Stowaways Painting

On their way to Hong Kong

Dick and Don are stowaways bound for Hong Kong

Having missed their intended destination of Hawaii Dick and Don find themselves en route to Hong Kong. Several weeks into the trip Dick is at the end of his rope while Don makes the most of the unexpected down time singing a little tune.

♪ ♫
I’m going east
way across the sea
to a distant shore
where she waits for me

In ‘ol Hong Kong
Pearl of the Sea
safe in your arms
I long to be

Now I’ve travelled far
and i’ve travelled wide
I’ve roamed the ocean
on a wayward tide

and so to Hong Kong
pearl of the sea
where love and adventure
they wait for me

good ‘ol Hong Kong
Pearl of the sea
land of adventure
and mystery
♪ ♫

The Wrong Luggage Painting

Dick and Dond discover the idol

Dick and Don discover they have the wrong suitcase

 

There is a lot of back story to this painting but I’ll spare the details and just say its form a the Hong Kong comedy project I am working on at the moment.

alien zbrush cartoon caracter

Long live the King

So here is the final render of “the King”. He was created entirely in zBrush and took about a weeks worth of late night sculpting sessions to complete. In case you have been out of the loop on this guy. He is a character I designed for the movie Space Chimps in collaboration with Dean Taylor and the rest of the art team while working on the film Space Chimps. Our designs were cut but I resurrected him here to appease my own curiosity.

Render Pains

It was a fun project but took more time than I was expecting as I ran into a bit of trouble towards the end. I like the sculpt but I must admit that I am disappointed with the render. I had all sorts of technical issues and have decided to call it quits.

The rendering of the king himself is ok, but the little Luzian aliens are not properly rendered. Their material is all wrong and should actually look like blown glass. Wouldn’t you know, one of the shortfalls of zBrush is that it can’t render caustics, so no glass. The best it can manage is a sudu-transparent material. It also turns out, you can’t have a transparent object behind another transparent object, to fake glass, as the first object will completely matte out the later. I didn’t know this when I began or else I would have changed my workflow to be able to render in MentalRay. Since I used dynamesh on all the characters they lack UV’s and have insanely high poly counts so Rendering in Maya was out of the question. So in the end rather than glass-like aliens I get waxy, oily looking ones. Sigh. Que Sera, Sera.

Still, render issues aside, everything looks ok and I am happy. I have my closure now and can move on to other things. I learned alot from this project and am glad I did it.

The Making of the king

Here are a few work in progress pictures.

Dim Sum iPad Painting

ArtRage iPad Painting

Some far off place…

Here is another ArtRage digital oil painting. Painted this one on the ‘ol iPad while at Dim Sum the other day. The food was good so I didn’t spend much time on it though. Not drawing any place particular here, just doodling.

messy placeholder

More Painting Work

Last night I was updating my portfolio and then this morning the phone randomly rang with a new painting commission. The universe is funny that way. Right when you begin to stress the jobs present themselves. So it looks like the portfolio update will have to wait. Its time to paint!