Making of — Seekers — Starscream, Skywarp and Thundercracker

    I’ve been rereading IDW’s Transformers comics, and I came to the realisation that All Hail Megatron is the last story in which Starscream, Skywarp and Thundercracker were actually on the same side, fighting together. For some reason this realisation inspired this painting; a ‘one last group shot’ of the three, before the takeover of New York starts.

    When I recorded my process for creating these ‘crispy’ style illustrations previously of Celegrom and Huan, I showed a certain way of texturing, using seamless patterns. At the time I also mentioned that there’s another way of texturing, by using images, rather than patterns. I’ve been asked on numerous occasions, if I could create another video showing texturing done with images.

    Knowing that this painting will require a lot of texturing in the environment, and knowing that this would all involve images, rather than tiling patterns, I’ve decided to record the whole process of this piece, from sketch to final stroke.

    I created a total of 5 videos.

    The first one, is a short ‘summary’ video showing snippets of every stage in the span of less than 3 minutes. You can watch the summary video here:

    The other 4 videos are more in-depth and show each stage from start to finish, though all of the videos are timelapse and none are longer than 7 minutes.

    The first of these videos is about creating a clean sketch from a rough draft in Manga Studio 5:

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Review — MasterMind Creations CYNICUS R-12 (IDW Vos)

     Another Transformers toy review, and again from Master Mind Creations.

    Cynicus is based on Vos, another member of the Decepticon Justice Devision, from IDW’s More Than Meets the Eye/Lost Light comic book series.

    Vos is a creepy little con, who transformers into an awesome sniper-rifle, speaks only in Primal Vernacular and having a habit —or rather, hobby— of making others ‘wear his face’.

     In his rifle mode he is mostly wielded by other members of the DJD, but there is one panel showing him wielded by Megatron himself at some point during the war.

     As with all of their toys, MasterMind Creations have done an outstanding job on Cynicus! Beautiful detailing, great paint job, fun transformation and, above all, faithful representation of the comic book character.

    One thing stands out about this character far above all other Transformers toys that I possess: it is, by far, the most posable TF toy I’ve ever come across. It’s mind blowing how many poses I could achieve with it, and how easy it is to pose him. But I am getting ahead of myself.

    As with Tarn, he comes packaged in a lovely box, containing a short comic doubling as an instruction booklet, as well as, a collector’s card.

Review — MasterMind Creations KULTUR R-18 (IDW Tarn)

    My first contact with Transformers was in the 1980’s through the UK Marvel comics, followed by the cartoon aired on Sky One. I knew then that I’ve found a story and characters I’d love for life. Through the years I watched all the cartoons and read the multiple comic book iterations, but none (including Marvel) have ever come close to the masterpiece that is IDW’s take on Transformers.

    IDW’s Transformers has a fantastic plot, fabulous characters, great humour and gorgeous art.

    One of their original characters that immediately jumped out at me was Tarn, leader of the Deception Justice Division (DJD).

    He is featured most proeminently in the More than Meets the Eye series, which now is retitled as Lost Light.

    Sadly, or perhaps thankfully, Hasbro doesn’t pay much attention to the Lost Light crew, and thus, there are few toys available that are based off of this comic book series. Thankfully, this gap is being filled by the third-party manufacturers, like MasterMind Creations who created this absolutely gorgeous figure of Kultur (aka. IDW’s Tarn):

    Kultur comes in a deceptively small box. This is due to the fact that he is shipped in his vehicle mode, which is more compact than his considerably larger robot mode.

Making of — Tia’s Voyage — 3D Character Art

    During the course of the 1^st semester in my final year at Teesside University, we had a module called Beta Arcade. This module focused on team work, recreating as faithfully as possible, a work environment similar to that of the games industry. During this module, students across multiple courses needed to form into “game teams” of 10 to 20 people and over the period of 12 weeks, create a fully playable game demo. We had Games Programmers, Designers, Animators and Artists all coming together during this module.

     The team I was a member of, called the Beta Bunch, consisted of 4 Artists, 3 Programmers, 2 Designers and 1 Animator. I can truly say that I was extremely fortunate in having met some of the most fantastic people I could ever hope to work together with. The chemistry in our team was superb.

     My role in the team was to be the Character Artist. We decided to create a Pegi-7 rated, third-person role-playing puzzle game, which, eventually was titled Tia’s Voyage.

The trailer for our game can be viewed here:

Trailer created by Robin Coils.

    In the planning phase, we decided to go with a Polynesian look to our game, but then added a touch of Mayan/Aztec influences to everything. Not yet certain whether we wanted a male or a female protagonist, I created some quick concept sketches for both genders:

Making of — King Valerius

This is a character sheet I’ve created for Raythe Reign Publishing some time ago.

The process by which I created Valerius’ character sheet is available here in a timelapse video:

Tutorial & Making of — Celegorm and Huan

Celegorm and Huan from the Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien.

   I have been asked on many occasions to create a tutorial for how I go about creating these ‘crispy’ illustrations.  Due to the fact that I am currently in my final year of University, I had very little time to work on this, taking over 2 months to create this tutorial. I am sorry for the long wait.

   Now, without further ado, let’s dive into a detailed step by step description on how this was made:

Angel Wings — Lucifer, Michael and Raphael

These three are part of my original story.

   I’ve drawn all three a couple of times in the past and will probably draw them more in the near future, as I slowly start work on my script, but before all that, I’ve decided to revamp the wings. Previously, I drew them in a less realistic, more ‘convenient‘ fantasy style in what concerned the arrangement of the feathers. But I felt I could no longer tolerate the inaccurate design.

   The story —once I’ll actually have the time to draw it— will be a fantasy manga/comic style, which allows for a lot of artistic interpretation, but I like to be as accurate as my current abilities allow, when it comes to anatomy.

   So this image is a representation of the new way I’ll be drawing their wings.

   Below you will find the making of progress GIF, and a couple of closes-ups of each of the characters; Lucifer, Michael and Raphael: