Here are two illustration pieces.

This is one of the many pieces that grew out of an idle doodle. I think this one wins the “most likely to be made into a plushy” award.

Probably the only piece of fan-art I’ve ever drawn. This little guy is from the game Chrono Cross, published for the original Playstation by Squaresoft. Admittedly, I’ve never actually finished the game but something about this cute little alien made me want to do my own interpretation.

For a few years now I’ve been working on and off on a digital card game partially inspired by Final Fantasy‘s Triple Triad. Programming wise, I’ve completed a working javascript mockup with animations (details about that will have to wait until another post). Midway through coding I got sick of looking at filler artworks so I created these pieces to represent the different ‘suits’ of the cards in the game.

Technology:

Magic:

Wisdom:

Strength:

The drew the images at print-level DPI so that digital cards could theoretically be made into the real thing someday. Overall, I’m pretty proud of these. I did each one in the order they are presented above. The first one probably took 4 or 5 hours, because I was developing the look the same time I was illustrating. The ‘strength’ icon was probably the most difficult. The final version you above was actually the third iteration and I feel like it could still be improved, but sometimes you just have to step and let it stay finished.

Speaking of clocks, this is another one I think would make a good one. It vaguely reminds my of the logo used by the empire in Star Wars for some reason or another. If sci-fi evil empire needs a logo, let me know.

This is a five minute sketch I did in photoshop using the same brush style I used when I made the Imp. This isn’t my favorite piece because it’s so messy, but I think it has some charm.

Diligently pushing onward…

Another piece from the rotation series. I was going for a clean look that implied a sort of 3D lattice. Since there are twelve spikes, I think this would make a rather striking clock face.

I like this one because of its simplicity. The whole ribbon was a single path, stroked with a really dynamic brush that shifted size, color, and opacity. I’m definitely gong to explore this technique more because I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what can be done with dynamic brushes.

Continuing the picture dump:

This was my attempt at creating an image that was ugly, but at the same time pleasurable to look at. I cut the grungy border off of an ancient public domain photograph and twisted it around over and over. I like how the spiraling creates the illusion of a tunnel and the texture makes it a bit hard to take in the whole form of the design. This one is pretty high res and is best enjoyed fullscreen.

Working off the same sort of shapes that I use in Bug Girl, I created this little Imp. The spiky lines were a product of a custom brush in photoshop. I crushed a large circle down to a very thin oval and set it the angle to the direction of the pen. The line is thin and smooth when painted in a straight line, but becomes wide and spiky on a curve.

Sorry for the delay. Turns out that WordPress isn’t as secure as I thought. While the actual site remained more or less unharmed, some worm managed to insert spammy links into the RSS feed. I’ve got a fresh install and database so it should be cleared up, but let me know on Twitter if anything else horrible shows up.

Onward with the art:

Here is second spiral piece I did. Using the Spiral #1 as a base, I multiplied, rotated, and scaled to achieve this blossom.

This is Bug Girl. I’ve been drawing her in the margins of notes and books for years now and she’s become a bit of signature of mine. This particular rendition was a quick scan and trace in Illustrator.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be going through my backlog of design, drawing, and illustration work and posting some of my favorite pieces.

To start it off, here is a piece I did in early 2007 while figuring out Photoshop’s blending options:

I like doing sketches in isometric perspective. Unfortunately, it seems like almost all of the isometric grid paper I could find on the internet totally sucked.

So I made my own isometric grid paper [PDF].

The lines are grey at 75% brightness. I’ve found that this keeps the focus on whatever you’re putting on top of them while at the same time keeping the lines legible during work. Of course, there’s no watermarks or any other silly stuff that graph-paper providers like to add either.

If you print the PDF at the default size, the diamonds that form the grid are about a 1/2 inch wide, and a little bit less than 1/3 inch tall. The full size of the grid is 10×7.5 inches, perfect for printing on letter sized paper with 1/2 inch margins. If you need a larger grid than that, my paper can pixel-perfectly tile in all directions.

Enjoy! Tell your friends!