Garden of the Fairy Queen WIP

This week’s EOW (Environment of the week) over at conceptart.org is the Garden of the Fairy Queen:
“From the real to the unreal. The Faerie create a garden as a tribute to the Faerie Queen, the woodland halls are decked and warded. She walks tonight. Is all prepared?”

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to finish in time, but it’s nice to finally have some kind of inspiration- I work best with art direction. Anyway, here’s a screen shot of my version. I really like the idea of bioluminescence, plus if *I* was the fairy queen, I would want to be tiny and have my city take advantage of the awesomeness of shelf fungi.

Crc What? T shirt Design

T-shirt design for my brother’s dance marathon team . They were really into dinosaurs and I gave them two ideas (one with only the t-rex and this one) and this is the one they liked best. I really like how it came out, especially the stegosaurus. It’s three colors total (black, orange and white) on a dark blue t-shirt. I’m getting an honorary shirt, so I’ll post pictures of the real thing when I get it.

Really dig doing t-shirt designs.

Valentine’s Day- Early

Most people hate Valentine’s Day. As well they probably should, it’s a silly day made up to sell cards and chocolates and stuff. But sometimes that’s okay. Especially since here, in the dead of winter, I get seasonal affection disorder. Most people get the other sort of SAD (seasonal affected disorder), which I also get. I’m pretty sure my SAD is a reaction to the first sort. Whatever it is, around this time of the year, I get an overwhelming urge to draw/paint adorable small furry creatures. Sometimes they have scales or feathers instead of fur, but they’re almost always adorable and cute. Valentine’s day brings out the worst of this because I feel the pull to draw small furry creatures In LOVE! All twitterpated and disney-fied.

So today I have for you adorable squirrels (actually, more correctly, adorable squirrely butts). Tomorrow? Who KNOWS. Possibly baby rhinos, or camels, or frilled lizards. Very likely there will be more squirrels (I like squirrels), possibly even these squirrels in the aftermath of their peanut buttery indulgence (but who didn’t eat peanut butter from the jar at some point in college?? definitely not me…)

Break Storyboards

Been working with one of my brothers on his final film project, “Break” (which is loosely based on Euripides’ Medea, and then more loosely inspired by the graphic novel version of Medea I did my sophomore year of college).

The uncolored storyboards are more of the quick and dirty type – the “i only just got our final shots today and can you do these storyboards overnight, please?” kind. I kind of like working on that kind of deadline, but it usually results in the less than perfect storyboards (and this is not super acceptable for portfolios and the like). So I spent the portion of today NOT spent searching for jobs to apply to and applying to them, working on some loose color ideas for page 2 (which is full of gore, so of course I went for that). I was trying out a vector-ish look which I sort of like, until I did the Lucretia smiling panel in a more painterly style (but still with super high saturation), so now I kind of want to go back and do it all in that style…

we’ll see.

Lady Warrior-quick concept art

I ran 4.5 miles this morning and spent most of the day working on the job search, so this evening I took a little break and cranked this out. I think she’s the best so far of the unintentional series of somewhat scantily clad women wielding interesting weaponry and probably ineffectual armor.

I was trying to go for a slightly different look with the inking and the coloring style, too. I kind of dig how it came out. I was sort of thinking of her as being something between a rogue and a druid as far as class goes (I am always tempted to play druids because they usually get to be shapeshifters or have animal companions, but they’re generally just weaker versions of rogues).

I was thinking of her as a non-celtic/gaelic druid class (so the fantasy desert equivalent, with maybe something akin to a cheetah as a familiar instead of the usual bear/wolf/raven/boar option). I might do a series, possibly with equally scantily clad men, just for y’know, equality.

Did a tiny bit of research on the armor-mostly just looked at different armor styles that appeal to me (I still really dig chinese armor, it’s got all kinds of neat swoops and spikes and such) and mixed them up.

I also doodled a horse. It started out as a realistic horse, but quickly devolved into a silly horse. I have real trouble with horses. They just look wrong, proportionally. On one hand, they’re big, strong animals. But on the other hand, they’ve got teeny thin legs, unlike other big strong animals that have nice sturdy legs (rhinos, elephants, hippos, etc).

More random character doodles

Working off my vague doodles from graduation. She’s still looking kind of generic. Also working on new painting techniques.

must research better armor, me thinks.

Graduation/Sketches

Well I officially graduated from CDIA on Saturday. Very exciting and all that. The ceremony was actually quite nice and the key note speaker was pretty interesting, even if one of the other speakers compared all artists to prostitutes, which was a bit odd (if possibly accurate- still odd). As per usual, I brought a pen since I inevitably get bored at this sort of thing, and one should always be prepared to doodle.

Worked on a new character design which I may do more with. so that’s good.

Also my portfolio website is all up and running, demo reel/technical project reel and everything. In case anyone who reads this, doesn’t read any of my other media portals.

www.torimckenna.com

New Stuff

Portfolio website is all up and running- obviously, I’m still not totally pleased with the design (so there will probably be changes made) yet, but it’s up. The only thing that’s not up is my demo reel, and I will have that up this week (by friday).

Also, new art up over at deviant. Icaran Air

Bast Wips

BASTwips

look! a cat! it looks miles better than my horse…not quite done rigging, hopefully will finish monday…so much to do.

Iguana

new iguana painting up on deviantart

Horse Wip2

horseWIp2

Finished modeling him completely (he’s not super low poly, but he’s definitely lower poly than Mortimer was)- still has stand in eyeballs (and i have to bring in it’s teeth) and am going to muck about with hair systems for it’s mane.

Starting to rig today (should finish that up for the most part tomorrow so i can start on blend shapes)….

Horse Wips

horse_wip

Just a screenshot of the semi-realistic horse I’m working on in maya. Its anatomy is loosely based on the friesian horses.

sketches

Haven’t updated in awhile- Been working on semi-topsecret practicum project at school. Will update other sketches perhaps later. But in the meantime, was noodling about in photoshop and did this graphic-y thing:
ladieswithdogssm
I most uncreatively, call it “Modern Ladies With Dogs”. They aren’t any women in particular, I just got carried away with colors….

Lip Sync


also, here’s the link in case that doesn’t work for whatever reason.

lip sync (work in progress)- of mortimer. Audio is from Doctor Who. Just mapping out his key poses and starting on some of his in between. No actual mouth movements yet (and yes, i realize he doesn’t actually have lips :) )

Beauty Pass, plus a contour

Some still images from Mortimer’s turntable:

(click for nice big images :) )

mortcontoursm

mort_rendered_sm

playblast of the animation (not done yet)

low res turntable: