Self Portrait

This started out with me taking anatomy reference for a self-portrait.  Step two was to use the next set of reference photos with a shirt on to make a professional looking avatar for all those networking sites.

Well I did step one…

It’s not often I get to render anatomy these days – especially of the figure.  That might sound silly considering most of what I do is character art, but the rules of anatomy can be flexed for cartoons.  It’s a liberty I take frequently and this more traditional approach was a nice change.  There are two newer painting styles I’ve been experimenting with, and this one is a perfect amalgamation of them.  One started about a year ago, and the other a little less than that.  The woodcut print looking blocky color border is something I developed accidentally while responding to my artist friend in a silly art trade.  As I was painting, I had yet to block in the pants and bra, and upon realizing how Leyendecker-ish they appeared without being rendered – I kept them flat voids on purpose.  It’s great to have a combination of the graphic shaping and realistic painting working together.  And the hot pink makes the portrait sizzle!

It took 8 hours for this.  Having photo and life reference really speeds up the process.  Familiarity helps too, I suppose.   I’m attempting to convince other friends to pose for me so I can have a few more paintings like this in the portfolio.  We’ll see how it goes.

They can keep their shirts on if they like.

I was invited to work on the app Know Color? by a pro techie: K. Gutteridge

His blog is full of useful programming information I don’t understand in the slightest (and probably never will) but if you’re a programmer you should definitely hit up his blog for tidbits.

The internet is a wonderful and vast world that allows us to cross borders and oceans with ease.  This is my first project for the UK!

Know Color? is akin to Brain Age.  It’s a simple Stroop Test with a timer.  You have to pick the correct color or word in the time limit and if you get it wrong – you get penalized.  It’s pretty fun.  I got a decent score the first time I played it despite the iPod Touch’s awful touch sensitivity.

Being that it’s a test, the developer wanted to go with a hand-drawn approach and as I love doing digital paintings with scanned pencil art – it was like a dream come true.

I had the most fun coming up with the professor.  He looks rather like a bird.  He was created around the time I did the Rocks the Haus Party poster and the second installment of ARR Pee! It’s a nice combination of my “cut paper” style I’ve been developing and my clean vector cartoons.

The app is only $.99 in Apple’s store and a great casual game to pop out while you’re in the waiting room at the doctor’s office or on a short break.  You can download it here: Know Color?

Most of my projects are in production and I need permission to show them off.  I recently finished art on a project called Know Color (an app for the iPhone) – and that’ll probably be one of the next few posts.  This .com needs to be updated more frequently!  In lieu of secret projects, I present an old fun one from a while back: Rocks the Haus!

Everyone needs a release now and again.  My friends and I were having a party where the title was a play on words. (Ignore the grammar and spelling of it, would you kindly?)

As it’s a joke – I spoofed the Gorillaz Rock the House video and stylized the main party planners accordingly.  The likenesses of them all have subtle inside jokes attached.

The most forward character in the composition tends to have a lot of shirtless pictures on Facebook, the girl standing in as “Noodle” is a huge Harry Potter fan, the guy with the beanie always shrugs like that, and the big fella in back resembles a wookiee.  (He also had that bike helmet on in a photo).

It was a lot of fun to make and we used it as the party invite photo.  I can’t go into detail much, but I love relaxing projects that can garner a few laughs.  I tend to avoid heavy outlines like the plague, so it was a great change of pace to try out a few things and learn some new Illustrator tricks.

The new ARR Pee! is in production and we’ll see if I can take some time out to post about Know Color and the upcoming The Oil Blue project.

Episode 2 Teaser for ARR Pee!

It has been a month since episode 1 of ARR Pee!  The first one had a lot of conceptual time pumped into it, but for the second installment, I really wanted to bump up the detail and environments.

The style I use for the comic incorporates heavy layering for the effects I want to achieve.  It’s not as apparent in the first episode, but in the second you begin to see a cut paper look.

This heavy layering allows me to break the boundaries of the panels with ease and also gives me the option of creating “sets” for the characters to be placed into.

The idea is that you see the character in the real world – or the game store Yottaquest (and the surrounding area of Cincinnati), as well as in his fantasy and roleplaying D&D-esque world.

I won’t place episode 2 up yet, as it’s made for Yottaquest to post, but as the other episode has been out for some time, it’s fine to post the first installment.

The first, finalized installment for ARR Pee!

It’s a smaller resolution, but it gives you the idea of how it is supposed to look.  As you can see, there isn’t a lot of environment for the character and I rely heavily on the style and poses for the dynamic aspect.

The method is tedious and difficult, but the results are so fun and colorful – it makes the trip there worth it.

The next episode will finally introduce the other main characters and begin to flesh out the experience.  By then I hope that the Yottaquest community will contribute their input and ideas to improve the comic to make it their own.

Brisbane teaser pic for ARR Pee!

It’s been years since I last created a comic series.  Actually, I had been working on 3 simultaneously back in the day, all of which I ended simultaneously – to my relief.  Case-in-point is that comics require a lot of time and work, especially if you write and illustrate them.  However, the thrill of cranking out amazing writing and art as a neat little package is severely enticing and it was only a matter of time before I let myself get sucked back into a world of panels and quotation bubbles.

Yottaquest, America’s #1 Gaming Store (no, I’m not kidding, they won that title!)  has been displaying some of my cartoons and drawings in their newsletter and on their website for a few months now.  There was a bit of a clash with doing them, however, as the owner was attempting to make my art a community project by having people submit fun captions to cartoons that weren’t funny at all.  I went along with it for a little while to see what happened and it seems we lost people along the way.

I took a couple months amidst several game art projects to rethink my approach.  It is a gaming store that’s deeply committed to its community, so I agreed with the inclination the owner had about including that community and the creative minds within it.  But what to do?  Comics about fantasy role players have been done, beaten to death, and then thoroughly flogged posthumously.  And then one day, I sketched out three little  ’toons and immediately gave them names.  I drew a picture of a heavier set nerd with glasses fighting a dragon inside a mountain.  When I tried to come up with a name for a mountain, I was amused to find the first thing that came to mind was the name of the area where Yottaquest resides: Mount Healthy.  And suddenly, Cincinnati became my medieval landscape.  Lockland became Lochland, Norwood became the Woods of Nor, Eastgate the Gates of the East, and Mt. Healthy became Mount Healthy!

Early ARR Pee! Character Sketches

Although it will narrow the audience, having Cincinnati and Role Players as the subject matter offers two very broad and familiar topics for the Yottaquest community to suggest ideas for the comic.  The comic is free to make light of dice rolls or the latest Cincy government scandal.  Or maybe to make fun of that Ohioan past time of playing “Cornhole” that I never quite understood.

Brisbane is set to release his epic intro for the first installment – so stay tuned for Yottaquest and Two Bit Art’s comic series ARR Pee!

In Process ARR Pee! Comic

Several months ago, I was approached by the developer/creator of Raylogic Games to work on an RPG with him.  We traded a few e-mails about it, and then the project was set on the backburner.  He was such a nice guy and I was thoroughly disappointed when nothing happened with the game.  He was one of those “clients that got away” – the people who have that great vision and drive who would be fun to work with for one reason or another.

Low and behold, some time later an e-mail popped up in my inbox from him and everything was green lit to go!

Nothing says bonus like being able to design monsters!  It’s scary when the creature presented is literally an amorphous blob – something that should have no shape but “blobby” and little distinguishing features.  Technically, the “blob” was a protoplasm, which, after some research, had the potential to be more than jelly.  I decided to make nuclei-like designs within the body that could function as “eyes” and internal organs – setting them up for heavy transparency so their innards could be visible to the world.

The biggest and possibly most important part of the project was an icon for the iPhone.  A 57×57 pixel icon doesn’t seem like a huge deal, but it has to compete with hundreds of thousands of other icons and stand apart enough for someone to click it.  Cartoons are easy to see, but the game was trying to steer away from being pegged as cute.  Dark suburban streets don’t show up on something the size of a thumbnail and after tweaking with crisper vector graphics and more chromatic colors we’re happy with how it turned out!

The game’s developer wanted to utilize my illustration and graphic design skills and as you can imagine, there’s never a dull moment!

Monsters in Suburbia Icon

The premise is fun and creative freedom is definitely a plus.  We may have just started, but some major coding happens this weekend, so be on the lookout for an awesome iPhone app from Raylogic!

Master Chief Vector 'toon

I’m excited at how busy I’ve been lately.  I stumbled across an old drawing I did of Master Chief!  I thought it was awesome and decided to clean it up and give it a shiny new high-gloss vector coat!

The shapes in this cartoon of him are really complex despite the fact that I toned down the detail.  The armor took some time to figure out, but as soon as I came up with a good method of building it, I was able to zip along.  The pose is amusing, and has some serious attitude.

After hours of work, I couldn’t wait to show him off.  It’s just a personal project, but doing armor was something new to me and I really enjoyed it!

Grid Wars Tanks

The app has been out for a little while, but I finally got around to publishing a more complete piece on it!

Recently I was offered the opportunity to work on a small project called Grid Wars by Elegant Mutations.  The art for the project took about a week from conception to completion.  I even had to compete against other artists to get the project!  My enthusiasm for retro graphics led me to create what I think is an awesome combination of glowing and transparency.  They look pretty cool tiny (the sprites are only 16×16 pixels!) but they hold up all the way to poster size as far as detail and design go.

Upon completion of the sprites, I was commissioned a little longer to make logo and menu art for them as well.  The game looks really slick and it was fun to watch it evolve to what it is now.  They punched up the explosions and completely changed the sound effects to match the style I came up with better.  The constant video footage updates from them helped out a lot during the creation stages.

Everything in the game was created as vector art!  Glow effects in Illustrator and my computer don’t get along so well, but I’m glad they cooperated long enough to help me finish this awesome opportunity.

The app can be found in the Apple iTunes store for about $2!: GRID WARS APP

Grid Wars Sprites

Grid Wars is copyright Elegant Mutations and developed by Steve Dekorte and Rich Collins.

Junkie Monkey G.O.W.

Game Junkie.com has always had this little monkey mascot that has a robotic arm and wears goggles.  One day, I noticed it reminded me of the blonde guy from Gears of War and thought it was the perfect match for a poster painting for the store.  Unfortunately, the store closed down, but the community is still going which gives me hope that it might have some usefulness down the road.

I’ve been working on this on and off for a couple years now.  The paint job on it is hyper detailed as it’s actually poster sized.  I made some serious progress a while back, but I really ought to finish it or it’ll be a perpetual “W.I.P.” (work in progress).

I especially love how I was treating the background and his face.  So far the textures are great, but there’s still a long way to go on this guy.

There seems to be a lull in my work coming soon – maybe I’ll pull the file back up again and give another update.

Clean Cut Marketing Ad

This is a couple years old, however, it still remains one of my more successful designs.  The starkness of the product against the background is great.  Simplicity speaks volumes sometimes.

I only had an hour to design, digitally manipulate, and crank out this piece.  I love the monochromatic color scheme and the shade of blue for the background.  I feel like I do my best work under pressure!  The frame is closer to the top of the page instead of the direct center to catch the eye faster .  I also placed greater emphasis on the product by keeping it at high contrast unlike the backdrop.

If I were to go back in, I’d probably take that underline out from under the title, maybe change the typeface.