Cyborg Bear

Let's get right to the meat of it, shall we? CYBORG BEAR:



This big guy is basically the top of the line for ground-based animal-frame cyborg security. A living battering ram, with hundreds of pounds of armor and weapons, the Grizzly Guard will handle all of your security needs. With five-inch serrated surgical-steel claws, a pair of 20mm autocannons firing high-explosive, fragmentary, incendiary, and flashbang munitions, there isn't much outside of a main battle tank which can take on the Grizzly Guard and live to tell the tale. Used in concert with Recon Deer and Ostrich Cannon-Platforms, you can sleep soundly at night.

BONUS PROCESS .GIF TIME!!!!

Future Humans

CGHub.com has another challenge going called Future Humans. The future in this case means 1,000,000 CE. Which is a cartoonishly far point in the future. When I first saw the challenge, I wrote:

A million years is a stupendously long time. A million years ago, Homo Sapiens didn't even exist yet. A million years is enough time for humanity to crash down to near-extinction and rebuild. Multiple times. It took less than ten-thousand years for us to go from hunter-gatherer to carrying around a small device capable of accessing the entirety of human knowledge from almost anywhere on the planet.

My own thoughts on what humanity will look like in 1,000,000 CE is that we'll have progressed so far in nanotech, biotech and computing that the three will essentially be interchangeable. We'll be able to manipulate atoms so well that people will essentially be able to change their appearance at will in the blink of an eye, convert every single photon the sun spits out into energy with very little loss, and any fight that happened to occur would be over in the blink of an eye.

Who says I'm not an irrepressible optimist?

My first sketches ended up being pretty close to what I ended up with:





I played around with the details before dinner at my parents house one night:



And I banged away at it over the last few days:



It's more glowy and floaty than I generally like, but it fits for the topic. The actual challenge was to do a man and a woman, one a warrior one a teacher, and the deadline is tomorrow at midnight, so I may not end up entering the contest at all, but I'm glad I stumbled across it, if only for the weird directions it pushed me in.

Environmental Concept

I've been meaning to do more environmental work, so I did some environmental work!



I ending up going with the first sketch, although I still like the second one.

Here's the color sketch:



And the finished product:

Power Rangers and Excuses

I've been trying to do more group activities, like the Character of the Week and Industrial Design of the Week at Conceptart.org and the Character Forge at CGHub.com. I haven't been particularly successful, hence the title of this post. In my defense, the last month has pretty much been taken up by moving from Seattle back the Bay, and then getting the apartment into non-box-fortress shape, but still: I should have been painting and creating and writing.

Anyway, the last topic on CGHub was Steampunk Power Ranger. I got pretty far along before I ran out of time.






I like where the piece was heading, and I have all sorts of reference for the cracked leather and the steel and brass gears and stuff. But with the deadline gone, I don't think I'll ever get around to finishing it. There are simply too many other projects I'm more excited to do. Although looking at this guy now, I might just chop off the legs and do something with the upper body, because that gear and pulley on the shoulder turned out reeeeeeaaalll nice.

Combat Ostrich

That's right: Combat Ostrich. Technically it's a Cyborg Combat Ostrich. It's the counterpart to the Cyborg Deer. The deer finds the things what need shootin', and the ostrich does the shootin.'

I saved a few in-process images this time around, which isn't something I do enough of. The basic idea never strayed much from the original conception.



The ostrich has been implanted with control hardware, armored-up and had a weapons system bolted to it's skeleton.



I got to this point and decided to make a few relatively small changes. The sensor cluster at the base of the neck was screwing up the silhouette, the armor didn't look right, and the head was completely divorced from the shape of an actual ostrich's head.



Much more terrifying!

I have a few more ideas in the pipeline along these lines....

Shaolin Bunny

When pressed, I can do "cute." Case in point:




Stephanie's boss is having his first kid soon, and for the baby shower he asked everyone to bring an image of a rabbit, since this is the year of the rabbit we're in.

I had waaaaaayy more fun doing this than I expected to. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to draw more cyborg ostriches.

EDIT: I knew this was missing something: Secondary Highlights!



Much better!

Cyborg Deer!!!!

Man, it's been way too long.

Anyway, Cyborg deer.



This came about while I was doing some thinking about the Cyberpunk story I'm working on. I want to keep the story as "traditional" as the genre gets, with casual Virtual Reality, affordable cybernetics, brain implants, hyper-powerful and ruthless super-corporations etc.

It's the details that I'm playing with. I read an article recently about the burgeoning filed of remote control animals. Scientists have had the remote control cockroach and rat for a while now, and I just took that to it's natural conclusion: Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a robot to patrol the perimeter of your shadowy base in the woods when you can take a deer, surgically implant some control hardware in its skull and strap some armor on it? The deer is already fantastic at running around in forested areas, and you feed it grass.

I'm working on more of these, so check back soon!