: This is a mad scientist mastermind type character named Sparky Armageddon.
For my birthday, I got a gift certificate to use at a local book-store (thanks, Alex and Jen!) and they fortunately had a copy of Dorling Kindersley's Dogs book. I love the DK books - more aimed at kids, but chock full of great illustrations and photos. I referred to DK's Cats for all of the Fastpaw crew, and now have some great references for the bad guys too. So Sparky here is based on a Rough Collie. Good dogs for shepherding... flocks of evil minions, that is!
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2/15/2008 - Happy Birthday, Frank Frazetta
For its March 2008 issue, ImagineFX magazine had a large tribute to the master of fantasy art, Frank Frazetta. They asked a number of artists, including myself, to contribute a piece done in Frazetta's style. It was interesting to see all these mixes of Frazetta's style with that of other artists, which artists tried to really mimic him and which ones only borrowed form him just tangentially. Here's my efforts, a combination of Frazetta's anatomy (or at least my best stab at it) and palette with my own silly sense of humor. Looking back though his work, I noticed just how often he used this sort of pose for the males so I just had to incorporate it! :)
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2/7/2008 - More canine enemies
A selection of doodles for other sci-fi and alien canine bad-guys. See any you like? I hope not - the point is for these guys to be mean! (except for that chihuahua in the flight-suit in the center - he doesn't look too mean. Ooops!)
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2/5/2008 - Lockjaw!
The Cataclysm cats need someone to fight and here's the first real contender to step into the ring: He's 'Lockjaw,' a German Shepherd Cyborg villain. I went a different route with this rendering than the other ones: While everything else was on a clean white background, Lockjaw really looked best in really dark armor, and it didn't show well on white. It looked nicer on a darker surface to let the subtleties pop out more.
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1/29/2008 - Dog soldiers
Well, once I'm going to create an army of cats, they need someone to fight against. I don't think these are them, though. These were just warm-up sketches this morning. I think in the end, I'd like the cats to be fighting some foe a lot more fearsome and monstrous. But ti's fun to experiment, and I like all of these characters.
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1/26/2008 - Captain Woogums
Yet another made up character from my 'Cataclysm' project: Captain Woogums is the Captain of the Fastpaw. He's a bureaucratic type, very into the regulations.
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1/17/2008 - Private BooBoo
Here's the latest in the series of Cataclysm characters, Private BooBoo. Because you can't have officers without enlisted men - er, cats - right? I've edited this image from the original post to fix up his eyes a bit.
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1/13/2008 - The Fastpaw
Continuing concept sketches for 'Cat-aclysm,' here is the Fastpaw, Major Socks' battleship. The top half are all the rough sketches I did to get to the final ship. The one I went with is the one in the upper left. At that angle, you could see a little better that it looked a bit like a cat. A little bit.
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1/8/2008 - Commander Muffin
...And yet another character from the same series: It's Commander Muffin. I wanted to keep things military but not necessarily make it all guys. Muffin is Major Socks' commanding officer. The other two characters so far have both had some serious mass to them, so I wanted to keep that consistent for her as well, rather than making the usual svelte feline female. I'm happy with how she turned out: Not slender, but still very sexy...as well as being tough, too.
To answer your earlier questions, Laura, they DO have claws but like with any cat, they can be extended as needed. They didn't need them out in this case. I'd tried drawing them in but didn't like how they looked. As for the big hands, well hey, after creating Major Socks' hands, I had to keep things consistent.
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1/6/2008 - Admiral Whiskers
Another very late night painting. I mentioned in yesterday's post (Major Socks) that I had other characters in mind for whatever astro-military service the Major is a member of. So this here is Admiral Whiskers:
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1/5/2008 - Major Socks!
So I was doing more doodling (see previous post) and I came up with this guy, a feline heavy-armored warrior. His name is Major Socks. He serves dutifully aboard the starship Fastpaw for his commanding officers, Commander Woogums and Captain Fluffy. The entire fleet is under the direction of Admiral Whiskers, whom I did a sketch of: He's a Persian, so he's got one of those smooshed puggy faces. I'll post it later, maybe even as a color piece. Anyhow, I did a couple of sketches of Major Socks and really liked him so I stayed up late to render him out. This whole thing, start to finish, is about 5 hours of work (the last hour of which was finicky (ha ha!) details that you probably can't even see at this resolution! )
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1/4/2008 - Creature and Robot sketches
It's been ages since I uploaded just some plain old sketches, not for anything in particular, just for fun. The top left one was kind of a Moblin from the Zelda games, or at least inspired by them a bit. The lower right ones are shambling robots of some sort. Anyhow, nothing special, just having fun...
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12/18/2007 - Mermaid for the holidays
Over on the PixelBrush forums, we had a holiday art gift exchange. My recipient was Rita, who happens to be into faeries and mermaids and such. She's already "unwrapped" her present, so it's okay to show this now, my mermaid for her:
Happy holidays to all out there!
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12/14/2007 - Chanukkah Alien progress
Well, Chanukkah is over, and I've since posted my finished artwork for this year's holiday cards... but I had a little fun throwing together the progression of the piece into an animated GIF file. Enjoy!
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About Me
This is the sketch-blog of Mike Dashow (walrus.) Hopefully this will get me off my butt and force me to sketch more.
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