Deep One Female

Hello again gentle viewer.  I have another in-progress piece for you to have a look at. I know it must seem as though I have painted quite a few of these horrid fish-men this year, but please note I come from a very fishy town in Massachusetts. Doing these abominable batrachian monsters often helps me get a feeling for the hometown I rarely get around Seattle. Hmm, I re-read that sentence and on retrospect that could seem like a negative. Trust me I have only love for my birthplace, but anyone from that lovely New England town should be able to admit it's got some fairly fishy overtones. Thanks to a longstanding longing for my town's beaches and a persistent request for art from a certain good chum of mine for use in his card game, I present the next in the fishmen paintings: 

She's not done but I figure I should be finished with her by the end of the week. Let me know if you have any suggestions for the background!

Humming Bird UI test

Hello again! 

I have had a humming bird game rattling around in my head coming on a few months now. You might recognize the idea from an earlier post: http://sketcheveryday.blogspot.com/2013/04/humming-bird-vector-character-concepts.html . I am still quite interested in developing it further so my task last week was to make a fairly simple and stripped down version of the game view-port. I started by drawing a page or so of flowers to obtain some reference and work out the mood. Rather than keep drawing for weeks on end I went ahead and just got down to some quick layout/design work done. This was the result:

First I used illustrator to sketch out a few vector flowers and some assets.  Once I had vector flowers as close as I wanted I imported them into PS to add some tones, I think it gave them a bit more of a soft, and happier feeling.   

When the tones were where I wanted them I brought in the other assets: a time clock, score toast/label, and life/energy bar.

Once everything was laid out I thought it needed a little something to give it a bit more depth so I threw in a bit of shadow. Overall I'm fairly pleased with where it is at the moment but that just means I now have to design menu screens, items, power-ups and a few level backgrounds.  For now, I like where it's going. See you next time!

Sketch Dump Day! Now with more goats!

Ok, so it's been a few weeks since my last post. Fear not, I am still getting at least a few sketches out each day and even a concept piece now and then.  After my last post here (Goats and Gardens) I found a hitherto unknown love for drawing goats, more specifically their exceptionally odd face structure. I am not sure why I like the lines on these animals faces as much as I do, but this has resulted in a sketch log for the past 1.5 weeks of almost exclusively goats. Today's post is a cross section of that log.

I've taken the pages, pared down the ones I was least pleased with, and condensed the remaining into three pages.  I think it gives a good overview of the week for me; a long somewhat obsessive struggle to understand how the strange animal's faces work.  What I need to do is go to the zoo and look at some living goats, maybe get a bit of life drawing in.  For now, let's just go with the sketches I have at the moment, shall we?

The crazy thing with these faces is I still have about 3 pages I haven't included. I often find when drawing something like this I should give myself an arbitrary limit, lest it eat up all my sketch time for the week. It's very hard from time to time not to return to familiar lines once you've drawn a face 20 or 30 times. If you don't stop and move onto the next project or sketch, you could easily fill a sketch book within a month. As for my current next project in the queue, this week I should have time enough to finish a painting for a friend as well as maybe post a few more sketches. Until then please enjoy the goats. As a side note, does anyone have any ideas for an icon set? I have become bored with my current graphic design self challenges and would like to to another icon set.  Hit me up with any fun or weird concepts that might make for a good group of icons. I'm thinking my next icons should be cutesy but we'll see what strikes my fancy.