Merry Christmas from my wife; a new look for Jeddins Field

Well, see what happens when you leave the keys on the counter. My moody black has been swapped for a new green and gray. My wife is a graphic artist who can actually make heaps of money with her artistic talent. I just seem to provide my spider killing skills to the marriage and even that is a dangerous, squealing, and hazardous adventure on my part of dealing death to our arachnid neighbors. 

I would like to say Merry Christmas to all who are visiting. For my Atheist friends Merry Winter's Solstice, and be good for goodness sakes. Dad if you actually read this, I'll be seeing you soon. Couple more days and its another fun road trip for me down to Orange County and two months of family and celebrations. I'm looking forward to playing Halo 3 with you. 

I always enjoy it when you go running off all "Johnny Hero" on me to kill the aliens. Little do you know that I always tend to stick a plasma grenade to your helmet just as you run past me simply to add to the carnage you must and will inflict upon our Covenant invaders. You'll re-spawn soon enough. Love you, see you soon.

To all my internet friends, I'll see you guys on the random boards and Kevin's Watch after January, so Happy Holidays to you nuts. I should have some new updated material for Aliens Vs. Transformers and the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and maybe some Pern images just for Menolloy on my return to Northern California. 

Jared, David, Jeff, and Norita and Lexi, a warm see you guys soon. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Years. 

So, that is it for December. I might post in January from my Dad's computer, but I think I'll be too busy. So see you all at Jeddins Field in February. Yeah right 

Kevin164 

Gorgon.

A long time ago on a message board called GojiStomp I was a moderator and the guy who made sigs. If you don't know what an sig is, it is an small internet banner that sits within a post on a message board. These little advertisements are usually of Avatars or sites a person wants to have representing them when they make a statement. I made a few and I was good enough to warrant my own forum for it.

I'm proficient with Photoshop and I can manipulate images on a professional level. I did it for friends and wasted some years on helping with generating looks for their sites. Of course they're all gone, so I have nothing to show for it, so Meh. 

On Gojistomp I was known as Dezerath and I was a nazi moderator, I admit it but when you deal with kids and fan boys you don't usually have a choice. It was good times. Now the site Gojistomp was run by a great kid by the name of Gary and he had a pretty reputable Godzilla Fandom following over his competition in Monster Zero and Mazer City. Monster Zero won out in the end, but with Godzilla 1998 we all lost a bit of our childhoods to two hacks. 

Unfortunately for Gojistomp it went and shut down due to Gary's school issues and having a life. When I was there I always found myself interested in creating American Kaiju. Giant monsters with hoaky alien invasions to waste those Sunday afternoons on those lovable Japanese movies sent to invade our sets in the 60's and 70's before buying everything in the 80's and 90's. 

When I started the outline on Chimera I always wanted to make a game where you were in those maser tanks fighting off some waddling rubber behemoth as it trashes the city. When I finished Chimera I got the idea for such a game and I started on the outline called Gorgon.

23 monster designs, but they had to be different over those normal Ultraman punching bags out of Bandia. So far three have made it to the block on Cs3.  

The image above was my first giant monster for Gorgon. I find that I need to look for a second job to get my hands on Zbrush. It's a sculpting program and you can get some powerful images with its use. These 23 designs would be easier to work with in this program than my basic 2d CS3 paste and color treatment. I already slathering at the mouth to try it out. Of course this means I'll have to convert Chimera over as well. DOH!

Aliens Vs. Transformers: November Notes

We'll here we are into November and I've begun work again on AVT: Rescue. I've been away from it since April of 2008 because my responsibility to my family. Finding time for this project is similar to trying to piece together a replica of a spanish galley. You don't know why you're doing it beyond the act of the love of seeing the finished project sitting on your mantle.

I've gone back and tasked myself to finding every board and separating them. Now instead of being placed on a single sheet of six panels, they are now free to fill up my web site's bandwidth. The neat thing is that some of the panels make interesting animation sequences when you run them at high speed. My wife would snuff out my life if tried to animate this into a Youtube video so I have no prospects in doing so.

I like to think of AVT as my learning curve on the art of story boarding while refining my vision. Fan made I meant it as a filler piece for places like Dreamworks, Blizzard, Bioware, or Pixar's portfolio reviews. I suspect in 2009 I will finish it and simply place it on my wasted time tray, while starting on a family friendly story board behind its wake. 

So far I have finished the entire Race/Shaft Drop sequence which is about thirty panels and I am ready to move onto the Brig Sequence, where we introduce the Tankbots ( My ode to the Dinobots) , some nasty Decepticons and a new age Maximal. If those references are over your head... congratulations you're not a dork.

Happy Halloween

"Mother's Son" is a fun little monster drawing that has been sitting on the desk since early October this year. I wanted to do a theme for Halloween that would incorporate a Lovecraftian horror with a warrior babe. What I got was something that felt like Grendel and his mother. The piece turned out pretty well, since It took all night to finish and the details fell into place for shading and lighting. This one has a stand alone quality that I liked right off the get go with the environmental colors. Playing with CS3 managed to bring out a wonderful effect on the clouds and atmosphere that I fell in love with over the monster's purplish ridges and crests.

I am a fan of H.P Lovecraft and I tend to have many sketches of creatures that would fit right in with Great Old One's ilk. Lovecraft had this reporter/professorial quality to his body of work that made you feel you were reading the terror first hand from the dark shadowy pulp corners of a tabloid or a science publishing.The only author to date that I feel could expand on his work is Stephen King. When King decides to walk down these dark lanes of ancient cobblestone it is magic. He does mostly short stories when visiting upon us the creeping horrors of H.P Lovecraft. They are some of his best in my view that sneer up at you from Nightshift and Skeleton Crew. 

Hopefully the man will give us one big drop down a well of terror and visit upon us something out of a Sutter Kane novel in the near future, you John Carpenter fans out there know what I mean by this. It is my boys second Halloween and we got him a Godzilla suit and a flashlight and we are off to have some tricks or treats this friday. Perhaps the Mother's Son will get tons of treats this hollows eve as well.

Jeddins Field: The Story behind it.

Ok, so my family keeps asking me why Jeddins Field for the title of your blog? Why not Kevin164, or just rantings of a starving artist? I love them sooo much...where else can you get such sarcasm so close to home. So here it is guys in a nutshell Jeddins Field is story about a woman who dies at seventy after a long bout with cancer. She is trapped along with two hundred dead souls in the after life within the small town of Mission Crest, California. Between them and the welcoming light is a terrible demon that will not let them pass. This woman's soul is now within the prime of her death-life, which she consider it to be twenty-five; she then decides to do something  after a close friend is consumed by the evil entity. She set out too enlists the aid of four fighter ace pilots from various wars that have chosen to "slumber" in an abandoned air field called Jeddins Field rather than face the judgement awaiting them in the light. This is no easy feat since the demon seeks to destroy her and any who help her while she tries to cross the town.

With the awaking of the four she then must convince them too help in the fight against the demon and gain the freedom of the trapped souls of her township. This turns out to be even harder since three of them are related and have grudges against the other. The tree in this picture symbolizes the fourth pilot's resting place. He is the eldest and can be considered like the Red Baron. He appears as a silent skeletal reaper like visage that flies an old world war one bi-plane that can kick some serious spectral butt. 

I liked this story when I first wrote it as a twelve year old. It has been sitting somewhere in a file under years of bills and receipts. Since it was one of my first stories it tends to hold a special place in my heart and I thought I would revive it as my Web-Site/Blog/Portfolio. 

I've always been fascinated with what we all have to face in life at the end and my Heroine is a plucky world war two grandmother of three who gets to be gorgeous again as she was in youthful life. A prize fighter and a good mom she represented an age of women's independence and bravery. I like her and would like to follow up on her story and the four pilots she has to coral into being the heroes they are. She is also the great grandmother of character who would star in her own novel that sits in the same box of notes and art under my desk. Perhaps we can get to them once we establish ourselves. We'll see...

Children's Book.

It's hard for me to explain this absolute dividing line that has separated myself with being a father from an irresponsible self serving mook that I used to be. It happened instantly and was nothing short of becoming a man of responsibility no holds barred on my son's first day of life.I can tell you parenthood is an interesting stage in growing up if you so choose it, or should it fall on you like a ton of bricks then you have my sympathy and welcome to the adventure of your life brother. So here's my advice... "Want it, rather than fall into it." You'll be better off that way. 

It clarified what was important over my arrogance, my ignorance, as well as some pretty asinine concepts that I had as a teenager and young adult. All the while I was chafing under my Father's love and Marine like supervision during those years, I actually let some of it sink in. I now find myself repeating some time honored fatherly commands while my eleven month old gurgles defiance. Ahh, the circle repeats. I guess I could equate parenthood as receiving a "rest of your life" pass to the going ons behind the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction in Disneyland after riding the boat for so many years. 

I love my son. He's a real joy and a blessing. He's a gentle heart and a fearless soul. My Wife and I have made sure to emphasize sharing and love with him at every turn. I've been out of work for near a year now and in that time I have received something most fathers never get and that is time spent with their sons all day long. 

I am getting to watch him grow into his personality at ground zero rather than a few hours between here and there whilst coming home from work and going back the next day. It took a long time for my wife to recover from her C-section and some pretty far reaching complications have kept me at her side since the birth of our boy. We're lucky for the love of her family and my father as they came through for us at every turn, I am grateful for that support while I cared for her and our newborn son and I will cherish it till the day I die. 

I've been working on various art projects over the months of this blog's inception from Stephen R. Donaldson's works to pin-up art, but these are self serving ventures. For long time I have wanted to give my wife a gift of a children's book, but have failed to do so. She loves Winnie the Pooh and I'm a big Godzilla freak, which is one of the perks of why we married. She and I are both at heart simply seven year olds trapped in adult bodies and are happy to have found each other. Not to say we are not responsible adults... we just enjoy kid things as well.

So I've begun on Pudgy Blue or Roo;  I haven't decided on a title as of yet. Basically it is a nod towards both of our beloved pets. Mine was an Old English Sheep Dog and her dog was a Malamute.( Word of advice Old English Sheep Dogs nip. They are good with kids but they do tend to bite as a herding reflex I presume. Malamutes are extremely vocal and loving. They like to work so get a sled or something they can pull.)

 I figure I will need about thirty pages between art and story for a finished book to present to an agent or publisher. Getting it published should be an interesting challenge to overcome. Luckily my wife has a friend who is an editor at People Magazine so I will have to harass her when it's finished with pleading emails and bribes of royalties.  :)

Pin-Up Art.

When I moved into Mt. Shasta I discovered the Black Bear Gallery. It is a nicely displayed gallery that promotes local artists and there is quite a bit of talented people submitting art here in Siskiyou County. On meeting the owner I presented myself as a Cartoonist and Penciler looking to sell my work. He liked my portfolio, but it was one of my sketches of a warrior babe from Chimera that caught is eye. He pretty much laid it out that he was interested in some pin up art for his gallery and that was fine with me. 

Of course I don't have any pin up art handy to show him, so for the last few weeks I've been sketching out some babes who are in serious need in eating some sandwiches.  I got a futuristic car pin-up that has been floating in my head and I'm really interested in bringing that to light, so hopefully I'll be able to add that finished idea to my On-line Portfolio.

So here's the first sketch of Saberous with some Photoshoop thrown in for the heck of it. She is a  prominent character in one of my outlined stories called "Side Show Coma." She is basically the female side to our protagonist who is trapped in a fight for survival against himself while lost in a coma.

Comic Con 2008

I'm sitting here typing up this post where I should be prepping for the long journey ahead of me for Sunday the 20th. I'm practically driving down from the Oregon border to San Diego for the 2008  Comic Con Portfolio Review.

 

I did this once in 2001 and It's not bad so long as you go in with the healthy perspective that you're going to get compressed through an emotional cheese grater. Sucks being an artist, until you hit pay dirt, but that's the gig.

Over the last two years I've been working on Chimera in order to wing an electronic gaming job. It also has helped in getting the rust off the pen and my adolescent dreams. I don't care where I work in the gaming field, just so long as it has a paycheck attached to it. I can then feed my wife and son, perhaps get a new computer, so I can play Spore. (I'm so looking forward to that.) 

 The problem is I think my stuff stinks. I really got to slow down and focus on the anatomy and fine tuning of how I draw my hands and vehicles in order to sweep my way into employment amongst the other desk gaming jockeys. 

I just spent two days cramming a five page panel spread for a comic book illustration, and I feel like I just did an all nighter for some screwed up test in Latin. My work has some things about it that I like and some things I really hate. Despise it or love it they are going proudly into the maw of the reviewers.

Honorable Mentions OC Fair 2008

With>You : Darkest Day has taken honorable mentions for 2008 at the OC Fair in Costa Mesa under the mixed media amateur class. 

This year the fair had a bit more entries than usual and the judges seemed to be picking more abstract designs for the top tiers. I probably should have gone with the illustrations division for my submissions but with all the photoshop color and effects it seemed clear that it belonged in mixed media. There is always next year. 

 

Accepted for the Orange County Fair 2008.

Ok, I got two in for the OC fair for the mixed media amateur class. Hopefully, next year I can go in as a professional. I've been pretty fortunate that I've managed to take home a ribbon and award for each time I have entered in the fair. One of these days I'll have to actually follow the fair's theme for the year. I think it was a frog last time.

The Mother was created for my wife when our son was born. It was a bookend for The Father, which did not make it in. Two judges ruled for its admission but the third judge did not. I figured on this because the theme was basically the same where you had a parental elephant caring for its offspring. 

The original image is a small 8.5 x 11 inked onto a piece of copy paper. I scanned it into CS3 and spent about 2 hours adding color and detail until it was completed. The Mother and The Father can both be seen by following the Illustrations link on the side bar of this blog.

The Darkest Day PT1: With>you  is part of an on going motif based on an illustrated story that I will one day have to finish. It's my opus of sorts. A look into immortality and the consequences for a man who believes in doing the right thing, but has no faith. 

What would happen to him if everything he had known were to become mere paragraph in a history book? Everything from our age and what came before it is wiped from the map of the human condition, while he is incased in a ghostly state.

The last remnants of the bible are four sheets from the New Testament and have as much weight of relevance akin to the Rosetta Stone and its impact on our modern day society and science. 

Would you fight to protect those four crumbling pages, even if you didn't believe? Also, if you only could touch the real world only through the mediums of metals and lifeless material, what would you become? That is the Tychon Armor in a nutshell.

The Darkest Day Part 1 is a flash of premonition or a dream where our central hero observes himself as an insane monster in the abysmal future. The forces of men draw him out like Grendel in order to rid themselves of this beast forever. There on the battlefield in his insanity he is confronted by a warrior who is the reincarnation of his daughter. 

With>you: by Linkin Park was used as the inspiration for the scene's emotional weight.

I wish they would make that. Chimera's story.

One of the things that I catch myself doing when I play a video game is that I begin modding it into something else right away, especially when I like the dynamics of what I am playing. Mostly they are partial conversions to full on total conversions, but I am never really happy with any game that I play in its original format for some reason. My wife thinks it is due to my over active imagination and that I'm a dork.

For example GTA: San Andreas would make a great zombie survival simulator, simple enough just avoid the malls. Ghost Recon 2 would make a good platform for a Predator game, throw in some abilities in climbing and several vision modes with some cool weapons and you got a keeper. It would have to be a lot better than Predator: Concrete Jungle, urrgh I can't believe I bought that one. 

True Crimes: New York would have made a great Cloverfield movie tie-in game. Simply take the lead hero convert him into a News Reporter or a Photographer, then try to survive on foot in the massive New York map all the while the Cloverfield monster and its horde of spider parasites infest the Big Apple. Take pictures, get the scoop, and make history all before sunrise. By then you better be out of town before the army ends the party with a nuclear bomb. No shaky cams please.

The latest game to tweak my imagination has to be Spore , by Will Wright who is famous for The Sims and Sim City games. Spore is a massive game and I am really looking forward on having to buy a new computer, plus shelling out an extra $80.00 dollars for the Galaxy version of the game. Why? Well, since it won't work on the old Macs, I am forced to dig out my old Populous game to get my world building fix. My wife's poor G5, how you were once the Kong of Mac. 

Back to the subject. Looking at Spore I found myself considering how would I modify it? What would I do with it or add to it? In the typical Kevin164 style my answer is, I would place a "Giant Space Monster" creator as a tool with the UFO options. Reigning down comets is fun, but unleashing some super space monster says my alien race is epic. My working title for that idea is " It came from the Dark Nebula!" DUH, DUH, Duuuh!!! 

The galaxy stage of the Spore game is what really hammered that one out. I guess if I could mod a version of Spore it would be a cross between itself and Lionshead studio's Black and White, with a little Fantastic Four thrown into it for good measure. Let us imagine you're in the role of a massive sentient nebula adrift in a cruel universe and you're either going to make it crueler or better, depending on what kind of player you are. Find worlds and consume them whole while you make your way to the galactic heart where tougher and far more advanced civilizations band together to counter the looming threat you represent. 

Discover alien animal life forms and then mutate them into a giant planet killing monsters to wear down those stalwart civilizations opposed to your malice and hunger. Or envelope a world and build it's defenses by helping its species evolve enough to build massive star-faring fleets. Send them out to take on some 16 year old jerk player from Nevada and his pet giant space squid while battling it out on-line, yelling out one liners such as... "avast, ye monstrous void sucking calamari! Eat my photon torpedoes!"

Anyways... I'm so buying Spore.

This is pretty much how Chimera, (which you can look at by clicking on the image in the side bar), came about. It was the by product of about four different games and their certain elements that I found entertaining while playing them. Chimera is the child of Fable, Mercenaries, Shadow of the Colossus, and Okami. Akin to the rambling above, that is how a 170 page exercise in design and story came about from my computer to my portfolio.

Now, I am not trying to make a game or broker a deal and ride off into the sunset with the overloading of my bank account. The odds of that are pretty slim at best, but if you can dream.... No, the reality is that I would rather ride off to a team meeting at EA games and draw out designs for some boss monster the hero has to be killing on level 23. Pick up a pay check and have wonderful cake. 

Conceptual design work for Aliens Vs. Transformers.

The interesting thing about the internet and current technology is now fans of pretty much anything can just go out and make what they want, when they want of whatever they want. You just need the will and a camera to do so these days.

I thought the Alien Vs Predator movies 1 and 2 were misguided when they hit the theaters. I had purchased the original comic books out of Dark Horse years back; they were great and I enjoyed them immensely . Sadly for me Fox completely sidetracked what could have been the fight of the galaxy in every way. It felt like they had brushed aside the original series and the source material out there for both the Aliens and the Predator, because those two movies should have never been centered on present day earth. They completely under sold the original Ridley Scott's Alien movie in 1979 by minimizing the fate of the Nostromo and what her crew went through to stop the Alien from arriving to Earth.

( I'm a Fanboy. I know it.) I don't even want to talk about how I feel about how they trashed the Predators. Of course on that note, I'm no better it seems. 

I've been playing around with a fan fiction pitting the Transformers against the Aliens. Yeah, I know I need to get out.  From a pencilers point of view though it's a "all you can eat" festive of robots and monsters to draw with.  

Surprisingly, as bad as it sounds in its time the Alien franchise under Dark Horse Comics seemed to be on a tour of butt-kicking from the Terminator to the Robocop in the late 90's. The popular space beast was thrown into every conceivable battle possible in the main stream comic book world from Superman to Batman. Both these iconic figures had their run in the Xenomorphs whenever it suited DC comics and they made gobs of money, while at it.

So, why not the Transformers? Michael Bay learned the hard way that Transfans are pretty much one of the most prickly fan bases out there. I mean these guys would make Piranha want to evolve into land based creatures if they fell into the same waters. They can be that bad at times, as a fan base should be. Let alone they are everywhere much akin to a global Fight Club.( I just broke the 1st rule) If you see someone around thirty, they are a Transformer fan and they are a G1( Generation 1) fan to boot. 

Beware girls, say anything demeaning about Optimus Prime ( The Big Truck Hero) dying in the cartoon movie and you're most likely to hit that hidden, crusty, and tiny emotional nerve in us guys. That movie would nearly traumatize an entire generation of young boys world wide in one fell swoop. On the same level of watching a random guy get kicked in the scrotum, we thirty something males all know what it means, when you say. " Its over Prime."

 

 I can draw and I got the imagination to pit these two franchise against each other. So thus began a little story board and now 2 months later I'm working on conceptual designs for the characters so I can begin a comic page layout. Who needs a publisher when it comes to a fan fiction? I would just get sued if this ever made a cent. I just want or need to see if I can do it. That's sums up my problem in a nutshell. I see these things and I'm not happy until I get it out on paper for myself. 

If you want to see the early story boards just go to my Portfolio link and head to AVT: Rescue for the originals works on this idea.

Side Note: Kill Switch was completely drawn using the Line Tool in CS3. 

Stephen R. Donaldson and the Thomas Covenant Series.

I started looking at certain authors that I enjoy in order to translate their words into images. I've always found Stephen R. Donaldson's work entertaining and a good exercise in testing my Webster's dictionary with words like mien and puissant when I was in middle school.

 As disturbing as the main character Thomas Covenant is, the Land's inhabitants wear away his leprous anti-social walls with courage, beauty, and friendship. They are so forgiving of his flaws and in accepting him, to the point where he eventually goes from the arrogant heel to saving them all from the all powerful Satan like character he his pitted against.

 

Sadly the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are lacking in visual artists. Tolkien has had the likes of the brothers Hildebrandt and Alan Lee who's visions inspired Peter Jackson, who in turn created the epic movies of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Stephen R. Donaldson seems to have very little to choose from what I've seen in internet searches for anything relating to his vision. From all accounts his movie deal is in the dreaded limbo of Hollywood middlemen. 

Probably one reason for this is because the hero of the story purposely and gravely injures a young girl in the onset of the first novel. He's a completely unlikable character thrust into the heart of a world in danger and he's the only hope of saving it. It is too much for an individual who has to struggle with being a leper, a raper, and possibly a mad man all at once.

I would imagine the only way Stephen R. Donaldson's work could be translated into the silver screen would be through the second series. The images posted along with this musing are of Nom. Any fan who has read the books ranks this creature's appearances through the novel the One Tree and the White Gold Wielder as one of the top most characters they really want to see in action.

So now I'm putting my sketch book to use and I'm trying my hand at visualizing this body of work into form and line.  Hopefully in a few days I will be able to post the images for Mhoram's victory over the giant Satansfist from the third novel the Powers That Preserve.

Tuning and then fine tuning.

Well, this is my first blog post and I am currently checking out the bells and whistles on the Blogger.com control panels this morning, so please just consider this a first post trial run. 

Why I created this blog is simple enough. I need something to send out to potential employers show casing who I am and what I can do in the field of art with my on-line portfolio when mailing out those important emails of "please, hire ME!" 

I'm a cartoonist, illustrator, and a general crafter of mookery with a pen. Also let us not forget self taught, which means not hirable in most cases. So as not to dwell on those crimps and walls that the industry expertly places on us, we need to push forward. 

The point of the game here for me is to get over those hurdles and find those untold riches, where I can eat and catch a movie every once in a while and I fearless reader have no clue on how to do this with grace, in the art field. So that makes my blog a tragic, yet a interesting work of determination.

There are a couple routes here that I can possibly exploit while finding rent check money with my so called talent. One is Cartooning. Please note the sample above of the Ambassador funny. This was my very first attempt at a comic strip panel. My wife loves the giant space squid, so that means I'm on to something. Fifteen more of these and I'm off to the local newspaper in Mt. Shasta to see if I can get on board with the editor. It's a start.