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.