How to Hillbilly

General step-by-step of how he escaped my brain. I dont know what the hell is going on with his hand in the one, haha.

Hmm I guess I forgot that he started out an a rotund jet-pack space dude... so cliche.

Relic Ball: Stores and Interfaces 4

Just about done., a few tweaks then it's on to cutting this bad-boy apart so Tim can make heads or tails of it in the code.

I have to paint some new icons for some objects that I have neglected for a while. But that's less store related and more random RB related.

Baloon Hips

Played around with warped proportions... Hard time blending still. Turned out flatter than I expected, and even after goin' back in an playing with lighting couldn't fix it.

Hillbilly holding a handbag.

Because the world needed one. I just wanted to play with proportions.

Relic Ball: Stores and Interfaces 3

Another updated shot of the working prototype for the Relic Ball store. As you can see a lot of small adjustments as I've moved on to making alternate windows. None of this probably makes sense out of context, but hopefully it will all come together in the final build.

Essentially though, the left panel is used as a filter menu to narrow down the amount of objects that a player can scroll through. These filters help define what an object is in code and hopefully make it easy enough to find what your looking for. This is essential to our game because we have so many objects that using traditional store designs typically found in social games doesn't work as well here. So we adapted a style similar to The Sims Social which also has to deal with a huge bulk of items that players have to scroll through.

Moving on...

Relic Ball: Stores and Interfaces 2

Newest Updates to the store design. Designing tabs and filters. Not happy with the actually item cards though. Something about them just isn't pleasing to look at. And the full store still needs a lot of polish. Generally pleased with how the filter sections looks.

Have to fix this card problem before I move on to the other pages.

As you can see trash objects start filling up the space everywhere as I am usually too afraid to delete anything.

Relic Ball: Stores and Interfaces

Hey everyone, while I am going to try and do my best with posting as frequently as possible, I have had a few family issues that shot things out of whack. But I'm trying to get back in the game now, and one of the first projects I absolutely must tackle is the design of the store for the upcoming game Relic Ball.

The only part worked on right now is the large card pop up which focuses on a certain selected item revealing useful info.

Unfortunately, progress is slow. The functionality is largely done for the prototype, but it is taking me a long time really nail down the details and the general layout.

Hit and miss, I will try and update as I begin the process of designing the aesthetics of this. The hard part comes from trying to play around with different scenarios in your head. What would a user do? How would they respond to this or that? Does it makes sense?

It will be interesting to see how this develops over time. Hope you enjoy!

TAD Portfolio Reviews at ConceptArt!

TAD and CA are offering free portfolio reviews for 2D artists for a limited time. This is a pretty great opportunity for everyone interested. I plan on submitting my own very soon. Hope to see you on the boards.

Tutorial: Painting Egypt

After the jump, there is a tutorial featuring the methods I used to create the Egypt illustration for my social game Relic Ball.

I threw together as much info as I could think of so I hope it is useful to someone.

Illustration Drop

Don't Let Jack Out!

Just a couple of the recent illustrations I did for various side projects. Enjoy! While I didn't win any of the listed prizes for the contest entry for the Lost Kids cover, I was told that it ranked high enough in the finalists to be published as an alt cover to one of the books coming out later in the year. So that feels pretty cool, haha!

Lost Kids Cover Contest Entry

I really like the bottom of the cover entry, but I really dropped the ball on the girl holding the amulet at the top. I was just grinding metal trying to rework her over and over again to no success.

Random Speed Paints

As I continue to publish a bunch of back logged images, I wanted to take the chance to show you a few of my speed paints over the past couple years that I feel turned out successful in their own ways

Often times I try and mimic the chaos style of speed painting that I picked up while studying the videos of Craig Mullins. Blasting the canvas with colors and shapes and different brushes and then trying to look and try and see patterns or shapes. Very much like a Rorschach test on acid..

Speed painting to me is probably one of the best ways to learn, forcing yoruself to try new things and solve problems while under a strict time limit really force you to innovate and learn tools in interesting and unexected ways.

The results are hardly ever worthwhile, but sometimes you get struck my lightning and you would be surprised what constraints can get you to do.

More after the jump!

Nexus Art

One of the things I worked on while studying at FIEA was the student capstone game Nexus. The game was created over 9 surprisngly shrot months. And for a student game it was a pretty stupendous experience. We tried our best to achieve as close to a big budget game as we could as amateurs to both our fields and the gaming industry. The game has been featured in Intel Magazines, GD, Game Career Guides, and several other online news sites.

Included are the 2D concept works I provided as the team Art lead. More after the jump!

Animation Preview

 
Click to see the full animation!

Hey everyone, I've been bustling around trying to figure out a way to share the animated .swf I'm working on, but I guess the best way right now is to simply link to a different page.

This has been a ton of work but it has to be done. I need to figure out how to work with flash, and thanks to My friend Andrew Bertino's help, I've picked up a little ActionScript along the way...

Animated in After Effects, then added music by the fantastic by the equally wonderful Dan-O at his royalty free site here. Check it out if you are looking for tracks from several different genres!

Programs Used:

-Photoshop: painting the character and background elements

-After Effects: Used to animate the entire scene

-Flash: Added the music and some basic ActionScript to allow looping and pre-loading

Resources:

-Royality Free Music "Mars and Stars" by Dan-O

-CGTextures.com for the stock paper back ground.

I am at the point now where I am not sure if I want to continue working on this and refining, or move on and take what I learned into something more complex. I think I'm leaning towards doing the latter. I have never had the patience to really stick with one art piece for too long, feels like a waste of time that you could spend learning new things and experimenting with different tools.

Also I just watched Johnnie To's Vengeance and I'm too pumped to sleep

Relic Ball Illustrations

African Savanna

These are the illustration environments for the upcoming social game Relic Ball, that I have been working on. Relic Ball is the girst game from my start-up company ootii, an independant game studio. The game is currently in open alpha, so while it isnt done, we have been getting some pretty good responses.

These illustrations are supposed to represent different environments around the world, places that I would love to explore. 

More after the jump!

New Animation Project

Hey this will be my first post. Nothing particularly exciting going on, but I wanted a place where I could begin to upload images and WIPs outside of my usual avenues. And since artist seem to be using these blogs more and more I suppose I should jump on the bandwagon... even if I'm pretty late to the party.

 

Above are some quick thumbs for an upcoming personal animation project . More info after the jump!