Mini Portfolio

Since it’s come up a few times, I’m throwing together a mini portfolio of some of the artwork I’ve done over the last few years. This is naturally a picture-heavy post, so the “More” link here is a natural stopgap for those who don’t want to bother with loading graphics. As one might guess, All of these images are copyrighted by me, and I’ll be grateful if you don’t use them without my permission. I might not even come after you with my rabid lawyer wombat.

Oh, and most graphics are actually links. Sometimes that doesn’t buy much, but other times, the link will take you to a larger version of the picture. Please enjoy, and I’m happy to answer any questions that you might have.

I worked for Headgate Studios a couple of years ago, doing special effects and water for Tiger Woods games. It was a blast, and making things look as natural and realistic as possible with the PS2′s aging technology was a fun challenge. Here are a few shots of my work, including the spectacular Victoria Falls hole in the Safari fantasy course. We got to design the course in-house, rather than recreating a real course. It was fun to work on, and I really enjoyed pulling the “huge waterfall” look off with minimal resources. As a karmic bonus, when I was testing the hole for playability as the Tiger Woods avatar, I got a hole in one. That’s the only one that I ever scored on the first attempt.

My Other Half Baked Portfolio Site

Yes, this is a link to another site, but the other site is mine, and I’m being lazy and not putting in thumbnails or Photobucket links. That’s what happens with my older work. Sorry, maybe someday I’ll make a real portfolio website.

I’ve had a fascination with fractals for a long time. The Mandelbrot set was my introduction to computer graphics, and the Plasma Clouds fractal that we see today as a Photoshop filter was the first one I ever saw animated, in all its VGA glory. It was therefore a happy day when I happened upon Chaoscope, a fun little program that lets me tinker with and render fractals in various ways. Apophysis is another great program, but I really enjoyed the Solid rendering mode in Chaoscope, which is where these came from.

Fractal Shell

Corkscrew Loop

Scouring Pad

Fractal Spirit Lion

Occasionally, I sketch. Some days are more prolific than others, and some are higher quality than others. Here are a couple of ones that I’ve been pleased with, a Dwarven tinkerer and a “Moses Lemming” from my BFA Animation project at BYU. We wound up going with a different Moses lemming design, but it was fun to sketch this out. Oh, and speaking of Lemmings, I’ve posted a bit of that on my other site as well. I’m not sure if the whole five minute short is available online, but it was a lot of fun working on that movie with a couple dozen other students. Oh, right, sketches:

Moses Lemming

This was done with a blue mechanical pencil, one of the tools of choice for when I’m doing character design.

Dwarven Tinkerer

This, on the other hand, was done with a cheap ballpoint pen. It’s borderline insane to sketch with a pen, but I find that it really puts an emphasis on getting the drawing right the first time, and in improvisation when I don’t quite nail it down. It also preserves the construction phase of the drawing, which can be fun to see.

I’ve also taken to transferring sketches into the computer and painting them in Photoshop. The first of these is a sketch done by a coworker, Shawn Boyle, but the others are mine. Most are based on Puzzle Pirates, since I was doing art for friends and contests there.

Shawn's Sketch

Painted Version 1

Painted Version 2

These are some of the Puzzle Pirates work, mostly “avatar art” for use on their forums:

Alethia the Archivist

Phillite the Pugilist

Silver Cat

Saadskellie Doll

Vain Vargas

Bia, Nightmare Before Christmas Style

Really Bad Eggs

Bluetta Battlecry

Careening Cambiata

Anchovia Attack

Silveransom Style

That last one’s my pirate. I’m also Silveransom on the forums, and I’ve written up a tutorial or two on art like this one for making this blue monkey:

Blue Pirate Monkey

There’s a huge version of that monkey here, just for fun.

Speaking of blue, I’ve also done a figure drawing or two, back in my BYU days, but I was never very happy with most of them. This one turned out OK, and it has the bonus aspect of being created with a nice blue Conte crayon rather than the old bothersome charcoal:

Figure Back

The scan is deceptive on that one; the original is about 20 inches by 30 inches. Figure drawing is more fun working large.

I’ve also dabbled with graphic design, notably with Ambigrams. This is one that I whipped up by request for a “Alhambra Speech and Debate” team shirt. It was fun to design, though I’d probably rework some things if I could make the time. I do like the “Speech” bit, though; that worked very well.

Alhambra Ambigram

I also did this bit of work for the Chrono Crisis team. It’s a fan-made game, more or less meant as a sequel to the fantastic Chrono Trigger, recently rereleased on the Nintendo Gameboy DS (Chrono Cross was the official sequel, and a masterpiece in its own right.) I’m not sure actually where the Crisis project is at the moment, but it was interesting enough that I did this for fun for a contest they were running. The interesting fractal flame in the colored versions of the logo was generated in Chaoscope.

Basic Chrono Crisis Logo

Dramatic Logo

Game Screen Version

Box Art Version

I’m already way over my bandwidth here, but to cap this off, here’s my latest piece of work, another contest entry, this time for Resto4Life’s shirt design contest. This is a tribute to the various Druid forms in the World of Warcraft game. I’m really happy with how this turned out, and Phaelia was kind enough to send me a free shirt with my design on it. Of course, she now gets to use the design in her shop, so if you like it, you can have one of your own. I don’t earn any royalties from it, but if all 11 million WoW players buy the shirts, my design can take over the fashion world, and the prestige would be… well… pretty big in nerd circles, anyway.

Distilled Druid

Advertisement