Black Dragon

Another Dragon, this one was commissioned for the book by Shayne Easson over at Phantasy Ink. Again, fabulous, fabulous people to work with, and I sincerely hope they sell bucketloads (especially with the new huge trend for eBooks that the iPad has spawned)

Demon Head

This guy is unfinished, but I got distracted at the same time as Blizzard had their big Diablo 3 announcement. With that in mind, I thought it was good to let him go as practice, rather than feel like I was jumping on the trend (there would be bound to be a lot of Diablo fan art with that kind of announcement).

Mercedes Monster

Mercedes Monster was requested for an advertising campaign a few years back. They intended to push the “beast under the hood” as a real monster presumably to appeal to that part of the market they were missing out on (hey, I never question these things!). It was supposed to be very organic, but include elements of the car and engine design (note the bizarre nostril/logo layout).

Mercedes Monster Head

Casplade

I’d not done any character work for a while at this time, and then I was asked by the guys over at DeviantArt for a “Dark” themed image for their 2004 (done in 2003) Calender.  It also seemed like a perfect excuse to get this guy out of my head.

Entirely modelled in Max (polygon box modelling) and textured in photoshop.  Again, please bear in mind the poly limits available at that time, let alone the modelling tools – Vanilla max, no mudbox/Zbrush/BodyPaint etc.

Swamp Dragon 2002

2010 :  Ohh this one has haunted me for a while, and frustratingly unfinished.  One of thes days I’ll get around to re-working it as it deserves.

2002: Partly modelled in Maya, partly painted in photoshop. This image is my step into making the dragon series. After the overwhelming response to the Blue Dragon (midnight) I decided to make a series of images based on the colours.

Being a glutton for punishment I decided to do the Green Dragon as the next in the series -to get the most difficult one out of the way. It’s incredibly hard to make a picture dramatic using just green colours as a theme.

Midnight Dragon

Ahh “Midnight Dragon” was pretty much the one that started me off on rendering Dragons. It’s one of those things I really enjoy doing on this side, as it never crosses with my main client work (even doing games, I’ve never had a project that required a dragon !).

The curious thing is, I also tend to use it as a yardstick now, comparing the capabilities of new software vs the tech that was available in the past. Midnight Dragon, here was done wayy back in 2002 and as such there were no sculpting utilities available, no normal mapping, no functional displacement mapping, basic shading etc, and god forbid you use more than 30k polys. This guy was entirely modelled and rendered poly-by poly (cut, extrude, move) in Maya (Maya 4, if I remember right)

Concept cartoon

Was just colouring up a sketch while testing painter back in the day.