BARTness

Graduation Day

My younger sister and my sketchbook graduated at the same ceremony. I'm pretty proud of my sister for making it through college but I have mixed feelings about the sketchbook I just finished. It didn't feel as unified and committed as previous sketchbooks and I only did one painting in it (which I didn't even finish):


Above: I did this at Dolores Park at the last Sketchcrawl. It was too windy to finish the painting... the gouache kept drying on my palette and brush before I had the chance to get it on paper. It's been endlessly windy the last few months here in the city so I suppose that if I want to get any plein air painting done, I'm going to have to find some kind of retarder for gouache. Or start working in oils again.
Below: More BART drawing. I've been working a lot lately and it seems the only real chance I get to do personal drawing has been on BART on my way to and from guitar lessons.


I should post some more Dragons of Atlantis work soon...

Head On

I went to a pen fair at Flax Art a couple weeks ago and ordered myself a sexy new fountain pen. I want to start working with new media again. Sexy fountain pen sketches to follow...

...and stuff.

Dragons of Atlantis: Part I

It’s funny... by the time you finish any project, it’s already outdated in terms of your skill level. It’s difficult to know when it’s time to call a project “good enough” (as opposed to “finished”) or risk getting yourself caught in an endless loop of revisions and redos. You just have to move on at a certain point and apply those new skills to the next project. Deadlines help with that.

As promised, here is some of the work I did on Dragons of Atlantis. I primarily did buildings for the outpost so the rest of the work I want to show will wait for another post. I'm displaying the buildings at approximately 200% the size that they would appear at in the game. Certain elements aren't rendered fully the way I would want them to be simply because when you shrink them down, you can't see that level of detail. Some things have been exaggerated for the same reason too.

BELOW: These are the 3 levels of Farms you can build in your outpost’s field.



BELOW:These are the Training Camps you can build in your outpost to train special troops different from the ones you would train in your city’s Garrison. When I was assigned to do the Training Camps, we weren’t sure exactly what sort of troops we were going to have train there so it left my design options way open. I dubbed the camp “Super Mutant Armory” and created a design that left a lot of room for all kinds of troops to train. The water for aquatic training, rocks for climbing, a platform for flying, etc.




BELOW: These are the 3 levels of outpost Muster Points. The Muster Point is a meeting area for troops and through it, you can control the movements of your military (send out attacks & reinforcements, etc.).



Here are screenshots of the game so you can see how the buildings appear to the player. I also designed and painted the outpost Walls (these are the Level 8 Walls). Disregard the overlapping shadow of the Dragon's Keep on the Walls... as of the time this screenshot was taken, the Keep placement needs to be readjusted.


Fun fact: the Zolmec woman avatar in the upper left is our former character designer, Rosie. She denies this, of course, but no one who knows her who sees the design doubts it's her.


The rest of the outpost buildings were done by my coworker (and college classmate) Chantrelle. You can play Dragons of Atlantis on Facebook here.

All artwork in this post is copyright 2011 Kabam. All rights reserved.

SAN FRANCISCO SOAKED IN SUNSHINE

A waterlogged town rejoices.

Shmetches

Things have been pretty busy on my end for the last 3 weeks or so and I haven't had the chance to do any art outside of work. But in the interest of getting things rolling again, here are some month-old sketches. I'm hoping to set aside time this week to get together some of my work from Dragons of Atlantis to post here now that my schedule is beginning to restabilize.

I've also been thinking about revisiting pencils soon in my sketchbook. While that may not sound especially noteworthy to anyone reading this, it's actually kind of a big deal for me. I'm a slave to ink and malleability of graphite makes me uneasy. I like to believe my marks are absolute, for better or worse. It keeps me decisive, thoughtful and, above all, humble. I think I'm overdue for an adventure in unexplored media though.