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.