More Assassin's Creed Fan-Art

As a big reason for doing these is to just have some fun, I tried to do some unusual things to push myself as an artist, namely, using more of my imagination and a lot less photo-reference. Of course something is lost and gained by doing this, but I'll never grow if I don't take those risks.

Here for the first time, we see Naseer's tatoos. I made more subtle adjustments to the costume, too. I guess I'm just not settled on the finer points. I also wanted to convey some loneliness, or intensity, just in his face, as we see it without the hood here.

Interspersed with working on this piece, I would frequently find myself distracted by Assassin's Creed 3, which is pretty darn great so far! The new character, and how tied he feels to his world and his environment, is my favorite thing about the game.

Now if only I can stop dreaming about climbing up the sides of buildings ...

Bringing Back Krayola: Commissioned Child Portrait

This was a commission by an old school friend who wanted their niece portrayed as a Superhero (she's known for donning a bucket on her head, and fighting crime around the house I am guessing). It was for her birthday, but I think the commission was as much for the parents too, maybe even more so.

Something I was unsure of was how the child herself might react to the piece. I normally get horror and action-themed work meant for adults, so I had to rethink how I did things. I had to look at things from the eyes of myself at say, 4-7 years of age. The approach was like going back to crayons.

Kids tend to also prefer cartoonish images that come in flat colors and bold outlines, as do grown-ups (just check out the stuff that gets made into designer toys) but I knew not to depart from what I was known for doing too much, and kept the cartoonishness to the background elements while I focussed on an exaggerated realism for the Superhero herself.

I don't do many portrait commissions (this may be my first, at least in recent years), but they can certainly be very fun, as this one proved to be. It forced me into approaching my work in a considerably different way than before.

Berkshire County - Teaser

An animatic I made out of concept art I did for the Toronto-based production, Berkshire County.

Casting Off the Shackles: Here Comes the Pink

These pieces (the first of which I posted here, then took down) are for a program that, before press release, I can't talk about. As always, I can just talk about the work itself.

These pieces were, as usual, focusing on horror and atmosphere, with the last one being the most out of character for me, but I just felt like, after the second one, which was pretty straightforward, I wanted to go a bit nuts.

Some years ago, a guy at Comic Con, who was posing as a portfolio reviewer (but who turned out later to just be a crazy person who had hijacked another publisher's booth), told me I should give up art entirely. One of his criticisms was that my color choices were a tad 'loud', and, like all young artists, I forgot any nice thing anyone said about my work -- ever -- and upon picking my eviscerated ego off of the San Diego convention hall floor, set about coloring everything after that point in as muted or restricted a palette as possible. The last piece allowed me to break some of those self-imposed rules and expand my horizons again, being a vertical composition exploding with blues, purples, and diagonal streaks of neon pink.

Concept Art For Movie: Shamanic Purging of Evil

This is for a film project I can't talk about too much, but as a piece, I'll talk a bit about it because in its own way it's quite personal.

I know, this depiction of what appear to be cyborg soldiers and their gangster overlords in a techno-fascist control room doesn't seem like an introspective journey into the abyss of the soul, but that's just who I am I suppose. Perhaps I see my own gods/extra-dimensional beings not through the iconographic filter of Hinduism, Christianity, or any other religion, but through the filter of comic books and video games and other geeky stuff. 

Palette-wise I went cold, which I almost never do. Since I was given some leeway as to how to depict these characters and scene, I wanted it's techno-fascist, icy hatred to confront the viewer, while also being less overt in other areas.

Also, on a personal note, I felt what can only be described as Shamanic forces while rendering this image, almost as if some dark spirit was working it's way through me, in a ritual-like manner. I don't know if it is expressed at all in the image, that is just how I felt when I was working on it.

The Second for Berkshire County

This is the second piece for Berkshire County, the Toronto-based horror film from Audrey Cumming (the movie with the pig masks).

One of the biggest challenges here is that this scene needed to take place in a bathroom with a window at night, which meant that there was going to be room flooded with light looking out into an environment not only of significantly lower, but of entirely different, light quality. The challenge was to keep all of that in one image and make it fit, which I tried to do.

Balancing Speed and Quality

While I can't say what this piece is for, I can discuss it aesthetically. I suppose every illustrator has a moment in their life where they begin to value speed as much as quality, and that's pretty much how I approached this piece, with immediate decisions and an economic use of rendering and colour.

I became very daring with this one, entrusting myself to brushes and brush effects I normally never use, trying to lay down basic shapes in a deceptively simple way, and then refining things where needed. The effect is appealing in some parts, where the roughness adds atmosphere and expressivity, but I don't feel I've perfected being both fast and communicating the amount of detail that I like to cram into my work.

I also used the 'rough' approach to guide the eye a bit, having this areas of vague, painterly marks being moments of reprieve from the more complex forms. In any case, balancing speed and quality is a definite goal I have for future pieces.