This and That

It's been a really hectic few weeks! We're gearing up for our spring show at the Palace of Fine Arts here in San Francisco - the opening is this Wednesday. Because of that I've been very busy  fine-tuning work, helping other others get things together, layout/ formatting of pieces... all sorts of random (and often unexpected) stuff in preparation for the show. We also wrapped another semester and it was my birthday!

So, here are a few weird things I've been working on on the side lately -

Above is a piece I started for fun while observing a class in the cintiq lab and I was enjoying it so I brought it home to finish. Nothing terribly original about it, but it came out nicely.

A giraffe-legged femme fatale pinup. I've been told my characters are kind of stumpy sometimes, so I pushed her legs and they got... well... very long. Maybe she is standing on a bucket under there. You don't know!

This is a speed paint, but it was done almost entirely with the custom shape tool. I've been reading about Sparth's custom shape technique from a few years back. I've tried it before, but only in passing. Now that I have a few weeks to myself I want to really get it down, it seems like a very useful technique. The above painting was a test of how I could use some of the custom shapes I came up with this afternoon, then I applied a quick color balance mask so it wasn't in black and white.

And what would an update be without some more one hour cinematics?

Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones

Skyfall

The Good And Evil Palace

A couple new things! First, the more or less finished version of the good palace from last week:

And then, the evil version of it ten years after the warring faction invaded and made some architectural modifications:

I'm still not perfectly happy with them, but they have come a long way and I like the over all concept.

I wasn't tired last night so I did a silly self portrait doodle:

I don't usually have a lot of time for light stuff like this, it was fun to do it. :)

And then here are some new one hour paints:

Iron Man 3

Django Unchained

The Hobbit