New Portfolio!

Which means, I have to fix quite a few links.
Anyway, sorry I haven't updated in a while, winter break started sometime ago, and I've been procrastinating a few things. However, today I bring the announcement of a new portfolio site, with a much easier to find address (if you google me, I'm the first one that pops up! yay!), and an overall improved layout.

Here is the link to the website mairosmall.com. I added a page for Judas, the character model I had been working on, you can there directly through this link.

Thanks for checking them out!

Judas Model WIP 4

Another update on Judas. This time I decided to call it finished in Zbrush, so I can go into Photoshop and refine the textures. It will be fun times for sure (I really like texturing).

Here are some renders with closeups.

In this next one, I took of the robes, so you could see some of anatomy detail I worked on in the torso. 

This last one is a close up of the face with the textures taken off. 

Thanks for looking, and I will keep the blog updated as I keep working on it.

Judas Model WIP 3

It's 1:40 am, but this post needed to be made. I was scultping away at Judas in Zbrush, and I suddenly reached a wow moment. One of those moments where you amaze yourself, and realize that maybe, you might just be good at the things you like doing. I was working on the face, trying to get some details down, when I noticed the face started looking kind of human, and that made me very happy. I figured I'd make a post about it, and update on the current status of the model as well.

Still a lot of work to do, but I look forward to doing it. I'm just really excited about how the face is finally starting to come along.
Thanks for reading and looking! [=

Life drawing

What's a sketch blog without sketches? A blog. Luckily, this is a sketch blog, with sketches! Here's is some life drawing I did the other day. Enjoy it!

They were all either 5-10 second poses, done with a pen on my sketchbook.
Thanks for looking!

Judas Model WIP 2

This is the most current version of Judas's model. This will be the low poly version; my next steps will be to UV map it, and then take it into Zbrush for detailing and normal mapping. I also need to redo the hair.
Right now it has crazy materials all over the place, but that is to make it easier to tell what each segment of  the model is.

By the way, if you follow this link, it will take to the finish concept art piece in my portfolio.
Thanks for looking!

I'm a mooooooose

I was looking through some drawing-a-day sketches I did last year, and realized that even though I have them up on facebook, that's not really the best place to display artwork, so I'll start putting the better ones here. Starting with this one:

It's a Godiva-esque theme, but on a moose. Done with prismacolors.
Hope you find it as amusing as I did when coloring it.

Judas Model WIP

The title really says it all. It was about time I posted again, and so here is the current state of Judas.
I first modeled the body, and took it into Zbrush just to better define the muscles. After all that, I almost felt bad for destroying all that work with the loose clothes, but now I have a base mesh I can use when making another male character. In the end, it's all good.

I'm quite happy with it so far, specially with the rhythm in the profile view.

Thanks for looking, and any suggestions/comments are welcome! 

Foggy dusk

So after for a while working on the turnaround sheets for Judas, things started to get a bit monotone. To spice it up a bit I opened a new window in Photoshop and did this speedpaint. Thematically they're completely unrelated, I just needed something to take a break from Judas.

It took me about 1.5 hours to complete.. Hope you all like it!

Quick Background

This image right here, was not even a speed paint to be quite honest. I made it as a quick background for the finished concept illustrating Judas, the character I'm currently working on. I did some changes to it in that final piece, but as simple as it is, I liked the colors as they were so I decided to post it here.

On that note, I did finish the concept art piece about 1 hour ago, and I'll be putting that up on my portfolio sometime soon. Now that I mention it, I'm currently reworking some details in my portfolio, and here in my blog, so please bare with me if you stumble upon any glitches.

Thanks for looking!

Judas concept

School has begun again, and with it, a new and exciting project. I am doing another character model, but this time it is a male figure.

So here is Judas. The character is inspired by Indian Buddhist art, with Moroccan and Persian influences, and some biblical undertones. Here I have two slightly different concepts. After finishing the first one, I wasn't as excited or as pleased by it as I would have liked to be. I felt it lacked some presence, or the power Judas should have being an authoritarian figure. So I went back to the drawing board and made a few adjustments. I made the top garment a bit wider, decided to fully show the belt, and added some other minor details. Now I feel he commands the presence he should, and I am very happy with this design.

My next step will be to fully render the image, and then create the turnarounds to be able to model him. 

The teacher has pretty high expectations for our work in this class, so I'm hoping I can meet and surpass those. It will be a fun and challenging quarter for sure.

Topaz Portrait Original Sketches

I did finally finish the portrait I was working on, and you can see the finished piece in my portfolio.

I wanted to also show some of my concepting process, so I scanned and uploaded the original planning sketches.

I really like sketching in pen for some reason. Maybe it's because the end result has more energy due to the non-erasable lines.

Either way, I hope you enjoy it and check my portfolio too.

Topaz Portrait WIP 2

So here is the full picture of the portrait I'm currently working on.

At this point, I'm done with the big picture, and will start working on details.
Comments are welcome!

Topaz Portrait WIP

Just a little preview of a piece I am currently working on. I think I've spent about 1-2 hours on it so far.

Thanks for looking!

Crystal City

I did this concept a while ago, and found it today while looking through some older files.
Another quick landscape. This time to test some new brushes, and just have fun with contrasting environments and color.

About one hour on Photoshop.
Thanks for looking!

Fashion sketches

I was feeling a bit of an art block, so to help me get out of that I decided to do something a little different from usual. The end result are these raw fashion sketches.

It was interesting to feel the difference in designing a costume for a character, and designing an outfit that could be wearable in our world. I would recommend this little project to anyone who feels like trying something different.

I had a lot of fun with it, and I hope you all enjoy it!

Ocean Goddess Renders

Like I mentioned in the post before, here are some close up and beauty shots of the Goddess model.

I had a lot of fun working on this project. I wanted to do so much more, but I had to finish it for class. Now that summer is coming up I want to redo her hair, and add some more elements to further mimic my original drawing.
I'm also considering rendering it with Maya to explore other techniques.

Anyway, thanks for looking and feel free to leave critiques or comments!

Ocean Goddess Turnaround

Here's the model finished, posed, and rendered with Zbrush.

This is just a simple turnaround, I will post some closeups and other renders after I finish compositing them. I'm quite happy with how she turned out.

Thanks for looking!

Ocean Goddess WIP

I finally started working on this project for class last week, so I decided to post some work in progress shots of what I have so far.

These are the clothes she'll be wearing, before I got them into Zbrush:

This is the character model in Zbrush:

My biggest concern so far is the face, because it seems to be falling into the uncanny valley. That's an area where I'll keep working a on until I'm satisfied with it. Also the textures need a lot of work.

Apart from that, I'm pretty happy with my progress.

Creature

This is my second project for my Zbrush class. We had to model some sort of creature. Mine is some sort of an alligator-dinosaur-turtle-shark mix. I quite like how it turned out.
For this project I decided to finish the model itself early, so I could venture more into exploring posing in Zbrush, and the different rendering and compositing techniques.
Anyway, here it is:

I did the base mesh in maya, and exported it into Zbrush. The textures were handpainted with Photoshop.
I definitely enjoy Zbrush the more I use it, and I'm looking forward to working on a character for our last project.

Ocean Crown

Our first assignment in the Zbrush class was to make a simple object so we'd get used to the software. I made a seashell crown which might be slightly familiar if you've been through my portfolio. It changed just a bit, but I like this new color scheme more. For my final project in this class, I'll be modeling the character who wears it. Anyway here is the crown:

I modeled the base mesh in Maya, sculpted in Zbrush, and textured with Photoshop.

Alien Thing

So as I had mentioned earlier, I'm taking a class that emphasizes Zbrush this quarter. Since it is my first time using this program I thought I'd look up a tutorial and just follow it step by step. This way, I can familiarize myself with it, and try to find an efficient workflow. In this case I used the Starting guide in the Documentation folder. It was a pretty nice and simple to follow tutorial.
Anyway, this is my end result:

It's interesting I suppose. Well at least I can only go up from here, and I have a better understanding of the interface. More (and better) work to come soon!

Color Scheme

I haven't posted much in a while, because this quarter has been pretty hectic for the first two weeks. It doesn't seem like that will stop anytime soon, but hey, at least I stay busy.
Anyway, in the meantime I thought I would post an older piece to prove I'm still alive. This one was another quick painting I did for practice. I used a photo I took of a sunset for reference, and a randomly provided color scheme from the internet.

This is the scheme I used. Tetradic Color Scheme. The site is pretty cool too, check it out if you are having problems coming up with one, or are looking for a color challenge.

Spring Quarter

This is shaping up to be one of my favorite quarters at SCAD so far, and it is just starting. There are two classes in particular I'm very excited for, Sculptural Texturing for Games and Conceptual Illustration.

Sculptural Texturing for Games is basically a Zbrush class, which I'm thrilled beyond words to finally start working with it. I've seen the gorgeous sculptures and models other artists have done with it in ZbrushCentral, and just about everywhere, so to be finally able to work in 3d with this level of detail makes me very happy. I'll definitely be posting works in progress here as the quarter moves on.

Conceptual Illustration, the other class, is going to be amazing. Basically we'll develop a character and their environment and story throughout the quarter. What's most important though, is that we will actually go out, and experience things like wearing armor or wielding weapons, so we can get the experience and the feel of it, and know how to better portray it in our concepts. It will be a very hands-on class which I know I'll be very grateful for.


Not to sound like a broken record, but I'm very excited about this quarter, and hopefully I'll get some really nice work out of it.

Red Sky

This is a speed paint I did earlier today, when I did not feel like working on another project. So this is basically how I procastinate. Sometimes.

Now that I see it again, the sky and the reflection on the water don't really match, so it looks like the water is a magic barrier or something. Hmm...

Done in Photoshop in about 2 hours.

Alexis

This is the side project I was mentioning in the previous post.
Her name is Alexis, and she is a character that I've had in the back off my mind for quite a while now, and thanks to a little challenge me and a friend came up with, I finally made some concept art for her.
Alexis is a bit of a tomboy. She enjoys having a toned body and doesn't mind flaunting it a bit. She has control of the fire element, and her favorite color is sky blue.

Hope you like her!

Thumbnails

Right now I'm working on a little side project, so in the meantime I decided to update with some older stuff.

These are some thumbnails I did for a portrait piece I submitted to Exposé. I still don't know if my work will make it in the book, but even if it doesn't I'm pretty happy with the finished piece (which you can see in my porfolio).

Anyway as I was saying, these are thumbnails I did to study and figure out different mask styles, compositions, and overall design of the piece.

Oh, those are indeed two strips of masking tape in there, not because the paper tore, but because I was drawing with a pen and needed to erase somehow. 

Mortal Kombat inspired character

This is a quick sketch I did while being inspired (and very much excited) about the new Mortal Kombat game coming out. I decided to create a new female character following their classic female ninjas (Kitana, Mileena, Jade), and make her "the red one" since it is my favorite color. I also gave her a circular blade which could be her signature weapon to match the other female ninjas. 

I used the concept art for Jade as a reference for the pose.

I came up with a few names for her, and ended up liking Fabia or Diana the most. I'm still not sure though. Anyway, hope you like her!

Mortal Kombat and it's characters are all owned by Warner Bros.

Intro

Hello!


So this is my blog that I have where I post things as you do with blogs... yeah...


In all seriousness now, I'll use this blog as kind of an online sketchbook. I plan to post anything from really rough sketches, to works in progress, to finished pieces. It will also act as an incentive to get me to work more. One day I was just looking at work from people in the industry (the gaming industry, where I plan to exist one day) and I realized I need to step it up, big time. So this will help me in doing that precisely.
I might occasionally also post random thoughts about things that inspire me, or things that I just find interesting.


With that, I thank you for taking the time to read this, and hope you enjoy my work!