This is a small selection of the best of my work that I have collated into one portfolio to better give viewers an understanding of my current skill level, as well as to show how I have improved in a short space of time from slightly older pieces to current ones. For each piece I shall give a brief description that should hopefully give an insight into the idea(s) behind them.
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| Warriors of Chaos Sorcerer of Tzeentch |
A traditional ink on card piece I did a while back for the annual art competition at Games Day in Birmingham. Games Day is an event run by the company Games Workshop as a convention to celebrate their franchise Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. For that particular year, the title of the piece was 'Psykers and Sorcerers' and so I chose to design my own Chaos Sorcerer of Tzeentch. This piece was placed second.
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| Chaos Space Marine Raptor vs Space Marine Assault Marine |
Another piece I did for a more recent Games Day, this time from the futuristic realms of Warhammer 40,000. The title for that year was simply 'Warhammer 40,000' and so I created an image of conflict between 2 airborne foes. A classic good vs evil struggle where anything could happen in the next few seconds. Is the Raptor about to remove the Assault Marine's head? Or is the Assault Marine going to pulverise the Raptor with his Thunder Hammer? This piece won first place in the competition.
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| Crocorilla sketches |
This was a creature design for an animation project. My aim was to create an interesting fantasy creature to animate and chose to combine aspects of a crocodile and a gorilla to create the Crocorilla, which I decided would be a sort of yeti-like figure.
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| Crocorilla |
Here is a refined version of the Crocorilla, digitally painted in albino colours to help define his mountainous snowy home.
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| Gloryhammer/Alestorm fan art |
This digital painting was done as a test of my skills a while back. It is a fan art piece to the bands Gloryhammer and Alestorm, using their mascots; Angus Mcfife and Captain Morgan.
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| Brown John |
A traditional coloured pencil and pen drawing of my interpretation of the character Brown John from the book 'Prisoner of the Horned Helmet' by Frank Frazetta and James Silke.
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| Kitzakk Soldier |
A digitally painted Kitzakk soldier, again from the book 'Prisoner of the Horned Helmet'.
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| Megadeth Christmas Card |
Every year the metal band Megadeth run a Christmas card competition; this was my digitally painted 2013 entry.
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| How to Train Your Monster sketches |
For a mini-project I decided to try applying the style of the 'How to Train your Dragon' franchise to the creatures from the 'Monster Hunter' franchise. It was a fun, if tricky test that I feel was fairly successful.
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| Angel sketch |
A quick sketch of an angel that I plan to take on into both a traditional and digital piece.
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| Ubiquity character - Laam |
A vector art style character design for a group project. The team consisted of 12 members and we were collectively know as Velocity Raptors. Our game was Ubiquity, and our client was the Sony company Futurlab. Our brief was to create a game based on their 'Velocity' series. This is the character I designed for the game; her name was Laam. This piece in particular was used for the in-game tutorial text boxes. Here is a link to the gameplay trailer we made for our game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqyd7DDwJ0w&feature=youtu.be
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| Ubiquity character - Laam |
Another piece using the character Laam. This was used as part of the front cover of the final hand=in version of the game.
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| Ubiquity Player Death Explosion |
An explosion that I created and animated for the group project. I am particularly proud of this image for some reason, so I just had to include it!
The group project has been continued on after the final hand-ins and the team has reduced in size to those few keen on advancing the game, refining it and altering it to further its potential. As a team consisting of now only 5 members, I continue to remain as one of the 2 artists on the team. We have rebranded our group 'Basement Raptors' and our game has been renamed 'Duality'. We recently exhibited our work at Dare Protoplay in Dundee to resounding success. Though we couldn't win any awards, our game received high praise from the visitors and we were oft asked if our game could be voted for to win (which of course it unfortunately couldn't!). This attention was likely due to the refinement that the game has undertaken, changing many aspects of the design which made it slow, clunky and confusing to experienced players, nevermind new ones. The art too has been refined. As the character, enemy, player and general concept artist (as well as lead animator) for the team, it came down to me to redevelop the main character for the game, as well as changing the 3D sprites that were in the game (concepted by myself, but created by another artist) to 2D vector graphics that would suit the game's intended style far more. Thus it was that Laam became _______ and I redesigned her suit.
The reenvisioned outfit became known as the Shark suit due to the large 'dorsal fin' protruding from the character's back. With this, I had the idea that there should be an under-lying marine theme to the game, shown through the designs of the character, creatures and vehicles.
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| Original 3D rendered Player Ship sprite |
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| Redesigned 2D Player Ship sprite |
The new ship design, a reformed version of the original, is based on rays (the type of fish) and thus has been christened the Manta class ship. The above image is the Mk 1 version of the ship and will receive further tweaks to refine it and alter it in accordance with how the game will chnage and flow. For example, the previous game used the front prongs as part of the 'tether' mechanic (used to grapple objects), but seen as this has been removed for now, it serves no purpose. The next step to refinement would be making a generic prow for the ship that could accomodate for a variety of add-ons, should the tether be re-introduced, or weapon systems added to it.
I also had the task of changing the enemies for the game. For the Dare Protoplay, we aimed to have 2 enemy sprites for the player to avoid, one of which one of the programmers had already designed and added into the game as a placeholder. Due to the limited time constraints, I took that design and recreated it using the vector graphics we would be using for the game.
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| Original placeholder sprite |
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| Recreated enemy sprite |
The second enemy was designed with the marine theme in mind, basing it on a crab. This would be our projectile enemy, attacking the player from range, so required some sort of gun emplacement on it's form. The idea of a large set of jaws was discussed at a group meeting and so became a prominent feature on the creature.
As seen, these jaws open up to reveal a sort of cannon inside. This idea allows for a great amount of change, as the weapon placed inside the jaws could theoretically be anything. The creature has also been designated a wall-crawler, with the future intent that they will traverse the walls of the environment (at this point in time they remain still) and so will not be seen from top-down view.
The game will be an on-going project throughout fourth year as well and so will mean more art and thus more updates here.
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| The Assassin |
A digitally painted revamp of a character I sketched years ago. This became a test of style, as shown by the alternate vector version below:
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| The Assassin |
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| Lizardmen sketches |
Sketches of Lizardmen from the Warhammer universe. This was part of a larger porfolio of images I created based upon the IP of Games Workshop.
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| Ork Pilot and Grot Co-Pilot |
Also part of my Warhammer portfolio, this is a characterful sketch of an Ork pilot and his Grot co-pilot. I like to think I could take this sketch on into a sort of movie poster, reminicent of Indiana Jones.
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| River Troll vs Goblin |
Another sketch for my Games Workshop portfolio. This image shows a River Troll being confronted by a rather mean looking Goblin who is staking claims to the Troll's hard earned catch. Comedy in Warhammer is something that appeals to me greatly.
The following 5 images are taken from an interactive environment project I worked on, based upon the book 'The Wasp Factory' by Iain Banks. The final piece involved playing as a wasp, flying through the island described in the book, clicking on glowing objects to be rewarded with an audio clip taken from the audio version of the book. The environment transforms from the island to a surreal version of the Wasp Factory itself in a sort of Alice in Wonderland kind of way. Here is a link to the final piece:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CogQ1P_3Xeo
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| The House |
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| The Bunker |
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| The Bomb Circle |
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| The Spider's Parlour |
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| The Venus Cave |
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| Deathleaper |
One of my final pieces for my Games Workshop portfolio. My rendition of the Tyranid character Deathleaper. I worked the image up in black and white first and added colour afterwards to produce the alternative image below:
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| Deathleaper |
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| Monster Hunter Weapon Design - Arzuros Claws |
Another mini-project where I took it upon myself to design some weapons for the game 'Monster Hunter'. My aim was to create weapons that literally used parts of monsters, e.g. the claws of an Arzuros as shown above, or the head stalk of a Gobul as shown below:
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| Monster Hunter Weapon Design -Gobul Wand |
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| Chaos Space Marine Lord of Slaanesh |
One of my final pieces for my Games Workshop portfolio. I decided to attempt compositing in this image, taken photos of models from the Games Workshop website and manipulating them to place them in the scene and keep focus on my digitally painted character.
For further work, here are links to my blogs for my Creative Research and Computer Arts Practice modules from University:
Creative Research:
http://year3cr.blogspot.co.uk/
Computer Arts Practice:
http://year3cap.blogspot.co.uk/
