If you're in LA...

I'll be in LA for the weekend of July 16th attending CG-con. If you're in town at the time, give me a shout! For more info on CG-con, click the image above or go here: http://www.cgcon.net

Carlos Huante W.I.P

So I've been trying to carve out a little time in the evenings to work on a full piece, and I've always been a fan of the work of Mr. Carlos Huante. If you're not familiar with his work, prepare to be dazzled when you go to his website here: He also has two amazing books published you should check out as well. They can be found here: and here:

***Edit... So I finally finished this guy (or at least I'm putting him down for now)...***

Who said Halloween was over?

A quick sketch today.


A quick sketch today.

Old dude WIP

I've been wanting to work on more than a head for a while now and to learn more about integrating different work flows using Zbrush. This dude is still WIP, but I probably wont go too much further before getting bored and moving on to something else. He's been fun so far though.

Another floating head....

I promise, I'll do some bodies soon. A friend went to the Joru Schell exhibit at the Gnomon Gallery in Southern California and took some pictures(thanks Juan). Some of the pictures from the exhibit inspired me so much, I sketched out this guy this morning.

quickie relief

These were fun. I was inspired by my friend Mike Defeo who did an AMAZING relief piece for the Totorro Forrest Project. Each quickly sculpted from a plane in Zbrush with no idea where I was headed.

GO WEST YOUNG MAN, GO WEST...

This week has been bitter sweet. I've been at Blue Sky for eleven and a half years and I've had the opportunity to learn from a lot of amazing people there. Now, I'm off to Seattle to join an intimidatingly skilled group of artists at a company called arenaNet. They made a fantastic game called guild wars a few years ago, and are working on even more amazing stuff now. To all my ex Blue Sky peeps, I'll miss ya!

tf2 fan art

So, I've been a fan of the art style of Team Fortress 2 since the game's debut. I recently created a little fan art of a new character class; The Aviator. This was a really fun project, and I learned a lot about creating full characters for real-time (I still have a lot more to learn though). The music, background and font are all lifted from the game, so they are property of Valve.

Here are some concept sketches I did prior to modeling:

And here are some screen shots of the model I ended up with:

And here is a progression reel for the modeling and texturing process:

Sketches from life and Magazines

Sitting in Starbucks, sketching strangers...

Messing with an old dude... Um.... So to speak...

A while ago I worked on a bust from a very phallic looking base mesh. I went back to that mesh today and reposed it, added some eyes, cleaned it up and added super quick paint job. I'm going to use this model for a Zbrush demonstration this summer.

I love the speed of Zbrush. There is no way I could have visualized this guy this quickly in three dimensions. Oh, also, I totally looked at Jose Fernandez' wonderful sculpt here (Jose is amazing check him out if you have not yet):



***EDIT***

So, my good friend and mentor Mike Defeo has introduced me to the world of 3d printing and rapid prototyping. This is my first 3d print, and although the quality is not the highest (yet) it's great to have a physical model at the end. I'll take better pics soon.

Consolidation...

So, I've been doing some housekeeping on my website and blogs, and decided to pack up my 2-d blog and make this my only little blogging homestead on the web. Below are some images from posts from my old 2d blog I wanted to move here.

This first image is painted by me in photoshop, but designed by the amazing Mel Milton.
These next couple were more photoshop painting experiments:



These next ones were from a series I called "stuff I sketch in meetings." I'll be updating more sketches soon from this series.

quickie bust...

Ok, so I've been spending a lot of time in 2-d land lately and it felt good to mess with this guy in mudbox for a few hours. We are going to be doing a project based on a bust in class this weekend, and it's been a while since I did one.

Skull

Well, school starts at SVA again tomorrow (man summer went tooooooo fast!) and for the modeling class I'm teaching, I'll be demonstrating how to turn a cube into something that resembles a skull. It's by no means perfect, but I think it's good enough for demonstration purposes.

normal maps kicks mucho @$$

This is a quick normal map test I did for the workshop I'm teaching this summer. The map and model would need some love to make it in to production, but it serves its purpose as a demonstration tool.

These are screen grabs and a playblast from a Maya camera with no rendering (hence the jagged shadows etc.).