Happy New Year!

Well, hello there, 2011.  I hope you're settling in well.  I have to admit, my relationship with your elder sibling was not the greatest.  Here's to hoping you'll provide me with less illness, and more art production!

Here are some tidbits from last quarter of 2010.

To start with, here are the thumbnails from Scene 02 of "Overtures."

And here's the thumbnails for the pages of Scene 03 that I've completed thus far.  I'll post the others later, once the final pages are posted on www.altairuniverse.com 

At the Universe of Altair, the site where "Overtures" is displayed, we have a Map Room which is slowly but surely being filled up with maps from the fictional setting "Overtures" takes place in.  To help spruce up the world map, I made some sea monsters to put on it.

And here's the map.  I made this a while ago... Wanna say a little over a year ago, but at the time it didn't have any of the names on there.  Tom took the time to put all the names in place himself, which is pretty awesome!  I added the sea monsters and compass rose a few days ago.

You can see a larger version of the map by visiting www.altairuniverse.com and going to the Map Room section of the website (it's in the Compendium menu).

Here are some sketches I did for a creature design idea.  I was trying to combine a Long-Tailed Pangolin and a European Bee-Eater.  I haven't uploaded all my sketches because my sketching gets pretty nasty; since this is my exploration phase, I don't give two toots about making my drawings pretty.  Or having them make sense to anyone other than myself.  One of these days, I'll get around to doing an illustration of the final designs I came up with.

My first sketches are always littered with reference drawings.  I'm very particular about wing and tail anatomy on birds, and make a point to refresh my memory every time I need to draw them.

 

And this is the little fellah I decided would be my final design for the chick form of this combi-species.  The adult will be based on the small thumbnail with "adult" written below it in the image above.

I revisited Ugly Vamp one afternoon, and started rethinking UV's appearance.  I also developed Mum's design a bit more.  Hunch-backed, Igor-esque women are CRAZY fun to draw.

Here's a random painting I did in pchat, a java-based painting program that allows multiple people to work on a canvas at the same time.  While others were drawing pretty ladies and majestic dragons, I was in my own little corner, creating this little guy:

I had a photo for reference, but unfortunately the lighting and focus on it wasn't very good.  I've since researched mantis anatomy and learned that the mandibles I painted here are incorrect.  Mantis' mouths are quite complex, but very cool!  I'll have to post my reference drawings sometime for anyone who might be curious.

And lastly, I finally got around to picking at my slimy meatball painting again.  I adjusted the lighting, as suggested by a friend, who rightly pointed out that my highlights were too large and too "hot" on my previous attempt.  The same friend has already given me further suggestions on my newest version; hopefully it won't take me another four months to get around to using them ;)

Toodles, everybody!  Maybe I'll post more frequently in 2011, hur hur hur!