The Order of the League of Creation

I've been jonesing for some group blog action and since Line it up! is no longer breathing, I figured I'd start up a new group blog! With that said I present you: The Order of the League of Creation!

It's all about monthly and bi-weekly art challenges, both 2d and 3d, that will hopefully help to motivate and inspire members to be creative! Check out the first post on the blog for a slightly more detailed 'mission statement'. If you know me personally and I haven't contacted you yet about joining (sorry!), or if you are a friend of a friend and would like to join the league, please email me or leave a comment and we'll get you involved! So far we have video game artists, graphic designers, animators, and film artists participating!

In the spirit of fast approaching Samhain '08, the first League topic is Vampires. Above are my first two submissions. I'm going to be posting the work from the League blog here as well, with a slight delay. I'll probably post my submissions here once the current topics have changed on the League blog. We'll see how it goes.

Have a Horrid Halloween, you ghosts and ghouls you!

Brain holder

I got the notion to draw a skull when I was playing Pirates: Duels on the High Seas on my DS yesterday. The visual styling of the game is really cool, and I was going to attempt to emulate it, but I ended up getting carried away instead. I'm going to have another crack at doing a more cartoony skull soon and try to paint like Ryan Wood, which is no small task.

As a cool/interesting note, this piece was created entirely in photoshop, start to finish. I was inspired to try sketching digitally again after seeing Seamas Gallagher's work again recently, and since I really want to get better at painting digitally, I figured I'd give it another try! It was a lot of fun and I'm definately going to do it more often. All I need now is a bigger, better tablet as my little 4x5 Graphire is starting to cramp my style ;)

Old & New Horizons

Here's a couple of oldies but goodies that were posted on a group blog sometime last winter. The first was for a post called "Gorillaz" where we had to re-design ourselves in the style of Jamie Hewlett's Gorillaz characters. I really had a lot of fun doing it and was just starting to get into learning how to use Illustrator. The second image was for the topic "winter woes" where we had to illustrate some aspect of winter that we find less than enjoyable. Can you guess what I don't like about winter? ;)

I really enjoyed posting on a group blog and since the one that I was posting on isn't active anymore, I think I might start one of my own! It was great fun seeing how others interperated the same topics and was usually good for a laugh. If anyone reading is interested in participating in a creative illustration blog, please leave a comment!

If you are a returning guest to this blog then you may well know that in the past I've promised to post more work more often and haven't always followed through. Since I have a bunch of stuff scanned that's just waiting to be painted, I'm going to challenge myself to keep posting work regularly. I'm also planning on doing some essay style posts about what I like to call the "Entertainment Art Industry"; I.E. the video game, film, and animation industries combined. Expect my opinions about old and new films and games that have inspired me over the years.

Uh-oh

I submit this little sketch that I did a while ago (while in line at the super market) as an illustration of my current mental state: blissfully unaware. Actually, it's more like "brain-dead".

I'm having an artistic crisis of confidence. Having been out of school for a while now and having not landed the job that I want yet has started to take it's toll. Fear not though! I am taking steps to stay on track! It's really tough but I have some great help. It's been suggested that I show more of my work more often so that I can get different perspectives on what I'm doing wrong and what I'm doing right. I have never been very comfortable showing work that I feel isn't a good representation of my abilties, which is a bad way to learn. School totally helped me get over that and to realize that not every day is a great drawing day, and not every single drawing that I make is going to be the best one ever. Having not had as much contact with artistic friends since school, I feel like I'm in a bit of a creative void. It's been tough to push myself lately and I'm finding that I've begun to fall back on old and very bad ways of thinking and doing things, like only showing drawings that I think are good. Crappy drawings have their merits too!

Recently when I sit down to draw just for the sake of drawing, I feel kind of guilty. It's like the act of sitting quietly in front of a computer or a piece of paper is counter-productive. Now that finding a job is my "full-time" job any time spent not looking for work is not good. The strangest part about it all is that in order to create new work I need to spend time to create it and get better because I'm still a newb. However, it usually takes more time than I would like because I'm a newb. Since I'm working part-time and looking for work full-time, it's difficult to make the necessary time, and since that time isn't being spent looking for work the idea that I'm doing something bad or falling behind is often at the front of my mind, which doesn't help my confidence.

This is a very weird time for me...stranger than any other I can think of. Even though that's the case, I am not going to stop continuing forward, and I won't let anything stand in my way. Not even me. As bad as things might seem I have a lot to be thankful for and I need to keep that firmly in mind and take advantage of the advantages that I have right now because they might not always be there. I also need to stop second guessing everything I do (like actually submitting this post)!

UPDATE:

Just knocked this out. The line work is by Joe Olson, who works at Avalanche Studios (who is owned by Disney). The line work was posted on the Avalanche art blog and after seeing all the different ways that other people had coloured it, I decided that I wanted to have a go at it as well. Some parts are better than others, but I'm still a newb when it comes to digital painting. I'm going to step away from it for a while and then when I have a fresh perspective of it I'll go ahead and fix up the stuff that needs fixing. I'm definately going to be reworking the background, but for now I'm just glad that the guy isn't floating in a white void.