Perspective is awesome!

So here's a "movie poster" I'm working on for Cleopatra. Cool times! I was playing around with an environment, taking some creative liberties with Egyptian architecture and then later on rendering it and adding Cleopatra into the scene. She's lit completely different because I created her seperately, so when it's all done the lighting should unify the image. Take a good look at my sexy line quality, because the environment and perspective is all free-hand. Rulers and T-squares are for the weak!

Final Portfolio: First Semester

Here are some pieces from my portfolio within December 2007. These are good examples of my first attempt at rendering using the crazy "smudging" techniques. It's all new and cool to me, and it's quite an effective method to get a rendered drawing down in 10-20 minutes. This last one, or the one closest to this paragraph - is the last drawing I did on the last week of school - therefore it is technically my greatest drawing with all of my skill and experience combined. Of course...this is only the beginning, and I have so much to learn and so much to struggle with.

It was all fun and games...

...until all the pictures I took were much too blurry. Gah! So, I won't have any pieces from my current life drawing portfolio except for this one, right here.

For this portfolio we are required to have many rendered or "shaded" figures. I don't like rendering, because I was never good at it, and I always stuck to my straight-ass lines. But, my roommate (4th animator, awesome) showed me some elite tips on how to attack the drawing. Unfortunately none of those examples are here, so you will just have to look at this drawing for a prolonged period of time to make up for all the other images that didn't make it. Enjoy!

(If anyone is curious - I will get the portfolio up later, but I need to hand it in this week, so possibly within the next two weeks I will have the drawings up. Oh, and this was a 10 minute pose, cha ch-cha!)

Tezcatlipoca

Ah! I'm quite excited about this image. This is officially my second finished digital painting. The first, being Quetzalcoatl and the second now being his "evil" brother Tezcatlipoca. Cool! It's like it was meant to be! Here's the low down on Tez. First of all, he isn't all that evil. He just has a bad rep for being the god of smoke and mirrors, and trying to deceive humans into doing something nasty. The reason why he tempts and tricks humans, is to test their will and their heart (sorry, that's quite cliche). In Aztec mythology there is a ton of dualism, and so Tez and Quetz are twin brothers who work together, but are quite opposite in personality and philosophy.

Technical goodies about this piece. It was done mostly in Photoshop with a bunch of textures and rendering, but the cool stuff was done in Painter X such as the smoke billowing from his body, the background, and the smoke from his face/skull.

B-B-Bones?!

20 Minute full skeleton

5 Minute skeletal gesture

Here are some skeletal studies which I used for my previous anatomy portfolio in October. Knowing about the skeleton is great for studying how the body moves and what's behind all the fat and muscle on our bodies. I also love animal anatomy (although I'm still very new to it), so I'll post some animal gestures up sometime as well.

These were all done with conte and a pinch of pure graphite pencil (6B) to tighten up some of the lines.

He doesn't even need shoes!

Here's a quick and simple example of a well inked drawing converted into a vectorized image. Sexiness! The cleaner the lines in the original drawing, the cleaner the digital copy will be. And my lines, are damn clean. Remember, if there is any talent that I may ACTUALLY have, it's drawing a straight line. I can't really do anything else, I just fake all the rest of it incredibly well.

Just to explain the image real quick; this is Quetzalcoatl in human form. The large monstrosity a few posts down, is his bestial-god form. "Quetz" is the god of many things, one being wind. When he runs, geometric graffiti flares in his wake. At least that's what I see in my mind. So this is a simple test of what the graffiti may look like when Quetz runs, and how it integrates digitally. Oh, one more thing - I love fooling around with perspective, technically this may be categorized as 6-point perspective, which is the predecessor to the infamous fish-eye perspective. More examples of that to come!

Best. Hat. Ever.

Gah! It's huge! Not only is this guys hat WAY too awesome, but I suppose his ego is too! I want to explain something, so get ready to read. This character is an ancient god, who existed some time before many of the Aztec and Mayan gods. There are a handful of these old gods who seem to have unsurmountable power and wear insanely large and kick-ass hats.

On a side note, my posting may slow down slightly due to the hyper project I am apart of. My friend and I have officially begun storyboarding and layout for our first graphic novel. With our ambitious abilities, we want it published soon. Very soon. Not only that, but I plan to begin creating an official site for all of the projects my accomplice and I are working on. These stories that we have created are part of something truly epic, and we will unveil the universe that we have created in due time.

Thank you, for taking the time to stop by and enjoy my progress.

The Devil has Antlers

This was an image used to represent an anagram of my name and a color "Michael Kenneth Janzen Black". The anagram turned out to be "Hijack 'N' Hell-Bent Amaze 'N' Neck", and then I visualized what that awkward phrase meant. It's all painted with gouache, 100%. I used black only, and I didn't go over any mistakes with white...because I make no mistakes. Quality control at its finest...ah...I'm getting cocky, :P.

The Absolute Q

Well well, here's the final piece for the great and ominous Quetzalcoatl. Officially, this is the final stage for the title of a graphic novel a friend and I are developing. Not only that, but we would like to take the graphic novel in as a storyboard for an animated short. That's a long term and ambitious goal. For now though, it's a snazzy piece.

Wolf Woman revised!

Here's the finished piece for my journal assignment. I used a "scrapbook" wallpaper for the background found in an art store.