Duck Knights

When I was around 5-6 my brother and I created these race of mice-like creatures called the "epu". They inhabit a world similar to ours, but have their own plant and animal life, so different from Earth that they might  as well be aliens. We would draw the epu all the time (at one point exclusively) and they became a sort of personal mascot. Redrawing them as a 21 year-old feels very nostalgic and made me notice how this world has so much potential for interesting stories.

In writing this story, I imagined what I would have liked to read when I was 5-10.

I did this comic so insanely fast (about 1 hour per 2 panels), and made up the story as it went along. If I was to do a small book I could probably churn out a book per week.

I will continue this story soon. There are about 10 panels left.

Pencils:

Finals (inked with a pen and water-colored):

Fun with concept-arting

I've always enjoyed designing random stuff for imaginary games that would never get made. Here's a concept for a knightly leading hero:

For starters I wanted an easily recognizable helmet:

Then I started on some body silhouettes:

Some finalization to the design... Plus thumbnail for painting:

Final sketch:

Then some good old watercolor!

Some detail on the sword that my crappy camera didn't manage to get:

I recently had an insanely useful (arguably career/life-changing) "painted comics" course with Brian Stelfreeze, who gave me some extremely useful advises on playing with the color wheel and having a "damn subject" in our pieces where the most pure color would be put. Not sure if the camera captured it or not, but that's why the sword is the bluest thing here. By painting this guy I realized that while white rim-lighting work great for machines/metal (like my last painting), it is terrible for leather or non uber-shiny surfaces. I need to use some more shades of gouaches for highlights.

A little reference on the gloves might have helped too -- no idea while I didn't use any!

I realized watercolor paintings aren't the way to go for modern concept-arting... but it's so damn fun! The fact that my first digital painting I did last night was so terrible (that I'm not even going to put it here), did not help my move towards digital either...

Re-imagining old characters

When I was in high-school, I created this world where the Soviets and Americans were fighting a Cold War on a secret alien planet called Demeter. The war would escalate to the point where they lose contact with Earth, and the story takes place 100 years after this. The game would be played through the perspective of an Earthling explorer who rediscovers the planet, who then ultimately has to choose to help either the Soviets or the Americans settle the conflict on the planet.

I imagined this as a video game, knowing full-well that it'll never get made, but it was fun and I used some of the pieces for the grad art show (you can see them here).

A few days ago, while looking for a subject to draw/paint, I thought back to this weird idea and started drawing one of my favorite characters I did as a 17-year-old:

This guy is a psychopathic outcast who is on neither side. I re-sketched him in several ways:

I didn't like this one so much: 

Then this just to show off his insanity...

I then water-colored his helmet. Did more of the same technique I used on the Merc dude... Got a bit lazy on the neck.

I think I'm going to try paint some of these sketches digitally, or maybe redoing some other old ideas from high-school -- I enjoyed doing that a lot.

Watercolors update

I realized that I needed work on environments so I made this painting on my over-priced Moleskine watercolor pad:

It started out as me wanting to draw a demon standing in the rain... but then putting it on a building made more sense for some reason. After drawing this building, I realized that buildings were pretty cool after all.

When it comes to subject matter, I have a difficult time choosing between whether or not it should be fantasy, or science-fiction, or something in between. This castle is the most "fantasy" I've done in a while... Most probably because I've been playing lots of Dark Souls and Witcher 2.

But of course... You just HAVE to draw guys with guns every once in a while:

In lots of futuristic video-games /movies, most of the military guys have camouflage and a pretty dull color scheme in general -- being inspired by real life organized armies. In this painting I wanted to portray a mercenary or private military contractor (PMC) who have less uniform policies and more of a shadier and unorthodox approach to things -- Hench possessing the less "tactical" colors like red and yellow.

Tried a new technique of going from light to dark in this one... debating whether or not I should add some sort of background. 

I should also start scanning in these painting instead of using the crappy iPad camera.

Experimentation

So I took a pretty long summer trip to Kazakhstan. Being in an empty desolate country (even more so than my previous location of Oman), allowed me to contemplate life and draw more. I bought this cool Russian notebook with a cover of vintage cars and started doodling random stuff. Buying some crappy notebook made me feel more comfortable about doing really stupid stuff without caring whether or not it will ruin the book.

WOOF!

STARE INTO THE EYES OF OBLIVION

I played more with watercolors:

Eastern European wildlife

Check out those badly painted dubs

Floating alien

Pencil scenery -- if only I could do this with a pen...

Dramatic hand

'Nam badass

Then I got back to Van-city and started to paint things on actual watercolor paper:

Usain Bolt from newspaper:

My brother's hand:

Some photo of a girl from the internets:

Some guy from the internets:

But then I realized that painting from photo is so much easier compared to still-life or memory...

Salt from Bean Bros Cafe:

I saw a girl on the train the other day, she looked sort of sad and I tried to capture that here (from memory):