Portal Island Transformation

More WOW...

Here are the latest two cards I did for World of Warcraft TCG (set 21), along with the rough sketch and the finished card...

Nuthin' but Mech 2

I contributed the couple of pieces below to Lorin Wood's second great mech anthology book, Nuthin' but Mech 2. Out now, and the profits go to a great cause, my friend and fellow Presto Studios alumni Francis Tsai's battle with Lou Gehrig's disease. Check it out, I'm humbled to be among so much stunning imagination, inspiration and mastery.

This next one printed very dark in the book, so I'm happy to be able to show it a little more clearly here. A keyframe painting from my personal project Scavenger.

Some Iron Man 3 stuff...

Wow, seems laughable every time I read my last post and realize how poorly I've been keeping this up. If I claim I'm going to be posting regularly, don't believe a word of it!

Anyway, I'm done after a year-long stint on Avengers 2, so I have no excuses! So the below was posted some time ago on the ill-fated CGHUB, so it's about time I post it here. 

Below are some development sketches for the Mk 42. Credit for the final Mark 42 goes to Ryan Meinerding, I just did some clean-up redesign on the front and contributed the initial design for the back view and the final helmet. 

Some development for the War Machine Mk2, which only made it into the movie as the Iron Patriot. A few minor design elements made it into Ryan's final design, such as the helmet and some torso forms that were incorporated to beef it up. 

Some of the other specialty suits that made it into the final battle. They all get featured at one point or another, but the way it was shot it's hard even for me to tell them all apart!

Finally, some development work for the extremis characters. Initially it was thought that extremis would be based on nanotechnology as in the comic book, and so I developed more mechanical structures that would form just under the skin.

From the vault: I Dream of Jeannie

I'm going to try to post a little more regularly by not biting off more than I can chew! So I'll be putting up a random old image or two every week from my archives. 

These are from 2005, one of the first movie projects I worked on, I Dream of Jeannie: the Movie. Actually had a fun script that spent a good third of the running time in ancient Persia. Too bad it never got made. This illo was produced in the days when I was transitioning from pencil and marker and traditional media to Photoshop, so it's a pretty lifeless piece and you can imagine how much painstaking time went into it compared with today's techniques. Still, it was a lot of fun for the time. Enjoy!

Iron Man 3...

I've had the pleasure of seeing the movie twice now, once at the Premiere and once at the Cast & Crew screening, and I couldn't be more pleased. Marvel seems to be able to pull a rabbit out of their hat every time. It's nice to have some small association with such consistent quality storytelling. 

Anyway, I'm going to wait until the Art of Book comes out on the 14th to post any work, but I'll be putting some stuff up here, so keep your bookmarks hot.  There's even a final battle suit design that accidentally got left out of the book, so I'll get to put up some "exclusive" content :)

Stay tuned...

Ray Harryhausen, R.I.P.

Seems like these have been a couple of years of the passing of the greats. After Ralph McQuarrie and John Berkey, now Ray Harryhausen has left us. The Sinbad movies were a highlight of my childhood. They fell into the very limited category of movies that my mother would allow us to stay up for if they were on TV, even on a school night. Very special indeed. Part of the magic that led me to this business in the first place. 

He will be missed, but his impact lives on in all of us who pursue the magic of the movies.

May he rest in peace. 

Or, his skeleton could come to life and move around in herky-jerky movements. He's certainly earned that much.  And I wouldn't put it past him.