Just blowing some steam. I’ve been playing around with an awesome, new, FREE 3D sculpting program Sculptris. 3D is kind of a guilty pleasure for me since what I do never seems to amount to anything worth showing because the end results are rarely anything artistically interesting.

3D has however helped me flex artistic muscles that I rarely use otherwise – and working with lighting, texturing and, now, sculpting has helped me gain a better understanding of how light works, for instance. So it’s not complete waste of time and it’s fun.

This image is just a bunch of screengrabs from Sculptris combined in Photoshop with some post-processing to add shading, colors, texture and BLOOOOOOD. So no fancy rendering here.

I may have gone a little crazy with the glows but what the hell, it was fun. Here’s my sketch for the next in the activity:

Gabba gabba hey.

Well, with a little research it turned out that the image was actually a montage of two different images and it had probably been done at the ad agency that hired me, so I was free to do whatever I wanted with it. So, off to sketching I was.

First I googled a bunch of reference images of cell phones and sharks and drew a few quick sketches to get a grasp of how they looked and how I could mix them up.

Since the image would be a single character on a basically blank background, the shape and design of the cell phone shark would have to be interesting enough to hold the image and composition together. So I started thinking in shapes.

Above you can see the sketches that I thought were worthy of finalizing marked. They’re far from perfect but I now knew what I wanted and where I would take the final sketches. There were two different ideas: One for the traditional cell phone model (which was much like the image in the brief) and another one for the shell fish model. I finalized sketches for both:

The first one was pretty much a cleaned up and refined version of the thumbnail. The second was a combination of two different sketches. I wanted both of the sketches to have a sort of a fake fish eye perspective. I added the mockup type, and sent the sketches to the client.

They went for the second one. The final had to be all vectors which was a challenge since I usually work with raster images – and the final would have to have a painterly, retro quality to it. So, after some emails back and forth with the client and tweaking things, I finished the piece:

Some extra space added around the edges for cropping and bleed.

… and you’ve got hell to pay for it.

Another one for the CTT.

Another panel for the Stylus collaborative comic activity. My previous panels can be viewed here.

So, goodbye Bush – don’t let the door hit you in the ass. Hope the next time we hear from will be when you’re put on trial.*

In the mean time, the Guantánamo Bay detention camp is still running with full steam. You can sign a petition to challenge President Obama to close Guantãnamo, put an end to illegal detention, torture and impunity at Amnesty International’s 100 Days Challenge website. It only takes a minute to do it.

For more info about Amnesty’s framework to end illegal U.S. detentions check out tearitdown.org.

*) Not holding my breath, though.

Download Cancer Face mask (2,9MB) »

Initially this just supposed to be a stylized self-portrait for a forum activity, but then it occurred to me that with minor adjustments it would fit another activity too: Japanese Giant Monsters at U16! Better to look like a silly giant than some lame-ass pop punk promo picture.

Swiped the photo for the quick montage from Satyendra.

- Where’s your hat, soldier?
- I, um, misplaced it. sir. And I’m actually cavalry, sir.
- Cavalry? Then where’s your horse, man?
- Uh, hmm you see, sir  …
- Ungh, don’t tell me. I bet you’d lose your head too if it wasn’t attached to your shoulders.

This is a custom design for Christopher Bonnette’s Squealer paper toy. Since Halloween is coming up shortly, I thought I’d something to fit the theme. Live by the sword…

Anyway, here’s a low resolution version of the template. You can download a printable PDF here (about 1MB). For instructions on how to put it together visit Christopher’s site for a tutorial.

Download Papertoy (1MB)

Thanks to Christopher, who put the thing to together and took the photo too.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the deep ones.

The Deep Ones are a race of frog-like, ocean-dwelling creatures with an affinity for mating with humans.

Despite that they’re basically mind bogglingly horrific, fishy frog-creature-horrors, the mating does happen regularly. Much of how it happens is still a mystery but thanks to recent advances in sciences, the scientists at Miskatonic University have unveiled more facts about the process.

The males have a special mating dance to woo the ladies:

The females on the other hand have a more direct approach:

Stay tuned for more exciting revelations that everyone wants to hear!

Don’t worry, it happens to the best of us. More often to the worst, though.

For Illustration Friday’s theme "Foggy" and slightly inspired by this. (And apparently someone beat me to it slightly with his "vampire zombie" comment. Vampire zombie?).

Alright, I’ll be off for a few days eating sausage and drinking beer. I’ll be back next week. Hyvää juhannusta!

And my sketch for the next in line… Consider this a preliminary sketch for another project to come.

Traditional inks, each of the characters was drawn separately and then the final image was put together and colored in Photoshop.

So here’s a couple for U16’s Character Tag Team activity. First one is based on Gavin Mouldey’s sketch. And the second is my sketch for the next in line.

This was the sales pitch:

She was young, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. What began as harmless flirt, quickly descended into madness and sexual decadence of touching the inappropriate places. She had to do it, she had to cut herself loose before her precious hoo-ha would be breached!

Everyone thought she was crazy.  In fear of her hurting herself more they put her away. But she didn’t mind the rubber room. At least she was free of him now. And beautiful new life waited her outside, when she was deemed sane again.

And she wasn’t crazy. But no one expect her knew that. No one knew… until her doctor was accidentally killed by multiple stab wounds and was replaced by a handsome, young and passionate colleague….

This was done for U16’s "CTT – Turbo Mode" activity and the initial sketch is by DamselinDistress.

I could add, though, that I did some digging around with my old sketches, and this is actually based on a quick sketch from 2005. He used to be a card shark, snake-oil salesman or something like that back then, though.

Actually Skeletor is the main star here – or Aviator General Skeletor as I dubbed him with the redesign. The shoulder pads and the crotch piece of the original design reminded me of feathers, so I went for a bird motif. Conveniently, with a different name and color scheme he could well fit in another story as well. I imagine the world the MOTUs would live in would be a mixture of the Napoleonic era, WWI, magic and weird gizmos.

And then there’s He-Man. He was kind of dragging himself along with the Skeletor design, but as you can tell he’s still slightly sketchy.

He’s hard to make look cool or charismatic like the leading man should be, considering the original design basically comprises of steroid muscles; sissy looking hair style from the Middle ages; S&M armor and solarium tan. He’s like Conan’s uncool, Californian little brother without any personality. I don’t know if my version feels any more like a person, but at least he’s wearing pants now. It’s way difficult to look noteworthy (well, in a good way anyway) when everyone else is properly dressed and you’re running around in your panties.

I finally had some time to do some drawing just for myself, and here are the results. Doodles and sketches of my regular cast – monsters and women.

Shit, this was a lot of work. Deciding to do a Google Sketchup 3D-model of the castle sure didn’t help either – except the actual drawing phase, of course. It would’ve been faster to just draw the castle the old way, though – but maybe someone else can use the model later on as well.

So to begin, here are some sketches I did to get to know the characters and their gear – as well as the said castle model. You can download the Sketchup file for castle here and use it as you like.

 

And the actual comic:

These two pieces were done for yet another forum activity. The first one is my take on Scobot’s mighty fine sketch. It could either be just an allegory of life – or an epic depiction of how the rebellion of Heaven got started.

And here’s my character for the next one to participate on the activity. It’s not fine or epic at all, but it’s really late and I need to wrap this up.

So without further a due, I present to you a tender moment captured in Paris. Enjoy the song, admire the image and feel all mushy inside.

They say to "kill the head and the body will die," but truly wise men know that death isn’t enough for someone who has a deal with the Devil and heads to spare.

For damned she is – but not in hell and no more without a head. Yarrr!

That was the description George came up with and I figured it’s good enough for me too. I took a little longer than George’s time limit of 20 minutes, but these were quick ones nevertheless. They’re called Keanu, Daisy and the last one just likes to be called "F".

  

I suspect I was receiving someone else’s acid induced flashbacks from the sixties.