Really excited to share this! Here is the project I used for learning Rive, an interactive animation tool, and exploring how to use Midjourney AI image gen in my workflow.
For more information, check out this presentation I gave on the design process.
To view the full resolution version and see how the Rive file is structured, click this link to the version on the Rive community page.
I'm excited to share a box art illustration+logo that I worked on for a new narrative board game called Taelmoor. It mixes pen and paper style RPGs with an app that guides players through the narratives, super cool! The team is super talented and dedicated to bringing this project to life. Shout out to Dattan Porto for the amazing character designs that I referenced in the final box art.
Please take a moment to check out the Kickstarter page using the link below and consider backing it: http://tlm.gg/kickstarter
Here is a design I made for the Character Design Challenge in March. I had a lot of fun with this one!
An ancient mushroom samurai who is a guardian of a sacred forest shrine. Some say the mushroom fighter is the ghost of a legendary fallen soldier, bound by unflinching honor to protect the shrine for eternity.
Time flies! Last year was something else and I’m grateful to be healthy with steady work given all the chaos outside. I’ve been focused on work and family for the past year (we had a second baby in October!) since the pandemic has limited a lot of things in life we take for granted. Because of that, my portfolio has taken a backseat and I’m itching to get back into some personal projects.
This upcoming year I want to take a step back and redesign this website, focus on building my artistic voice, and try to grow in some new areas. Something that excites me is the prospect of getting back into 3D with the purpose of using it for my 2D illustrations. In the meantime, here are some random paintings and sketches that I’ve done recently that I’m proud of <3
A few coworker friends and myself worked on a game jam! Really happy with the results, we placed in the top 10% of peer-rated games. Really loving the new art+animation features in Unity 2019 and thinking about experimenting with the 2D character rigging + skinning in the future.
I’m happy to say that the character design from the class I took this spring turned out well. The CGMA interview team really liked the results and so they reached out to interview me about my process. I definitely feel like this piece was a step up from my other work.
Update on personal growth. I’ve been taking a CG Master Academy Class with Marco Nelor. As usual, I’m learning a lot and really trying to push my ability to explore designs and pose the character. Here are some of the explorations I’ve drawn in the class. Also, I’m excited to finally be using Blender to do some rough 3D models to help with figuring out props in 3D. This helped out when revising the pose on the shoulder armor. Hoping to keep using this technique in the future. Two more weeks to render and color this :)
I just finished my last concept for the architecture design class at CG Master Academy. I learned a ton over the last 8 weeks including adding photo bashing to the list of tools when making art. It really helps to speed up the process. My next goal is to sit down and learn Blender for gray boxing scenes to paint over. I have a bunch of experience in Maya, but I don’t really want to pay for the license. Hearing good things about Blender, so hopefully that process goes smoothly.
Been busy with my main job and teaching my new graduate level digital painting class (I wrote the online course, yay me), but I wanted to share some work-in-progress pieces from a CGMA course that I’m taking for environment concept art. The class ends in 2 weeks. At that point in time I’m going to take what I’ve learned to polish up a few of the better concepts from the class to update my portfolio page. I’ve been practicing photobashing and using 3D models as guides a lot in this class as well as showing the exploration process more.
Wow, so it's been about a half a year since posting. Life update, my wife and I had a baby back in the beginning of May. A lot of my time earlier this year has been spent wrapping up work stuff, prepping the nursery for the baby, and now bonding with our new son!
Here's some paintings that I forgot to post. I'm also working on some freelance stuff, and will be updating my portfolio with a couple new images. In addition to my main job and the freelancing stuff, I'm currently writing some digital painting curriculum for Academy of Art in San Francisco.
There's been so much going on in the past year between our trip around the world and now with our newest addition to the family. It's been wonderful, however it's nice to get back into painting.
I started a character design course on Schoolism as part of the supplemental education budget for work (yay free classes!). The course is taught by Stephen Silver, and my hope is to get through it by end of February (fingers crossed).
Here is the lesson one assignment: a wealthy entrepreneur in modern day London who is jolly and full of life. Short and heavy set, wearing a smoking jacket, bow tie, and monocle.
The addition of accessories of bowler hat and umbrella were something I thought helped sell him as an Englishman. The posing was really fun, and I focused the initial sketches understanding the body language/facial expressions. The face is based on a conductor from a chorus my wife and I attended on Christmas Eve.
Update: We ranked 60th out of 1852 peer reviewed games in the game jam! I'm really prpud of this, and am looking forward to another one soon.
A friend and I made this game over the weekend as part of the LD Game Jam! Click the image or link below to play on the web or on Android :)
I completed my first Inktober :) Tried to stick to a spoopy theme for them all in the spirit of Halloween. Here they are...
It's been a long time since I've posted to this blog. I just recently got back from travelling the world for 5 months. check out my travel photos and sketches on Instagram @babypiecandraw
I'll be posting sketches on this blog soon. Inktober is around the corner, and I'm going to do my best to complete it this year with a focus on a horror theme :)
A friend of mine gave me the idea to make something inspired by the Legion expansion called the Tomb of the Wardens. I haven't played much WoW, but this was a fun piece to make. There's a lot of taleneted artists to study that work at Blizzard, so that was a treat also.
I've been doing some more quick art prompts in order to add some variety. Beauty potion and poison apple :)
Here's a new character illustration that I just finished for a table top RPG that I'm playing currently with some coworkers. The character is a travelling merchant turned vampire who mixes poisons and can cast illusion magic. Hope you like it :)
Been busy working on a collaborative painting project outside of work (I'll be able to post that stuff soon), but thought I'd share a couple recent paintings I've done in my spare time. The horror portrait is something that I'd like to make a series of in the near future :)
We had a hackathon at the company I'm working at during Thursday and Friday of last week. Hackathons are free time for game developers to flex their creative muscles to come up with ideas to improve the current games or products. As part of this, I painted the background and character for part of my work on Thursday. Corgi monk and floating zen garden :)
I start a new job on Monday, so I've been using this week off to crank out some concepts for the VR game. More to come in the next few days.
