Saturday at Worldcon, a fine day for another 1-hour illustration...

A bit of fantasy this time around.  Enjoy...

Another day of Worldcon, another 1-hour sci-fi illustration

We're on day 3 of Sasquan here in Spokane.  So... another hour of sci-fi illustration INSANITY (compressed into about 4 minutes).  YOU ARE COMMANDED TO ENJOY.

Hanging at Sasquan (Worldcon in Spokane, WA) and Making Art

This week I've been hanging out at Sasquan (that's what they're calling Worldcon here in Spokane).  I got inspired, as I often do at cons, to create some art.  Above is a piece that I created in one hour; no save until the end, non-stop illustration madness.  This was created primarily because I'm fascinated by the artistic process and rather fond of time-lapse videos depicting such.  This piece is called "Devil in the Stars".  Sasquan will be a raging nerd-fest until Sunday, so I plan to squeeze out a few more of these for your entertainment.  Let me know what you think...

Breaking Ground on a New Project...

Welcome to my art blog  :)  

Today, I started putting together the first image for an upcoming venture into something I'm calling "Illustrated Interactive Fiction".  It's a bit like a visual novel, a bit like an interactive comic, a bit like an adventure game, and a lot like this stuff here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ih0Y6fW9J4  At least, this type of game is what inspired the new venture.  The review of this game was created by AdventureReviews.  If you like gaming and want to learn a lot of interesting things about how narrative games are designed and about their history, I highly recommend looking through the reviews on his Youtube channel.

This is a narrative project that will be presented as a series of sequential images with music and ambient animation.  Players (readers?) will be able to select a character at the beginning of the narrative and follow the story from that character's point of view.  There will be a few points where players can change characters during the narrative and a number of contextual situations that players will need to puzzle through to continue with the narrative.  

It's taken me some time to figure out an art style/technique that I can quickly reproduce for a large number of high-quality images, but I think I've got it.  The art is going to be a multi-media affair; a combination of traditional, 3d, and photoshop.  Here's an early art test:

Not necessarily the final, final, final version of anything, but pretty close to what the final art will look like.  So far, the most challenging thing has been getting the different mediums to jive with one another with a process that I can rapidly reproduce.  My goal is to give this story its due without compromising the level of artist quality and amount of images that I think are necessary for telling the story.

Stay tuned for a step-by-step of the artistic process, a bit about the development process and history, and a whole lot more...