Shadowrun on My Mind....

Shadowrun is an old-ish tabletop RPG that I've been aware of for a while now. I have many a fond memory of playing the videogame adaptation on the SNES, and the world has always appealed to me. Take Tolkein's dragons, elves, orks, trolls and dwarfs, put them into William Gibson's "Neuromancer", set the whole thing in Seattle and you get Shadowrun.

I can't actually remember why now, but I've had Shadowrun on my mind something fierce for the last few days. So much so that I've been doing character design images from the Shadowrun universe.



On the left, we have a female elf Technomancer, and on the right we have a male human Street Samurai. I'm planning on doing a Troll Bioware thug, an Ork shaman and a Dwarf rigger, to round out the races/classes. I plan to keep everything greyscale as well.

Character of the Week

I've been reading ConceptArt.org for...God, like six years now. I'm on my third username, which is my actual name, because I got tired of having a silly nickname and I figured the last thing I wanted to do was to make it harder for people on the Internet to connect me to my art.

Anyway, I haven't had much luck with CA's weekly challenges. I consider it a victory if I can garner a single vote, and that's in comparatively sparsely-contested sections like Industrial Design and Environment of the week. I haven't ever submitted a final image to Character of the Week.

Until now.

The challenge this week is Aladdin, the thievin, genie-finding street-rat. I knew vaguely of the character and story apart from the Disney movie, but the first thing that popped into my head was "Future parkour-hacker Aladdin", partly because of this awesome image from my reference folder that I've been itching to use, and partly because Disney Aladdin is the OG parkour master.

I posted this sketch and got the go-ahead for the future setting....



And then I went to work. Here's my work-in-progress image that CA had me make...



And here's the final...



I'm really excited about this contest, and I think that this piece is one of the strongest I've ever made.

His Majesties Nineteenth Werewolf Regiment, pt. 2

I spent some time working on the clothes that the werewolves wear, and I came up with a jacket design that I'm a lot more pleased with:



I also made an image of the Russian Vampires that the Nineteenth will be facing off against:



I should probably finish writing the thing now...

His Majesties Nineteenth Werewolf Regiment

I had a dream around a year ago about werewolves, but the only thing I could remember when I woke up was one single line: His Majesties Nineteenth Werewolf Regiment. Maybe it's because I was reading the Termeraire series at the time, which is the Napoleonic Wars with Dragons, but something about old-timey warfare with the added element of Werewolves definitely stuck with me.

Here's the first paragraph I wrote about the Nineteenth:

Word on the boat was that the Russians had brought in a pair of vampire regiments along with the fresh cossacks, hoping to negate the Nineteenth's advantage during the cold nights on the Avoz Front. The full moon was only a few nights away, bringing with it increasing strength and ferocity for the werewolves of His Majesties Nineteenth, but also decreasing cognition and rationality. The bombardment of Taganrog had been going on for more than six hours. In small bunches, out of the way of the sailors of the dropships, the wolf-men discussed the coming battle in quick, barked snatches, their dull ocher coats hanging baggy and un-belted in preparation for nightfall, and the changes it would bring to each each man's body.

You'll have to be a real history nerd to know what war this takes place in without resorting to the Google or the Wikipedia.

Here's the first illustration I did of a member of the Nineteenth:




I think I need to re-do the jacket. It's looking a little too carnival ringleader right now, and less mid-19th century British army. I am however pretty pleased with the head and hands of the wolf-man.

I'll probably do some Russian vampires next.

Fuckin' Chairs, How Do They Work?!?!

So, I made a chair in Maya.



I've been using tutorials on Youtube to re-learn how to use a 3D modeling program, and it's weird how many things are coming back to me. Like at on point, the dude I was listening to/watching said "don't forget to set the group to center pivot!" and I had a flashback of one of my teachers from a few years ago saying the same thing in her distinctive, high-pitched voice and accent.

I'm also remembering the things that screwed me up last time around: Things like how important it is to work in the center of the ground plane. Objects being in the center mean that you can scale and duplicate them easily. If you work all messy like I tend to, duplication is a matter of guesswork and frustration. The really kickass thing about 3D modeling as opposed to digital painting is duplication. You spend hours working on a spaceship engine, for instance, and you spend two seconds duplicating it a half-dozen times when it's done.

This chair is made of stretched cubes, and none of the edges are trimmed to fit properly; they're all just mushed together, so I still have a ways to go. On the plus side, getting to patio chair level skill took me a few weeks last time around, so I guess I'm ahead of the game.

Teaching Myself Maya....

I've been doing some research, and it appears that a certain facility in Autodesk Maya is important in the entertainment design field. So I downloaded a trial version and have been watching tutorial videos on Youtube narrated by a delightful British fellow. That's Stephanie's computer on the left, running the tutorials, and mine on the right, running Maya. In between is a huge container of black pepper, because my "office" is also our dining room table.

I took a 3D modeling class way back when I was still an Industrial Design major, and it while it wasn't Maya, the interface was pretty similar. So the experience so far has been sort of like returning to the home of someone I wasn't really friends with and seeing that they've bought all new furniture.

I'm tagging this "3D Modeling", and in the coming days and weeks I'll be posting the sad, mangled models I can scrounge together, hopefully followed by some models that look at least a little better.

Suddenly, Ninja Turtle out of Nowhere!

I realized the other day that it's been more than a decade since I drew a ninja turtle.


Time to fix that:



Before I started this, I looked at a bunch of pictures of regular, non-ninja turtles. I learned something important: Turtles are freaky looking. They run the gamut from sort of weird looking to tremendously horrific. So it stands to reason that a mutant combination of a turtle and a dude would look equally horrific.