These two logos took up a lot of my time lately. They are both for businesses that will open in the near future. There were lots of iterations, especially on the one with the girl eating noodles. It was a lot of fun to do, but a bit stressful since it was during the time my daughter was going to be born.
Iteration 1
Final iteration
sun logo
Ah, this brings me back to my days as a D&D Dungeon Master! I’ve always loved The Hobbit, and medieval fantasy. However, it’s been years since I’ve drawn this stuff, and I wanted to prove that I wasn’t all about cute manga and chibis. 
So, I drew a pretty menacing orc head, and decided I would model it in 3D Maya so that I could get better at the program. I’ve noticed that a lot of modelers tend to go for too humanistic a face, meaning that they don’t exaggerate the facial features enough. I wanted this guy to have a gigantic jaw for eating mutton right off the bone! And, I wanted him to have a snout that stuck up with big nostrils. One of these days I need to texture this guy.
Here’s the drawing I started out with, which was a little off on the registration points, but I managed to do ok.
"Sauron is gonna beat our asses if we don't find them hobbits!"
And, here’s where the model is at right now. I wouldn’t call it complete, but I was aiming for a clean, low poly model.
"Green and mean"
Wrote the song and shot a music video using After Effects. Also, I built a new website for my band, The Liquid Now.
http://www.theliquidnow.com/
I realized that though I’ve done lots of isometric art, I hadn’t done many buildings. I have done some, but not very detailed. I thought I would try this out.
Sketches, and a first attempt at an organic, medieval castle
Chunky buildings that are purposely a bit wonky/angular to offset grid feel
Swapped the Colonel with a General.
Just for laughs I made this logo. He’s still a chicken, but he’s not finger lickin’. If it made you spill even a drop of pee in yer pants, go to Threadless and give it a vote, please! Thanks everyone.
http://www.threadless.com/submission/330580/KFC_Korean_Facist_Creep
Great model with a lot of character. He was a muscular dancer who does performance. He had some sweet clothes, kind of clownish, kind of steampunk. He wore them on the last pose. These came out ok. Instead of scanning, I tried taking a photo of the drawings, and then brightening them up. The paper was white but the photos in semi-dim light made it look like sepia.
Dancing harlequin model
I like the many different expressions found in manga and anime, including the chibi character expressions. They go from serious to wacky, and many are just over the top. It’s refreshing to see because it’s very different from the stoic superhero comics, and the silly but familiar Looney Tunes expressions. Anyways, I wanted to try to create a general template for the chibi (short, puny childlike) characters, and then work on some costumes and expressions. Lastly, I was experimenting with adding some texture to the Flash illustrations.
Chibi character with expressions (click to enlarge details)
Gang of chibi character designs (click to enlarge details)
Various characters in blue pencil (and graphite)
About a month ago, I finally tried some blue color pencils like Prismacolors, and I really like the feel of them. They are a bit waxy, but it allows you to build up lines very nicely. For some reason, I get some subtleties that I don’t get with regular pencils. I was working on different faces for characters. Lately, I’m trying to think about the anatomy of the figure more, and how the various planes and lines intersect and overlap. It really adds a sense of volume to the figure. I’ve also been using the same principles in some landscape drawings. I need to make a section for just sketches and put these drawings in there…
Caption: The rough nurbs model, made out of nurb spheres
I started learning Maya about 2 weeks ago, starting with 3D modeling. It’s pretty fun, and so far I find Maya to be pretty intuitive in terms of navigating the modeling tools. I found a tutorial online that was quite good. The concept was to create a Nurbs model first, and then create a polygon mesh to encompass it. I felt pretty good about the results, but I am still very ignorant in terms of how to do joints on models, and I didn’t try modeling complex features like the face and hands…yet!
Caption: The mesh created over the nurbs
Northern Mountains
I did this painting as a Xmas gift for my mom. She likes to hang a bunch of my terrible paintings from college around the house, so I try to paint something new and better every once in awhile to replace them. 
This is a painting based off of a photo I took while visiting my wife’s home in northern Japan during a snowy winter. I took liberties to make the color scheme bluish, which gave it more atmosphere.
