Alive again and Commissions

Well I have recently returned from an 11 day stay at a hospital and a 2 week period prior to that of intense pain and discomfort all beginning with what is believed to have been a bad spider bite. Ow. I'll spare you all the details but suffice to say I was suffering with a deep infection that I'm actually not completely over yet but thank God I'm at least home again and once more starting to catch up on things.

The 4 week and counting hiatus has hit my income up severely so I'm actually opening up commission work again. This is something I haven't done in a long time due to being too busy but I could use the portfolio work (and the funds!) - Particular details on how to commission me can be found here: http://mikewinn.deviantart.com/journal/45093062/ but to summarize, contact me via email at mwcreate@yahoo.com - I am doing $20.00 sketch commissions of a single character. Payment is to be handled via paypal. If you wish to solicit my services just email me to initiate the contact and we'll talk. My journal entry on deviant art has more information.

In the meantime here is an image I did just prior to getting sick, of Kongou. This image was used for the Toonbots Animation group for an ad in an animation magazine called Kidscreen. I've never drawn Kongou so angry-happy. He looks like he wants to eat you.

Keeping Up With The Jones (er The Blog)

I promised myself that I would stay up on keeping this thing updated and by God I'm gonna do so!

Very little to say here save that here's a dump of some images, recently scanned, sketched and drawn up. Collection of sketches, marker studies of other art and rough layouts. http://mikewinnart.deviantart.com has more. I've also finally dropped cash for am intuous 4. I'm getting all high tech and stuff.

Keeping It Going

So I might go a month between posts or have the ability to do several back to back to back posts. Look at that! So now that Shot Bar is out I'm going to toss up some of these. These are a collection of some of the favorite head shots of mine that I did for the game. Basically for the game I did just about all of the art assets (bottles, labels, pour animation, expression changes on the characters.) As I noted before it had to be kept to real simple animation but in the end really super animation would have probably distracted from the potential pace of the game. All in all I had to do quite a few characters but they were all bust shots. Some of the above shots were first passes after which corrections had to be made. I learned quite abit on streamlining my own work flow through this project.







I think I'm sold on the whole flatting plugin. I've never been able to get crisp flats like this before. I've gotten the color flat process down of course but this method just really works. If your lines are crisp and tight, this works. There are a few tricks though. First you need to get the line art layer to all black and white or as close as possible. Sometimes you might need to use Image > Adjustments > Threshold to do this but using Levels might work as well. I like using Threshold though but then after awards you may need to go in with the pencil and close in line breaks that might occur. Then you duplicate the line art layer and use the flatting plug in. I just leave it on the default settings suggested on their own site - and it works. It fills in all the closed in areas with their own color and then you just go in with the paint bucket and replace. Between this and still playing around with a cel shading style, I've been able to more quickly do some color pieces and enjoy doing so.

A Quick Post

It's been awhile since I"ve posted and actually I've been doing lots of art and animation related work I've just neglected to catch my sites up. Here's one of a series of commissions I've been doing, lately. I'll start catching up sketches and other assorted things soon.

Cathak Darius - WIP

This is a Work In Progress of a character named Cathak Darius. It'd been awhile since I tackled photoshop rendering and I felt somewhat rusty with this hence it's WIP status. I sort of just dived in with the intention of trying new things out - so it's still somewhat rough, in my estimate, and obviously unfinished but on its way though I may never actually totally finish it.

Darius is interesting in that he's a Fire-Aspect Exalted (those familiar with the game know what I'm talking about - if you're not then ignore this part.) yet is described as wearing alot of 'cool' colors as opposed to your usual association of warm and hot colors for 'Fire'.

Moar Art

I've had the opportunity to get some nice little projects onto my resume and portfolio but now I'm kicking it up a notch in terms of sending things out there to studios in hopes of looking for more long term work.

Here are some marker renderings plus rough sketches with quick color slapped on them. Recently I started getting into the habit of taking rough sketches and just tossing color on them in photoshop just to see what I got as opposed to feeling like I needed to have super clean line-art to color for 'finished pieces'. Color without fear or care for it being super neat is quite fun, no?

Commissions - WIP

Some WIP Commission Requests. One is in a more complete stage then the other but they're both works in progress.