Fantastical Stuff

So, here are all my fantastical WIPs, concepts, doodles, and illustrations for the past few months. Because the way blogger inserts images into posts is stupid, these are actually in reverse chronological order, with the newest images at the top of the post and the oldest at the bottom.

Some weird, angry spirit characters for an illustration I'm planning. They're going to be swarming a thief who stole their treasure.

An update of one of my Team ChoW sketches from many months ago. Still a WIP.
A loose doodle of an entity I call the Deistic Tetramanous Convolucephalid.
Mushroom folk! These were very loose and fun.

An abstract, godlike entity that I just call the Earthborn. Part of a series of deities, both real and fictional, that I'm drawing.


The above is an environment for the same world as the Devil Sea image a few posts ago. I began by making a model in sketchup. This image is still a WIP, I think.



A transformed version of the Lost One, a character which I posted here some time ago. He's the player character for a mock game project of mine. The second image is supposed to be a transformation animation. If it doesn't work, check out my DeviantArt gallery for a version that does.


This is an environment for the same project as the above. Despite what you might assume, it was not inspired by either Avatar or by Roger Dean, nor did those works even particularly influence it. If anything, this was much more inspired by an old SNES game called Bahamut Lagoon.
The second image should be an animation of the various stages of progress for this image. I don't know if Blogger will let that work. If it doesn't animate, check out my DeviantArt gallery.

Final Cyclops

I finally finished Oog, the cyclops. The textures were a blast to paint!
The bottom image is an animation showing all the steps, from thumbnail sketches to finish.

Lost One and Cyclops

Hello again, blogosphere. Here are a few things that I've been working on lately.


Here's the progress on this guy. I wasn't sure what direction I wanted to go with the design, and I was simply getting tired of painting on this, so I'm taking a short break from it. I'll return to it soon, though.


Here's another form of the same character. I mentioned the concept of Aura's in this game's gameplay a couple of posts ago. This is the main character with a green aura, which roughly corresponds to the element of earth. In this form he has an earthy/greenish skin tone, a more muscular physique, a greater number of more highly pronounced protuberances, and a somewhat exaggerated bone structure (see the cheekbones and knuckles). I'm unsure what to do with the lower body.


Another character from this same world. His name is Oog, and he's a cyclops, sort of. In my initial thumbnails, he only had one eye, but as I painted him I decided it'd be cool to give him a deformed skull with a sunken and atrophied second eye. There are going to be several related characters/creatures with a similar eye arrangement. They are one of the main factions of antagonists in the story.

Coming up soon, another dump of life drawings, and some self portraits.

Lost One, elemental form

The Lost One again. In the game I was making, you begin as the rather pathetic being that you saw in the last few posts. Over the course of the game, though, you come across different abilities and upgrades, including objects called Auras, which change your physical form and allow you control over a certain element. The first Aura you acquire is the Red Aura, which changes your form into a winged, more diabolical entity, and allows you control over fire.
Obviously a WIP. The wings are very challenging to paint, especially the "hand" portion. Hands are always hard to paint, anyway.

Lost One 2

As I often do, in my haste to share my work online I posted it before it was quite finished. So, above, you have the same thing as yesterday, but with some more interesting textures and features on the head, shoulders, and elbows, some slightly brightened values on the upper torso, and some corrected proportions that were slightly off before. Below, obviously, is the same character clothed. Looking at the vest/shirt thing the right version is wearing, it seems to make his character a bit too...badass. I'll have to rethink that. Maybe just a ragged shawl of some sort.

Lost One

I don't know if any of you are familiar with the RPG Maker programs. If you don't know about them, they are PC programs that allow you to make very basic RPG video games pretty easily, and more advanced games if you work at it and can work your way around the program's limitations. I played quite a bit with various versions of RPG Maker when I was in high school. I never finished a game that I started making, since even a very basic game requires a hell of a lot of time and work, but I started several. Recently, on a whim, I opened up RPG Maker once again and played with my old games a bit. The passage of time allowed me to see the old worlds that I created in a new light and become interested in them again, so I'm resurrecting some of my old characters.


I spend a few hours today painting the being above. I really like the rendering technique I used for this. I used soft, textured brushes, which is a nice change from the hard edges I've been mostly using lately.
The being above, name uncertain, is the main character of one of the games I started making. The characters of this game were initially inspired by the characters of the SNES game Demon's Crest (screenshot below). I ripped many of the graphics I used from that game as well. However, once I started working on the game, the characters and storyline changed immensely from the material that originally inspired them. The storyline, in particular, bloated out into grotesque and incomprehensible proportions; I had to make it epic, you see. The storyline was a mostly senseless mess, far too big and complicated, and littered with plot holes and unanswered questions. Telling a story like that, obviously, is difficult, and that's partially why I gave up on this project.
Anyway, if anyone cares, let me tell you a bit about this character. The game opens with him awakening from some sort of life-support tank, with a computerized voice giving him instructions that he's too groggy and confused to fully understand. The only message that gets through to him is that he is expected to seek out and retrieve a being known as the Jester. Before he can completely figure out what's going on, though, disaster strikes, and the computer system that had been instructing him shuts down. Terribly confused, he makes his way out of the underground facility in which he awoke, and almost immediately encounters the Jester, who tries to kill him and then flees. The only thing he knows is that he needs to retrieve the Jester, so he gives chase. He finds that the outside world consists of rocky "islands" of land floating above a sea of clouds, and that the land is populated by demon-like entities. As he pursues the Jester, he gradually learns that this strange world is actually Earth, and that its demonic inhabitants were once normal humans. What could have happened to have transformed the planet in such a way? Just who is the Jester, and what is his purpose in pursuing him?
Like I said, the story is a mess, and I didn't quite know the answers to those questions as I was trying to tell it. Maybe one day I'll untangle that mess, and try to tell the story again. Or maybe I'll just draw some of the characters and leave it at that.


In the game, he starts off as the rather weak and pathetic being you see in the top image. As you progress, you unlock more of his powers and abilities. I'll draw alternate versions of him to show that transformation.