Character Line Up

Character Designs for Selestat Settlement

THE VILLAIN

Selestat Settlement Concept Art

Here is a little bit of cartography to show the lay of the land. When possible, I develop projects from the macro to the micro, starting with large-scale maps and progressing towards details.

The view from within Selestat Settlement.

The view from Horseshoe Bay facing due south.

Selestat at sunset.

 The Selestat Forge Mechanism.

Evening Stroll

"I have nothing against dogs or dog walks, all I'm saying is, how do you know that this wouldn't be WAY COOLER?" 

YETI CYCLES Frame Graphics!!!

Three Fantasy Musical Instruments

Had fun rendering these instruments for a set of three posters. I had so many layers my computer almost imploded. Here is a glimpse of my process.

A Ruin in Champeix

I'm finally back drawing. I went out with my friend Antoine Sevilla to the neighboring village of Champeix the other day. During this sketch I fell in love with the idea of buying and restoring the place. Unfortunately after knocking at a few doors, I found out that it has been sold a couple of years ago to a lady planing on restoring it and flipping it. Oh well, there are plenty of other ruins in the Auvergne waiting restoration.

Exploding Car

If you view these full screen you can roughly see how they animate by clicking through them.
The scene depicted an evil entity picking up the car and crushing it mid air.

Character Turn Around

More BGs from the Animism Production

Animism the God's Lake is almost wrapped up.
Only two more weeks or so for backgrounds. I'm not sure quite how many I've created. If I had to guess I'd say 100+
I'm now averaging seven of these per day. Can't wait to see the final thing!

BGs From My New Job at Z2H!

My boss Matt gave me permission to "leak" a few of the backgrounds I've been creating for the motion comic Animism. I'm really excited for the six episodes we are still hard at work on. It's a childrens' story about a group of youth helping mother nature fight against deforestation and big industry. Of course they are helped out by a motley crew of animals.
I'm exhibiting 25 additional BGs at the Ferry Building in West Vancouver next Tuesday (May 15th) Door open at 6PM! Definitely drop by and say hello!

Special thank you to my Production Designer Skyler Punnett who's work is amazing. Check it out here.
And to Jericca Cleland, my wonderfully patient director. She's worked on a tonne of productions including designing the filming and staging for Pixar's Toy Story 2 and Finding Nemo!

One small section of jungle platform.

Here is an example of a section of platform painted in grey scale for Shank 2. We had to tackle the levels in sections because Photoshop might not enjoy a 57000x2000pixel canvas. Parallaxing layers starting with dark leaf silhouettes out in front of the platform layer were later added along with background trees and distant hills  to create the illusion of depth and movement as Shank moved around the screen.

Shank 2 - Walkthrough of the Docks Level and Jungle Level

(99% of the BGs in these levels are painted by me.)
Spoiler Warning! These video contains game play footage.

Concept Art From the video game Shank 2

Here is the art for the campaign docks level and below it the multiplayer farm level. I just threw a gradient map on these. The BGs in the game are rendered in full colour. Click on these to see more detail.
Shank 2 is a 2D side-scrolling brawler coming out on Feb 7th on XBOX Live, PSP3 and PC.
Find out more Shank 2

    

Book Illustration. Concept Art to Line Art the Process

 Main character concepts.

 Village huts.

 Main character sculpts in Sculpey. I've been told to try Super Sculpey as it's suppose to be way better, hence the name...

I start an illustration with rough composition thumbnails(not posted) to establish the major shapes. These sketches become more and more focused till I feel confident enough to start the final illustration. In this case I worked traditionally with loads of tracing paper. I started by using red Prismacolor pencil. (You can see remanence of this in the scans) Then I traced over top with a mechanical pencil. The little "X" marks help me line up the different scans in Photoshop.

I may not like my first line work with one of the characters. So instead of erasing I simply remove that piece of tracing paper and replace it with a fresh one. Hence all the separate pieces.

 Here are most of the characters scanned in and cleaned up.

Then I add in the BG, and some extra foreground elements.

BG to a second illustration.