Backlighting

Done for a morning exercise at work.

Cowgirl

Trying to emulate an artist I really like. 5 brownie points to the person who guesses correctly (Avalanche concept artists excluded. No brownie points for you!)

Psychology

Trying stuff with color

A watercolor pencil doodle I did during a meeting

Something from a morning exercise at work. The drawing was from reference but the lighting and colors are made up.

Sketch

Emperor Mollusk

Cover art for a European print of Emperor Mollusk vs. The Sinister Brain by A. Lee Martinez.

I originally wanted to him in an exoskeleton suit like he wears in the book with a much less empowered true body, but that idea died. Still, I can show my explorations for that here. I like the pure melodrama of the right design.

This time with Peter

I decided to add Peter into the scene. I think it helps.

Grandfather's house

Too many irons in the fire

I've been working on a bunch of different things, and I can't seem to finish anything. One of these days I'm going to have a lot of new art to show, but for now you'll have to settle for cropped previews.

Water Troll

This is a really off-balance drawing, but I am starting to get more comfortable with these watercolor pencils.

Caricature from life

Cool model today.

Inktober Sort of Died

Partially because I got busier, and partially because I discovered some really cool Watercolor Pencils.

My watercolor pad is really small, so I didn't have room for much more than a head or so per page.

Peter

Just something for fun. Many thanks to Ben Simonsen, Jason Kim, and Matt Armstrong for the great last-minute feedback.

Trying out ArtRage

My review is this: if they exposed the controls to the brushes a tiny bit more, this would be a seriously cool painting program. As it is, it's barely more than a neat, but frustrating, toy.

Inktober 8 and 9

Inktober 5, 6, 7

Inktober 3 and 4

Inktober

I decided I'm going to try and participate. I probably can't post every day, but I will try to do several each week.

Why a unified style for Infinity?

I read the comments on the Kotaku article that linked here and there were several wondering why we chose to do a unified style for the game instead of just mixing the styles like Kingdom Hearts did.
The answer is really simple. Pixar and Disney said we couldn't mix their characters as is. John Lasseter told us that the only way we could get approval is to make them all from the same toy line with a unifying aesthetic. This is also why the "Disney stole from Skylanders" thing is silly: we were always doing toys or Infinity would never have left the drawing table for approval reasons. Getting everyone on the same page with the characters' looks and the Infinity style was nothing short of a miracle, not to mention that it was the first time any of us at Avalanche have had to design physical toys (which also created huge obstacles for the style).

I don't know what strings Kingdom Hearts pulled to get all the characters together in their original styles, but that option was off the table for us. And frankly I'm glad. Maybe it's the persnickety artist in me, but even though I like Kingdom Hearts, I find the complete shifts in style jarring.

Other Infinity Monsters

For the really early work for the monsters townspeople, we tried a couple different toy types. That was back before we knew we were doing Monsters University

I had to design the final townspeople so their limbs and parts were swappable.