Archive for the ‘creature’ Category
Snow Castle recieves Nordic Game grant!
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010Hey guys! Just a little bit of happy news!
The studio I work at, Snow Castle, recieved a Nordic Game grant for our passion project “Winds of Edéa”, which is awesome! We’ve gotten a bit of press about it as well, in Norwegian, mind :) Read more over at pressfire, gamer.no and arcticstartup!
We’re very proud and excited! I’ll keep you guys posted as soon as I can talk more :)
My AD let me publish a little concept sketch as well: (click for larger version)
Thanks for stopping by!
Character design stuff
Thursday, December 9th, 2010Hey guys! Just a short post. Started sketching this dude, and figured I could post a WIP and update the post when I get further along. Nothing special, just having fun :)
Right, so I had a little spare time and started laying down some color :) Doing a lot of more stylized/cartoony stuff at work, so I feel it’s cool to get back to some good ol’ demon/fantasy character stuff on my spare time. Hope you enjoy seeing steps! I’ll update when I’ve done more on it :)
Thanks for looking!
Movie concept art + photoshop tip
Friday, April 16th, 2010Hey guys! I was told yesterday that I hadn’t updated my blog in too long by one of the guys I’m working with on a game, and he was entirely right!
I have been working my ass off on three different gigs lately so there hasn’t been much time for anything but working and sleeping. I really wanted to share something though, and I got the green light from Cosmic Apple to show one of the character designs I’ve done for a movie they’re producing in collaboration with Rowbot Street. Doing concept art for movies is great! I’ve had a lot of fun working with Dan Rowbottom who is writing and directing the thing. It is currently in pre-production, and it’s already started to pop op on various movie sites around the net, which is awesome! Cosmic Apple is also doing a podcast series during the production. The second one is out now and I’m in it stumbling over words and trying to be coherent about what a concept artist does on a film.. haha.. have a look at it here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcz5ly_raven-waiting-podcast-episode-2_shortfilms.
Anyways.. here is the character/creature design I was allowed to show:
Thank you for letting me put it on here, Dan!
It’s gonna be awesome to see the guys I’ve designed walk around on screen!
And the title promised a photoshop tip as well; I was thinking about composing pictures and placing focal points. So I wanted to make a way to get the rule of thirds as a guide when I’m doing the composition sketches and such.
Some of you guys might have already found this one out, but I wanted to share nonetheless.
So here it is; the rule of thirds tool type thingamajig:
Step 1:
Step 2:
And you’re done! You can turn off and on the guides by pressing CTRL+’
The beauty of this thing is the guides will readjust regardless of your canvas size or pixel count :)
Hope some of you found it useful!
Thanks for stopping by!
Illustration progress and studies
Thursday, March 25th, 2010Here’s the final image. Scroll down for steps.
So I did a rough sketch yesterday I’ll be continuing on today. In the last post I said I might do a projects page, so consider this a soft start in the blog :)
I don’t think I’ve ever done a werewolf illustration before, so now I’m going to.. haha.. I decided to put the scene into a passenger car on a train.. Felt a little more original than having them fight in the woods :) Also it adds sort of a claustrophobic feel to it (I hope). It’s hard to run away in such cramped quarters. I’ll update later on today with where this has ended up.. gonna split my time between work and this one until it’s done. There will probably be a lot of changes before It’s finished.. I’m just having fun with it :)
Right, need to get on with some other work, so here is where it’s at now.. still very much a WIP :)
I’ve changed the design on the head of the werewolf. I wanted it to be something more in between a man and a beast. The first design looked too much like a dog.
Added an overlay layer and dumped some color in with the paintbucket tool in order to be sure I got color in on everything. Nowadays I’m usually working directly in color, or at least switching very early to color, but seeing as how this piece started as a fun sketch, and I was just messing around with the design, the color came in later :)
I’ve added some reds in the focal areas trying to create a triangle-ish composition going from the werewolf head, to the dude on the floor to the guy shooting.
I’ve also started thinking a bit more about the atmosphere. I wanted to give this piece a cinematic feel, and go more for dramatic lighting rather than pushing “natural light”. Like a DOP on a movie will put a spot off the side if it gives off a cool light, even though it’s not necessarily the way the light would’ve behaved in real life.
Still a lot to be resolved about the passenger car itself, and the characters, of course, but I wanted to give myself a focal point early on so I can gauge the detail level off of that.

So I noodled a bit more on it today. Rendered out a little on the werewolf and the dude shooting, started correcting a lot of the lines of the passenger car. If I had done this for a job, I would’ve had a stage in between the sketch and where I’m at now where I would’ve made sure the perspective lines were more correct from the start of the illustration, but hey.. it’s all for fun, right? :)
Trying to figure out a little more of the light as well. Putting some light that bounces off the floor, to push the shadows a little more. I’ve also started to think a bit more about my edge control going in with a soft brush to round off some edges.. up until this point I’ve used almost exclusively the standard round hard brush with size to pressure and opacity at 100%.
Had some huge issues with the shooter guy’s fedora, it didn’t read like he was actually wearing it. One google image search later, he looked a bit better. If in doubt; get reference! :)
I’ll update the post when I do the last session on this piece.
And of course the obligatory studies ;)
Creature concept art
Thursday, October 29th, 2009Hey guys! I joined in on the COW (Creature Of the Week) over at conceptart.org.. the brief was a pretty lengthy piece, so I won’t write it all our here.. the description can be found on the forums here.
Had a buncha fun with this one! Here’s my submission (click for larger version):
B.I.M.P
Monday, October 19th, 2009I don’t know what you heard about me/
but that b**** can’t get a goldpiece outta me/
no horse ‘n carriage, no flashy robe you can’t see/
that I’m a muthaf*****’ B.I.M.P./
Bat Imp creature concept! Click it for larger view! Added this one to the concept art gallery as well.
dC
Nightmare concept #3
Friday, September 4th, 2009If this was for a game, the first two nightmare creatures would be “low level” enemies.. they’re pretty much basic and fleshy. That being said; I have no doubt that they’d be dangerous.
This next guy is a level up with a bony armour plate on his shoulder and upper part of his chest. Maybe I should think of some protagonists as well if this turns into a concept art for games fun side project.. we’ll see.. I’ll keep it fun though.
As always; click it for larger version :)
Nightmare concept art
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009Experiments
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009Hey ya’ll! Did a little character concept experiment after being harrassed into trying zbrush by dboy.. it’s a very very rough zbrush model (seeing as how I’ve no idea what I’m doing in zbrush.. hahaha) and then I jumped back into safe waters and painted on top of the model in photoshop :D
Click it for larger version
Hope you like!
dC
















