We'll see you again in a little while, little explorer...

For anyone who has managed to talk to me about work lately, the conversation is usually along the line of:

Asker: So what are you up to, Kit?
Me: Painting spaceships~
Then later:
Asker: So what are you up to, Kit?
Me: Painting aliens~

This is actually rather marvelous– being able to be asked about my job, and actually being able to tell someone, in all seriousness, I'm painting/drawing/thinking about aliens and spaceships.  I love my job.  And we're working on some fun projects.  That is to say that the job I was hired on for, codename: Lambda, has been put aside for a little bit after our initial couple months of development.  Enter our current project, codename: Starship of the Line.  I can't say much about it, but there was a little talk of releasing some of the development work to get ourselves and others excited.  I'm excited.  I've been moving back and forth between a couple programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, Alchemy) and real media (pencils and copic markers), depending on what was faster or what I felt I could work best in on a given day.

So Cthulu and...wait...second row...Space Dwarves?  

We needed aliens and ships, and the design of one is sort of going to inform the other.  So the process started as doing some heads to choose which we all thought were interesting, taking those and making some bodies while I simultaneous started coming up with some different types of ships.  Before the ships got really underway, though, we needed some placeholders for engine, so I whipped up some that were simple and not really attached to any given racial idea.

A mishmash of silhouettes, basic turn around, ship-type sizing (fighter, warship, dreadnought).

We got into some story talks, with some art under our belts to get the brain-meat flowing, and now we're fleshing that out in some really fun directions.  Relatedly, I've taken the aliens we chose and started giving them bodies and spacesuits to try to match along with their story-lines/spaceships in our current proposed designs.  Here's a liiiiiiitttttlllle taste.  Really little, sorry, but we thought everyone would enjoy some of the designs as much as we do!  If you have a specific reaction or feel for any of these, feel free to share.

The design on these guys involved a lot of thought regarding cybernetics in Science Fiction-  how do most franchises depict them?  How recognizably human should they be?  How much, if they're very integrated with technology, do they themselves care about looking 'human'?  The head/face area is often a starting point since that's usually where we look.  The eyes especially.  But hands really struck me as well- lots of artists talk about being able to tell how skilled someone is at painting by how they do hands.  So looking at hands, and how hands look,  is something very "human."  Lastly was the bipedal, upright silhouette and average proportion.  Multiple legs, lack of regular feet, shifting the 'hip' width and joints were all things I was moving around.  

Is a tween fantasy novel being released through Helping Hands Press, written by Mark Venturini.  I could try to express how excited I was to get a contact about doing some spot illustrations, but I'd probably fail to do so adequately.  Illustration, especially of fiction, has always been a big influence on my life goals, so the opportunity to do so was A+.

Mark was very clear from the outset that he wanted something in black-and-white as well as something that looked sketchy.  The spots would be at the chapter starts, and they needed to have an edge treatment to match other work he already had.  He's a great client- good communication back and forth, clear wants and direction, succinct suggestions about what would make him happy and open to interpretation and artistic leeway in seeing the job done to both parties satisfaction.

A couple sketches mocked up for the troll at the bridge.  The assignment was a ruined bridge in a meadow at night. The stony troll, wearing simple braes with optional tunic, should hold a magic staff.  In the sketches you can see that I put the bridges over water, which was incorrect.  Mark's troll bridges do not go over water, despite being paths to other places.  I was playing around with where to put the troll so that he would be visible to a reader.  The spots are fairly small, but which side the troll is on commands if he looks ominous or not.

Dark figure in an alley...   This one was pretty quick and simple, the key was making it look properly sketchy and populated while not distracting attention from the figure.  It was also an evening deal, so lighting was tricky.  Thanks to growing up with the Batman Animated Series, I did know that night scenes are lit from the bottom up.

The final on the troll and his bridge (not over water) !   The lights on the far hills are campfires, ostensibly from other trolls and bridges?  Rocks of the fallen bridge dot the meadow grasses.  

I had a mural commission for a full living room.  The inspiration piece I was shown was an early 1900s japanese-revival china hutch, black wood with gold inlay and tiny red depictions of people going about their days.  The hutch is in the dining room, and the client wanted the living room to be bold, a conversation piece, and tied to that furniture piece somehow.  Went with colours and themes - two of the directional kami being the blue dragon, Seiryuu, and the red phoenix, Suzaku, both over a parchment ground with blown gold flakes.  I did a few different kinds of dragons and phoenixes, since everyone has different taste on how body shapes and faces look.  I was especially excited to put the claw near the light switch like Seiryuu might play with the lights, as well as the lost and found scale coils coming all the way down the stairs.

Painting was about 2.5 weeks with only Windsor Guest and myself painting, mostly in drying time.  The parchment effect on the walls was achieved with pushed oil washes, then drawing the figures and painting them in acrylics, and finally a guarding matte clear coat over everything so that the client could still wash the walls and have a clean house.