A Flawed Project

I went back through some older notebooks and sketchbooks looking for gems of ideas that I never took time to develop.  I found a couple that I think would be fun to work on in my ’spare’ time.  The first is a quasi-fantasy world that I started jotting notes about while I was back in college – the working title is “Flawed”. 

The basic concept is essentially a non-historical medieval  world without the typical fantasy tropes of magic, the walking dead, warring pantheons of gods, etc.  It’s very dark ages inspired; disease is rampant, people struggle to survive and have short life spans, small fiefdoms and big tribes are generally the largest spheres of influence, and the world is a brutal place ruled by fear and superstition.  I know, so far it’s not vastly different than medieval Europe.  Here’s the catch that effects everything else…  Instead of natural selection and evolution taking thousands/millions/billions of years to alter a species it only takes a generation or two.  Creatures can jump from feral animals to tool using primitives within a couple decades.  And all creatures (humans included) manifest random mutations that are sometimes beneficial and sometimes a detriment – these are flukes that may or may not breed back into the population.

It’s kind of ’X-Men’ meets ‘Lord of the Rings’ crossed with a bastardized version of ’On the Origin of Species’.  Right now, I don’t intend for the mutations and evolutionary steps  to include anything as bizarre as telekinesis or shooting energy blasts, but I also don’t want them to be as dull as changes in coloration or tooth configuration.  Even though I think of it as a fantasy world, I want it to have the quasi-logic of a good sci-fi novel. 

I’ve rambled enough for one post I think.  Time for some sketches!  The first two I was just playing around with human variants and mutations; these are meant to be individuals, not representative of whole races.  And the next three are examples of a first generation variant on a Spotted Hyena.  Sketches one and two are representative of a real-world spotted hyena, sketch three is a minor physical varient to capitalize on ambushing as a hunting tactic instead of running down prey (and to look cooler with a larger spiky ridge of hair).

    

         

         

 

Breakthrough

This blog is starting to have the effect that I wanted.  It was about 2am, I was wide awake, and I didn’t feel like working on any of the jobs I’m currently contracted to do.  So I figured I’d do a quick paint sketch to post here. It’s been awhile since I did something without a backstory – it was nice to just go with the paint and follow where the image was leading instead of trying to wrangle it towards a predetermined outcome. I like the result, I think it’s a decent little digital sketch.

The Color of Wood Elves

A friend of mine has convinced me to pick up Warhammer (the tabletop wargame) as a hobby, so I’ve started a Wood Elf army and I am attempting to put together a bunch of little plastic and metal warriors so I can paint them and then I will crush any that dare oppose me!!  I’m going to start painting all the miniatures soon so I decided to play with some color schemes - I just did a rough sketch of the basic Games Workshop Wood Elf design and threw on some options for color.    From what I’ve seen, people tend to paint their wood elf armies in fairly bright colors… but that doesn’t really do it for me.  The flavor text talks about how isolationist the wood elves are, and how they kill all that enter their forest and generally depicts them as relatively savage and feral.  I like the idea of a horde of savage barbarian elves a lot better than a troupe of delicate wood nymphs.  Right now I’m leaning towards #3 the Halloween color scheme.  I really like the green-skinned guy as well, but I tend to think he strays too much from the Warhammer reality.

         

         

Artist’s Block

Here’s the problem.  I have spent so long working from other people’s imaginations that my own has atrophied.  When I sat down to actually sketch something from my own head I was completely stumped.  Without that line or two of description or an e-mail with the image specs, I didn’t even know where to start.  It’s very frustrating.  But I knew that I had to do something to post here, so I scribbled for awhile and cranked out 30ish poses for people with sci-fi weapons.  It’s somewhat work related so that’s disappointing, but it’s just for practice and it’s not intended for a specific client… so I’ll count it as a small victory.

First Post

99% of what I do is for work.  And all of that is covered by Non-Disclosure Agreements so I can’t post it here.  It’s been a LONG time (like high school days) since I actually worked on something just for my personal enjoyment, and I’m hoping that having an online sketchbook that I’m posting in twice a week (fingers crossed) will spur me to dust off my personal creativity and develop some of the ideas bouncing around in my head.

As a freelancer, it’s hard to justify working on anything that I’m not being paid for.  There are always jobs available, and I somehow feel that if I have time to invest in my personal work I have time to take on more clients.  That’s not true of course, and I’ve started to realize that the lack of personal exploration has stymied my artistic development.  By sending my sketches out into the ether of the internet (and ideally, having friends and strangers alike enjoy it), I hope to give my personal work more weight in my subconscious.  Besides, if I have to post twice a week it gives me an excuse to wedge 10 or 20 minutes into my schedule between paying gigs… which can only improve my mental health.

Speaking of mental health (or lack thereof…) let’s start this sketchbook off with a little Lovecraftian goodness.  This is way more developed than what I’ll usually be posting here - generally you’ll see little more than scribbles - but it’s the first image I’ve created in a really long time that was just for fun.