Iluq: Caribou Spirit design

I'll have the rough work for this scanned soon (lots of it... my goodness)

This spirit is actually a whole herd of caribou. Since caribou get their strength in numbers, I decided it had to be a herd.

Iluq: Progress and Process

Okay so I've been doing more work on Iluq.
And also, at the suggestion of some friends, have decided to post some of the preliminary sketches for the spirits I've done so far.

Iluq:

I was given the crit that she looks too young. I had originally intended to have her be about 14 years old, I've kind of shifted her to around 11 or 12. I'm going to still play around though, I like the sketches I've done of her a bit older:



Here are some more actiony shots, some of them are still the kinda younger version of her, I'm still messing around with that:







Bear Spirit: Rough Work

So here's the rough work for the bear spirit design I posted a while ago:





And here's a repost of the final:



Here's the rough work for the fox spirit, she's supposed to be playful, fun, active and energetic where the bear spirit is more patient and grandfatherly:







This was my first attempt at her final design but I felt like I should simplify her back fur a little. Also, in this laying down pose it doesn't really read as active or energetic so I decided to fix that too



Here's the final design:




And then here's a few of the pages of the research I had done before starting all of this
I have lots of notes and doodles and things, these are just the ones that had drawings that other people could decipher hahah







More to come in the next couple of days!
Next steps are to finalize spirit designs for caribou, raven, lemming and seal
as well as some mood paintings that I'm working on

Iluq: More Vis Dev

A cleaned up version of Iluq:



Some of her facial expressions:



Her grandmother and brother:




A study of some icebergs (from ref):



Environment study (various refs):

Hank Burchill Design: rough faces

Here's some really really rough faces for a dnd character design for a friend

just trying to get some ideas flowing and feel out what sort of things he likes

Iluq- Visual Development

So some of you know I've been without my computer for weeks now.
I finally got it back
since I was away from it though, I started doing more work on paper, like I used to.
And it feels so great :)

For my story Illustration class, I get to basically come up with my own project
I've had this story playing around in the back of my mind for a year or so now.
I'm really inspired by inuit art, so I'm doing a short comic about a young inuit girl name Iluq (means frost in Inuit language)

Here's some of my sketches and visual development work I've done so far.
I started this project about 2 weeks ago now. Basically, I ran to the library, took out every book I could find on eskimo and Inuit culture and art and have been pounding out sketches of character designs and environments

There are hundreds of sketches of the bear spirit lying around my room, and even more of Iluq, but these are just some of the more recent, not as terrible ones :)

Final Design I've chosen for Iluq:


Some facial expressions (WIP):


Some of the earlier designs for Iluq:




Environment sketches:



Bear Spirit Design:

Valve Store Header Image

Yay I can post this!
I did this a couple months ago, it's now up on the Valve Store's main page as the banner image: http://store.valvesoftware.com

I love Valve, they give awesome assignments.

Check out the store, there's a bunch of stuff on sale! woo! sales!

TLD: Spread 6

I love this spread, I had to post it. Page from the Children's book I'm working on with Bruce Davis called "The Lonely Dragon"

Black Widow

I had a spooky dream about this broad so i took an hour and doodled it

Stuff from This Week

Work is starting to slow down a little on a game project I'm working on and CTN portfolio deadline is fast approaching. October 15th! also the deadline for the game to be finished, so holy crap! hahaha.. great client though, so I'm not concerned...oddly enough a good client who's not a pushy jerk will make me work faster and better than one who's constantly like "DO THIS RIGHT NOW" and is a wiener about it. Stubbornness... it's a curse.

Anyways, here's some stuff I've done the past week:

A couple illustrations inspired by Lunenburg Nova Scotia. It started out just as fall because Lunenburg is quite pretty in the fall, and LA doesn't have that season it seems. But then I played around with it and got winter, and now I don't know which one I like better... which is funny because I don't know whether I like Lunenburg's winter or fall better, they are both really pretty.




Rain in LA, because I find it so incredibly funny how worked up about the rain they all get. this was drawn from the window of a starbucks on the one day it poured here. I hear they get like... one or two days a year, and I experienced it. It was very comforting, and reminded me of home:



Animal silhouettes and sketches. These are for that game I'm working on. I have final versions of all of these, but I don't want to post them yet, out of respect for the client. He gave me the go ahead to use them in my portfolio, so I'll use it for my personal CTN stuff, but I don't like posting final game assets on the internet prior to the game getting released. So now you all have to buy the game to see what they look like finished haha... and tons of other stuff I've done!





Girls love puppies... just for fun



I also edited the birds to make the composition a bit better:



and that's it! Working on a giant illustration today and potentially on and off for the rest of the week.
I also have a whole sketchbook full of studies from this week from the zoo and starbucks
hitting starbucks every day for warmup drawings, it's like having super fast figure drawing sessions every day. Definitely paying off to warm up I think.

Animation Academy: Assignment 1

So I made it to LA in one piece!
And I started my course with the animation academy on character design.
So far it's going great, here's some bits and pieces from the first assignment which was to basically do 5 pages of head shots for a character development.
I'm doing a sort of take on Beauty and the Beast using a really ugly dog as Beast, and his owner, a young pretty girl as Beauty.

Bus Ghost

Often I'll come up with an idea for a drawing I want to do, but I don't feel I'm good enough yet to manage it, so I put it off, and it pops into my head every now and again, but I try to ignore it. This is one of those drawings. I thought about this about a year ago, and have doodled it like a thousand times in my sketchbook and just this weekend decided to take a break from working to tackle it.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out I guess, I'm sure I could change some things. I HATE how the baby is dead centred, I tried to find ways to fix it that didn't mess the whole thing up and I couldn't, so I just gave in and accepted that it's not perfect, oh well!

I like the thought that babies can see ghosts.

Inspiration: Xavier Atencio

Xavier Atencio is one of my biggest influences from Disney.
He was an animator, character designer and Imagineer from 1938-1984
The first time I saw his work, I honestly didn't realize how great it was, but I LOVED the Old Mac short as a kid:



now looking at it, it's easy to see why, the character design and colour choices (done by none other than Eyvind Earle) are brilliant.

but even more impressive than that is this:


all stop motion paper cut outs. (ridiculously racist as well but oh man the character design!)