More WOW!

... As in World of Warcraft trading cards. These I did over the last couple of years, from sets 15 and 16. As always, I take these on as a fun break from hard surface concept design, and it gives me an opportunity to just do pure illustration and try out new brushes and techniques. As reference material is usually provided in the form of screen caps of the low-poly models from W.o.W., I'm not bogged down in the nitty-gritty of design problem solving. 

From Set 15:

 

And from Set 16:

 

Set 18:

Okay, now that I'm seeing them all together I think I may have to vary my compositions a bit!!! No more right hand in foreground!

More Tron: Legacy

The first environment I worked on was the Game Grid. By the time I started the show the design had already been established and my job was to create a few "style guide" keyframes to set up the atmosphere, lighting and look-and-feel of the environment. Working over screencaps of Production Designer Darren Gilford's sketch-up models imported into Modo, I rendered these in Photoshop. David Levy had already found the sweet spot of heavy atmosphere and crushed blacks/blown out blues in his speedpaintings, so my job was really to find the moments and adapt that look into a more rendered finish.


Originally Rinzler's bike was going to follow Sam & Quora out into the wildlands, so this was a frame of that moment. Daniel Simon provided the model of his beautiful Light-runner for this frame.

I had fun with this one. A lot of the keyframes were painted over frames of lo-rez previs, so illos actually match exact moments in the film. Sam didn't have a final helmet design yet, so I took my own crack at it.


This one was a real struggle. Figurative work generally isn't my forte, so trying to come up with a likeness of Jeff Bridges from an unusual angle and lighting was nigh impossible for me. Needless to say I did not succeed! I'm happy if it looks remotely human.


Again, this was more of a digital matte painting than an illustration. Again, taking screencaps of model elements to paint over. I think the bkgd even includes some of Ben Proctor's city map!

This job was such a back-and-forth collaborative effort, I don't know that there was much that any of us could claim to have done solely by ourselves. This may sound limiting but in fact it was a really fun and free process, and I think we all grew a lot as artists from passing our work back and forth between us.