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!

Blastosie Redesign

Over at CGhub.com, they have a few weekly challenges going on, one of which is Creature Planets, which is moderated by a friend of mine from CCA, Brynn Metheney. I hadn't gotten around to doing a CGHub challenge until last week, when the topic was Pokemon redesign. I was never a huge fan of Pokemon, but I played the original Gameboy game more than zero, and watched the show... a couple of times.... Fine, I can name like fifty Pokemon, easy. Happy?

I decided to go for a gritty reboot of my favorite, old-school Pokemon, Blastoise.





I found some reference photos of turtles and tortoises, and did three quick sketches.



I decided to try and keep Blastoise's basic proportions the same, but make the textures as realistic as possible. I also wanted him to look like a large animal who fought other large animals for a living: Scarred and beat-up and more than a little tired.

So onto the final sketch:



And the final image:





All in all, I had a great time doing this piece, and I sort of really want to do Venusaur and Charizard next. We'll see.

More Neuromancer

Finished up Molly:

ChoW and some Neuromancer Fanart

Been keeping busy with some more Character of the Week on Concept Art:



The prompt on this one was Night and Day, and everyone else was doing fantasy-type pieces. I imagined the twin children of some despot, taking over the country while he was ill.

Up next is Molly from William Gibson's Neuromancer. I'm not quite finished with this piece yet, but I wanted to get it out there anyway.



The Kanji reads "Assassin". At least, it was the first thing that popped up when I typed "Assassin Kanji" into Google.

Shadowrun on My Mind.... pt. 4

Finished up the Dwarf Rigger, which rounds out both the team and the classes. Going off my limited knowledge of Shadowrun, I think this would be a pretty capable team for most any job.



What to draw next?