The Incredibly Slow Speed Paint Show!

In all honesty I ran out of great titles for speed paint posts some considerable time ago, we'll just have to live with lame ones from now on. It's been a whopping three months since the last one, surely I've managed to crank some out in that time, right?
Well, fortunately I have, or this would be a really short post; more than I thought in fact as I really though I'd posted a bunch right before I went to the UK - turns out I was merely delusional. Let's go see what we've got then shall we.

I should warn you, more experimental stuff than usual lies ahead.

The Best and Worst Sketching of August

Sometimes nothing goes according to plan. Take this last weekend for example. It was a long weekend, so plenty of time to do plenty of things, right? Wrong.
I had plans. I planned to speak to a friend in the UK, paint a couple of speed paints, paint with some real paint, finish the book I was reading, play video games and some traditional games with my son, make burgers on the grill/barbecue, go for pizza as a treat for the kid and so on. Almost none of this came to pass. It wasn't that anything major went wrong, but a few little things did, like my Son had a tantrum and injured my thumb with an unintentionally well aimed kick, reducing my gaming time (it hurt) and sketching/painting time (it hurt) and so on. It wasn't a bad weekend, just unproductive. I did get everything setup for a blog post though, but it hurt too much to type for long, so here it is today.

A Conglomeration of Ineptly Placed Lines

I've been putting of writing this post for far to long. I would blame the rather excellent new Deus Ex game, but that's rather like patting my large Budai like stomach and saying "but it was entirely the fault of the pastry chef!" Clearly the truth is I'm just a lazy schlub. The odd thing is that despite my putting it off I've had the post "prepped" for a while, and prepping is by far the most time consuming thing about making one of these posts. It's not like the writing has any time spent on it (as I'm sure you'll have noticed). Well, let's go and see what all that preparation has to show for itself (and more on what goes into it a little later).

All Work and No Play... (RFA Part 2)

Since my last post I've done depressingly little art outside of work, a handful of mediocre sketches (and almost all the sketches were of heads and faces rather than figures) and a rough mockup of a book cover that you won't get to see for a while in case it becomes the cover to an actual book. Other than that I'm sick today, which meant I didn't go to work - this is a shame because I'm rather enjoying what I'm doing at work right now. Since I'm stuck in the house though I'll write a blog post instead.  Lucky you.

Sketches on a plane (and elsewhere)

And I'm back. Normal programming will resume shortly, but until then some short messages.

I don't have any short messages of course, but I do have some sketches I did while in the UK; which is where I've been for the last three weeks. I didn't sketch as much as I may have liked, mostly because I was either too busy running around with the family or I was drunk with friends (or of course recovering from being drunk with friends before running around with the family...). So, I'll post most of what I did and divide it up into relevant topics - From Life, From Photos, From Memory and Free Sketching; with a little write up after each. Ok,let's do this.

All Work and No Play... (RFA Part1)

So as some of you may have ascertained by now I work in the games industry for a company called Volition. It's a fairly well known company, predominantly for the Saints Row games these days, but also for the Red Faction games and some other stuff you may or may not have heard of. I've worked on a few titles there at this point, predominantly as a vehicle artist. I've asked if it's OK to show some of my work from shipped titles (shipped means "finished" basically), and this is apparently fine as long as I don't slip you any source art (the actual files that end up in the game). I'll be starting with some of my work from Red Faction: Armageddon.

Getting Past its Use By Date

I'm such a slacker. The deadline I thought would hold up the next post (now the current one) was on Saturday, and here I am not having posted yet. Tsk. Worse still, I have some more things to post before I head off on a three week trip starting next week, so I should probably pull my thumb out, yes?

This one's going to be short, and sweet, and a bit dull.

Social Profiling № 5: Three's Company

If you're unfamiliar with the "Social Profiling" facebook experiment you can scroll down to the tags at the bottom of the post to catch up properly. I did the four initial profile pics as promised, but I still had a good number of people who wanted one, but didn't get one. As a compromise I decided more or less right off the bat that I would paint them anyway, but more directly from an existing picture, rather than inventing a new scenario to place them in as I did with the initial group. Then I got busy and didn't get a chance to do any. Time to catch up.

Unlike the initial four, these new portraits will all be done on a whim, with various things inspiring me to do them rather than saying "OK, I have 4 to do and 5 weeks to do them" as I did on the first set. This is nice if I'm not finding anything inspirational until a suitable picture or idea turns up.

The Impossible Amy Pond

Y'see, I'm back again? That month away was an aberration. One that's likely to be repeated from time to time, sure (as I said in my last post, it comes with the job). I've fallen behind though, my skills were atrophying while I was away, it was time to stretch some muscles. I never learn in some ways though, and the piece I'll be presenting today was a mistake. I pleasant and enlightening mistake to be sure (and how many of us would not be here today if it wasn't for pleasant and enlightening mistakes I wonder), but a mistake all the same. As usual I'll bore you all to death with a blow by blow account, but lets see the finished piece first shall we.

A Musing 4: Stress and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I've been away for a while. Had you noticed? Poor May, no love for May. Poor blog, missed it's first birthday. Why? Well, therein lies a tale, and I'm limited in how much I can tell you. But it does lead to this current blog entry, and I'll post some speed paints and such in with it as examples, but, as the title may lead you to believe, it's all due to stress. Nothing to do with Motorcycles though - but a more meaningful title would get me in trouble at work...