Train Guy Poster

Poster 'iconic' visualisation

Been able to return again to project Train Guy, feels really good to get this painted up! I'd been sketching these mock propaganda posters out in my pocket sketchbooks for a while now, essentially the character basically is an embodiment of a heroic looking soviet propaganda figure, with his crazy beefed up maul-like hands and arms.

Earlier, 'active' visualisation

  

Tree House

This was worked up from a Sketch I did back in 2012, I seem to recall I was super into Scott C at the time (well I still am if I'm honest) and  was playing a lot of Bastion (lush art by Jen Zee), I think the amalgam of influences from both are apparent here.

Dug out the old sketch and wit fresh eyes thought it could be a fun series to do, and it's got me thinking of a few game ideas too potentially.

Chaps!

These came about as an offshoot from a game jam project, and some much needed practice on trying to get the key shape into characters. 

Post Thought Bubble Post!

Man I almost forgot to say how awesome Thought Bubble actually was!

Had such a great time and although I was definitely a touch nervous at the start of day one (not really knowing quite what to expect) by the Sunday I was chatting on to everyone!

My view from 39b

Being my first time at a con and behind a table I was a little pre-occupied to catch everything and everyone on my list,  but it was still inspiring to see so much amazing work from passionate people. Definitely love to make this an annual event! (need to return to this post to add a photo of my swag)

a *slightly* jaded me on Sunday morning

Also I was super pleased to show my first comic 'Stamp' to people, got some really positive responses and as if that wasn't enough, I was delighted to get a mention on the Forbidden Planet blog which can be found here

Being primarily a game artist on other peoples products (which is still pretty cool) I can totally recommenced events like Thought Bubble to any artist who may want to do more personal work, the feeling you get from just doing something and taking it along is really encouraging!  

"Do you like Owls?"

Playing with some inker brushes, the result is a little different from usual really liking the rough texture brushes with the stronger inkish lines. I think it's a little inspired the amazing amounts of cool stuff I saw at Thought Bubble this year. (plus I've been playing plenty of World or Warriors recently)

Thought Bubble 2014, I present 'STAMP' !

I'm really excited to have my first comic printed, in time for Thought Bubble! It's been a goal of mine for sometime now, and I have a small run of 'Stamp' which I will be taking along on the 15th and 16th of November! 

I'll be on table 39b in the Ne Dock Hall (special thanks to Lucien Hoare who's table I'm occupying in his absence)  Please come and say hi!

http://thoughtbubblefestival.com/

First time I've had work printed as a book, and I must admit I've made a few schoolboy errors, but the overall feel and story is pretty rough anyway and my natural style isn't that tidy so it's not such a problem this time round. As ever there's plenty to learn through doing! (Next time's gonna be awesome.)

Really pleased I was able to convert some of stamp designs into stickers - really pleasing transferring digital art into the physical

 I'd wanted to create a book of my work for sometime but after some thought, I really didn't just want to have a portfolio style book, I wanted to bring a comic that was it's own thing and separate from my other professional work in video games. It's a small story about the Autumn, dissatisfaction, and surreal escapism. With stickers.

It's far from fully developed but I'm really glad I'm able to share with people!

Winner Takes It All!

Took a few days out to have some fun with some mock game concepts, it's pretty desperate! But I quite enjoyed how the quick sequential stuff ended up. 

Hay Ewe! (a long post, with lots of pictures)

This month a project I helped out on in the summer gets released, It's a mobile game called 'Hay Ewe' and it was a fun casual project that was made by a small team with a lot of love and not a lot of resources.

Matilda (from a design by the awesome Zhuo Wang)

As I've been freelancing again, I've really enjoyed working with small teams again, and reminded of how adaptable you need to be. In this case I was presented with an existing character and a loose art style amongst a lot of place-holder art. A key issue that perhaps I didn't quite iron out to the extent that I'd hoped for was matching the existing character style already set out. Especially hard as the team was working remotely, plus we didn't have time for much concept work, mostly conceptual design was just rough notes and suggestions. It's not all that sexy, but as its a 2D project it's kind of all that's required, plus it's nice not to get too bogged down also.

Area ideas

Some super-basic character concepts - nothing says highly intelligent predator like a Killer whale with a Rubik's cube right? (Didn't make the game if that answers your question) 

The costume and collectable objects were the first contribution, and kind of a nice and easy way to engage with the forming identity of the game.

Collectables

I've always  preferred illustration over UI and graphic design but my input ended being a pretty even mix of fun illustrations and some functional UI design - involving lots of roughing and revising, plus a lot mistakes and redesigns.

Early sketch and development out for the in game tutorial 'Ewe-tube'

'Hay Ewe'  as one might suspect, is not a game that shy's away from puns, like at all. Ever.

As soon as someone dropped the 'Ewe -Tube'  pun an idea quickly formed of having a beat up old BBC style computer on which player can watch (handily text lite) videos explaining the various hints and hazards of the game.

First pass at tutorial

I love big chunky analogue buttons that animate, and liked the idea of a forgotten pc in the bottom of a barn covered in hay and with chickens roosting on it etc. I felt pretty happy thinking "If this sort of thing was good for games like 'Machinarium' it'll be swell here!"

It was about the same time we that we decided add 2 entirely separate shop screens to the same format, that we realised that this was actually a TERRIBLE design for a multiple aspect ration mobile menu system to work... And so back to the drawing board until we started to get something a bit more appealing, flexible, and with even more terrible puns.

Reworked flow and final shop and dress up screens

As much as I love having User Experience and UI specialists on hand to help with wire-frames, flow charts etc. massively failing at UI design is a pretty useful experience. I did however get the chance to do some nice illustrations too which was super cool.

Red+Blue col-erase sketch

Some interiors for level transitions.

The backdrop and illustration stuff's always great fun (as you get to do pretty drawings) Even with the map there was plenty UI to consider, and even with a zoom-able screen it's challenging not to over clutter things.

An original working and a final screen-grab of the level map, sadly no sketches for this one.

Big props to the Rainbow Rocket Studios team for getting the game out - It was a real fun project to help out on.

  

Train Guy Update

I've been pretty busy on my freelance projects, and getting stuff together for thought bubble (under a month left now...) so I haven't been able to add much of 'Train Guy' project for a time. 

Currently the game revolves around brawling atop of a moving train to protect it's cargo, key part of this is obviously the design for the actual trains. Fundamentally I want to have an upgradeable train that consists of 3-4 upgradable components, all of which can be upgraded with more visually outlandish iterations. In short I wanted to have a train that can part by part be upgraded from a old vintage Steamer, to a futuristic Mag-Rail bullet train, via some glorious 30's sleek body work (I'm kind of a fan of incongruity) Below is the first step of dividing assigning sections to the an upgradable quality. (Cant wait to mock up some variations based on these)

While the visual aesthetic is still floating around a few possibilities I really loved looking at the old rusting trains with pipes valves and tanks galore, but even condensing some of that into a reasonable simple design was really tricky. I realised pretty quickly that this sort of inorganic design is actually pretty challenging to get down through drawing and painting, so this was a great project to switch to 3D for a little fleshing out. 

Ultimately this game could even be in 3d at this stage so it's been a really good exercise in figuring out the  direction for this project this has been as much of a 'game' design exercise as a visual one.

 It's a bit of a slow train, but for now I feel it's getting somewhere.

Isometric assets

Recently been playing around with doing some isometric game stuff. My personal work tends to the untidier side of things at the moment, and I've been doing some really rough and ready concept work over late summer early autumn too - so it's been a while since I've done any fully rendered stuff. Actually been pretty fun! 

Stamps!

Quick WIP preview of my comic project for Thought Bubble this year. It's um, about stamps.

Hands On

An offshoot from my ongoing 'Train Guy' project. Once I've perfected getting the quality nice these are hopefully going to be prints.

Priestess Process (sort of)

I don't tend to do process stuff of my pictures, technically speaking I don't feel my process is necessarily disciplined enough to warrant it. I've been working professionally as an artist and designer for five or six years now (and  drawing for significantly longer) and as time's gone on I get much less of a kick out of rendering for rendering's sake, and get more caught up in the subject matter and mental processes of drawing from imagination, I mean life's short right? 

Could be a part of how anyone's creative engagement with their work will inevitably change, (or could just be damn laziness...) either way here's kind of a 'creative' process I went through in looking at a priestess type character. Ultimately I think it was abandoned as concept, but it was fun working through these various stages, thematically and stylistically.   

Anyhoo- signed up for the Schoolism workshops in London next month so that'll be a chance to re-engage with the process side of things no-doubt :)

Train Guy: A Lover and a Fighter

Been  having fun designing this guy. Started off with a loose Bauhaus/Constructivist feel, with silly proportions, but wanted to flesh him out in his physicality with these paintings.

 Initially a tongue in cheek Desperate Dan like character who is all things to all men I wanted to be stern and combative, but also creative and gentle. It's been fun drawing a character with silly arms doing a variety of tasks. Next step is to jump back onto the really angular, possibly vector style to see if the solidity of these painted versions can recombine with something more stylistically true to the initial stylistic inspiration of the constructivist figures of old Russian propaganda.

Guilty Faces...

Some test images from a current side project, based on some of my street sketches of the past 6 months, I was keen to have a rough and unpolished way to include these into something. Currently planned to be involved into a comic, I'm deliberately keeping things a bit wonky and messy on this one as its all being done very piece-meal, and the real goal on this is to combine into a small coherent story, so rougher the better at this stage, will probably weed out the weaker images later down the line.

Train Guy Project

I'm flying off to Australia tomorrow so won't be blogging for a while, it's going to be awesome plus I'm packing some serious sketchbook so I will no doubt post some stuff on my return!

 In the mean time I'd thought I'd post up some of my exploratory stuff for my 'Train Guy' project. Still work in progress, playing with styles that I'm not sure I'm happy with yet. I wasn't 100% sure posting incomplete stuff up here is a good idea, but since it's been a slow burning project, I need to get some of this stuff off my desk and (potentially) get some responses.

Primarily exploring the character and aesthetic the 'Train Guy' character was initially an embodiment of old American Railway workers, industry, hardship and pride.

 Thinking about ways of depicting a functional, industrious character led to an alternative kind of culture to draw from Russian constructivism, and so to Bauhaus which has grabbed me as being an interesting potential art style to apply to a video game's art direction.

Having said this, when doing some more painterly work, I really liked how it had some of the qualities of old cigarette cards, which I thought would be an amazing way to tell a story, and sort of captured the romance and aspiration of the railways but from a blue collar grass roots level.

It's my hope to be doing plenty of writing and design over the next few weeks to try and work some of these themes out before pushing the rendering and illustration further.

Space Commuter

Found this old character in a sketchbook today, gave him a digital dusting off! Nice working with watercolours - it responds really well to digital tinkering too.

Pirate Mondays

Quick Blackbeard using some fun new brushes.

Street Sketches!

I'm going to update this post as I scan and compile these images: For some time now I've been keen on practice drawing more people and using pens more frequently to record things I see. 

A friend and former colleague kindly gave me a V ball pilot pen, and I've enjoyed how the fine lines have influenced my sketching, which I often feel is messy and overly constructed. (NB some of these drawings are still just that, but in a few cases I feel like I've been able to break some bad habits, which to me is progress!)

Also been playing with brush pens:

And the obligatory pencil:

Sketchbook Scan Sunday!

Since returning to a spell of freelancing towards the end of last year my Sundays have again become the universal day of Tea and admin, since the Taxes are done I thought I'd try another slightly tedious task and scan in some sketchbooks.

Here's some compilations from last years Inktober month. Some street sketches up next post!

Some old ghosts...

Just dug up some work from last year that never went anywhere, I think these were intended for use as stickers - not particularly seasonal but hey-ho. In my more current projects I've been doing loads of 'dirty' digital painting with some great grease pencil brushes, so its nice to look back at this stuff which is using crisp vector masks and smooth gradients.