Nintendo / Turbografx Squad

Or the Famicom / PC Engine Crew. However you want to name it, it's a collection of classic video game characters from the 8bit / 16bit era. Sat on this for about a week and tweaked a few shapes or colors here and there. Which goes to show that having more business or characters in a drawing means more things to have to keep track of. Which is a pain, even though I like these mash up style images, like the "Best Of" collection games that get released every once in awhile. 

 Having said that, hopefully I'm not using things like tons of visual business, detail, or color to hide bad drawing chops. Some folks rely heavily on super stylized brushes or minimal color to carry their drawing or style, but if it's the "right" style or choices alot of things can be overlooked technically. Either way, folks online tend to respond less to solid but no frills drawings, even when it's story related, than they do huge color or style explosions, sometimes especially when it's super minimal.

Samus Aran, Once Again

A more finished Metroid piece from this past week. Full image and sketches below.

[I ended up doing all of these after the finished piece above. I guess that's the part of my brain telling me I didn't push the pose or shapes far enough the first time. I'll probably do another version based on these sketches later on, something more cartoony and less contained. But we'll see.]

[Closer to the original. I think these were the first sketches before I started messing around with simplifying the design.]

[Quick preview of another piece coming soon.]

Animation Hellhole and CalArts Memories, WIPs

Series of recent unfinished sketches revolving around memories of both the pre-internet days of the Animation Hellhole at Allan Hancock College (panel 1), and the later post-internet days at Apartment 131 across the street from CalArts (panel 2).

As you can see, a majority of the time in both situations revolved around carefully researching the emerging world of interactive software.

(The second set of panels below are mostly based on the Hellhole days:)

The actual animation hellhole was literally a renovated janitor's closet inside the Arts Department at Hancock. It still had a working sink and some leftover mops, but it was also stuffed with state of the art second hand animation gear, both digital (two pieced together PCs, security cameras, a VCR) and traditional (an animation disc with several 80W bulbs cooking overhead and underneath).

One notable exception to the historical accuracy of these pics is the super model time traveler featured in the last frame, but otherwise I tried to keep it faithful to the crew, situations, and atmosphere of the time: Endless days of drawing, shooting animation or the sh*t, running off to Chopstix for cheap Chinese food (a miracle for the Santa Maria/Orcutt area in the early 2000's), digging around Gamestop or Blockbuster for Playstation games, endless nights playing Worms: Armageddon or Puzzle Fighter, planning our next trip to San Luis to either get art supplies at Law's Hobby or whatever art books and comics they had at Captain Nemo's.

Again, keep in mind that for most of us it was pre-internet, pre-Amazon, pre-smart or even cell phone. You got by with what you could find and took it all in with the company of friends.

Obligatory Retro Game Post 5

The Space Harrier cyclops mammoth got cropped out for now, but since this is part of a larger illustration, no worries. He'll have his day soon. As always, this can be found over at the Instagram account.

Obligatory Retro Game Post 3

Took a panel from a larger comic book page to try out a color pass. The larger page is below, with a simpler color / tone approach, which I like a little better. More of an old comic print approach with the RGB dot matrix / zip tone look.

Obligatory Retro Game Post 2

Once again, head on over to the Instagram account for the latest if Blogspot is making you feel dated for even lurking around here.

Which reminds me...

...Realized that I hadn't posted any of the previous Space Harrier stuff here before. So here they are, all two pages, plus development illustration.

Space Harrier comic pages and WIP cont'd

And the Space Harrier saga continues.

Some WIP pages and illustrations: