Photo Manipulating Fun

I wanted to post some photo manipulation stuff. Not original stuff but these are images that already exist or that I took and then digitally altered in Photoshop.

This is a screenshot I took myself of the Playstation 3 game The Last of Us. I wanted to make my own wallpaper from the game but the image had some blurriness, some "noise", and didn't have enough contrast. So I increased the contrast and light/dark levels and added some filters to sharpen the image and get rid of the noise. I made the image look more like a painting with said images, which I liked. I also added the blood on the blanket; it didn't exist before but this was a point in the story where Joel gets hurt and Ellie has to care for him on her own, I thought the blood would add more "weight" to the emotion of the image. Also threw the logo on the right to complete the homage.

The above photos were of my friend, Dylan. I took the photo when he and another friend visited me during college. The photo was taken during lunch at a sit down pizza place and I rotated the camera as it was being taken. Later I altered the colors and brightened the photo, I really like this image.

A few years ago a friend of mine was thinking of participating during no-shave November. I told him he should grow an awesome mustache and added one to his profile pic. Then I took another step and made him look like the Old Snake from Metal Gear Solid 4.

 

This is a painting I made in a college class. I wanted to study painting human skin and the teacher recommended I make a self portrait to study it. My friends told me that my concentrated look almost made me look like a dictator. So I ran with it and had some fun photoshopping my painting onto some paintings.

Had some fun with these. I enjoy photo editing from time to time. :)

JUMBiES Character Designs

Back in 2009 I did an internship at JUMBiES Industries. I was a "Social Media Intern". I managed the company's Facebook page and made approved posts on behalf of the company. I also made photoshopped images for them and helped design a few new characters.

JUMBiES are baby animals that got jumbled and mixed together when storks crashed on the way to deliver them. Each JUMBiE was a cross between two animals; usually the animals are puns or literal takes on animal related words. They are a toy company and make bean bag toys out of the characters. They also made children's book to go along with the toys that explains the origins of the product in a fun, rhyme-filled way.

This guy is a Diamondhead Shark. He's a cross between a diamondhead rattlesnake and a hammerhead shark. I gave him the body of a hammerhead with the pattern of the snake. Also gave him the tongue and rattle for his tail fins. I think this character appeared in book. But not in toy form yet.

Here is a Spidermonkey. This was a more literal take on the animal. I had other designs for this guy; some that had more apparent spider attributes; but we felt that those might be too scary for children. haha! So we ended up with this, much more, kid friendly version.

A Bullfrog is what this design is; if you couldn't tell. Another fairly literal look at an animal. This one was fun. I did a few color variations before settling on this one. Some of the other colors were more inline with a cow or a bull. But we didn't want this guy to look too alien.

The Gurtle was my bosses favorite idea. He told me the image he got in his head was that of a goose that just slid itself into a turtle shell. He wanted the character's catchphrase to be, "A gurtle is always there for support." This was the original design I gave him, but he wanted me to add eyelashes to show that the character was female; also he wanted the gurtle to be in a sitting position to make the toy design easier to make her not fall over.

This was the final design I made after. I really like this drawing. I think it came out well and looks like a stable posture for making a standing/sitting bean bag toy that won't fall over. This character is one of a few other that are part of a Kickstarter to help get released as physical bean bag toy.

Here's the kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/43379820/jumbies-two-animals-in-one-tm

Life Drawing

I took a life drawing class a year ago at the local community college. I love life drawing, it's one of my favorite art subjects. These following drawings are from that class; they were meant to be fast sessions so I didn't always have the time to be completely accurate, but I like how they turned out for the most part. Each drawing took about 30 minutes.

The Strangling Brothers - Original Character Designs

 During a break in class once I drew a clown hitman on the whiteboard. I liked the character design and turned it into an idea for a cartoon. The above image was a style concept for the Cartoon. I dubbed it The Strangling Bros.

The brothers' names are Syko and Blasto Strangling. Their last name is a play on the 'Ringling Brothers Circus', but twisted into a more "actiony" name. The premise for the story was: The Brothers were part of a famous family circus act when they were kids; their act was incredibly famous. However, the local mimes were tired of being in the clowns' shadow and form a Mafia. They decide to take extreme measures and assassinate the members of the top clown act in the area, The Strangling Family Circus. The Brothers' uncle grabbed the boys and escaped. The boys and their uncle hide out for the next 20 years and the mime mafia has taken control of the city. Events take place that force the brothers out of laying low. The brothers find a mentor and embark on a quest for revenge against the mimes.

The cartoon is meant to be a parody of mafia and action movies. It's a got some heavy drama mixed with over-dramatic dialogue and ridiculous action. The brothers face traumatic events and fight the mimes using their comedy; like throwing pies with grenades or jacket flowers with acid or napalm.

The image above is a "family portrait" of the Bianchi Mime Syndicate. After they stamped out The Strangling Family Circus, the Bianchi Mimes took over as the main entertainment force in the city. The mimes would extort local shops and vendors to pay for the "privilege" of having mimes on their street. One by one Syko and Blasto take these mimes on until they satisfy their vengeance.

Currently this project is on hold. I was working on it on my freetime and have some drafts for the first episode. I am planning this show as an episodic series on youtube. I plan to continue this when I have more time. I think it's a fun idea and has lots of potential.

Original Character Designs - Hearthound

 Back in 2006, when I was attending Westwood College, I took a couple of classes that had a number of projects that seemed to overlap with each other. So I took this opportunity to develop a game concept that had pieces from those classes.

The game I gave to the game concept was Hearthound. It was a science-fiction western about a bounty hunter with a fractured memory and is looking for the murderer who killed his family. The concept was meant to be a third-person action shooter set in an open world filled with story missions and plenty of bounties. There would be plenty of bosses of and side missions that could yield money and upgrades for the player.

The idea starred Jack Heart, I originally named him Tarrant but changed it. Jack was the son of the town marshal and they were attacked by a mysterious outlaw. The outlaw killed his parents and left the him for dead. He was found by a scientist, Dr. Henry Swanson,  and was saved, but not without losing and arm and an eye. The trauma and blood loss fractured his memory and he lost a lot of information about the events of that night and his past. Now he starts a mission to fill in the holes of his memory. Using enhanced prosthesis he becomes a bounty-hunter to hunt down the criminal that did him wrong with some new help whom he meets on the way. 

His quest takes him across the region. The game takes place in a western themed environment. When I first came up with the concept I was placing it on an alternate reality of Earth. Set during the late 1800s in the US, but with advanced technology available in certain regions developed from technology found from space or something. But later I thought maybe it would be better if it was set way in the future on another planet instead.

The first drawing above made for an adobe illustrator class. We needed to make an original drawing from scratch. I drew him in pencil first, scanned it, then outlined and colored him in Illustrator. The background was made in photoshop. The outlines on the character are washed out because the monitors we used were darker and the default color was a dark gray for the brush stroke. I couldn't tell the color difference on those computers. I lost the original file and can't adjust it. 

The name Tarrant was Welsh, I believe, I researched and found that it meant Thunder. I liked it at the time, but later thought that Jack was simpler and better. One theme I wanted to have was: many outlaws had nicknames in the wild west. Like Billy the Kid, Pistol Pete and the sort. So I wanted to give Jack some nicknames based on his reputation in different areas. Names like Jack of Hearts, Thunderheart, and Hearthound. Hearthound was earned from Jack impaling outlaws in the chest with a metal blade that retracts from his robotic arm.

 

 

The above image is from a game concept class. We were supposed to come up with a game concept, which is where I started piecing the idea together. Towards the end of the class we had to come up with a game case cover. The above image is the cover design I had. The image I turned in had the Xbox 360 cover banner across the top.

 

The next image was from a digital sketching class. I used the class to design Marie Swanson. She is the daughter of Dr. Henry Swanson. She is a song and dance entertainer at the local tavern. Though she is one to seek adventure and opts to help Jack Heart on his quest.

 

 Rev. Ivon Gutenberg is a holy man of the christian faith. The lawlessness of the land has become for him to bear with. He took it upon himself to venture out and stop as many outlaws and wrong-doers as he can. He will sacrifice his soul to damnation to bring a purer frontier by killing those outlaws. Gutenberg uses his cybernetic eyes to give him enhanced vision to get more precise shots with his sniper rifle. He also had specially made priest's robes that can react to electrical charges from his cranial implant to make them blend in with his environment. He gets his nicknames from his sniping prowess and ability to not be seen. One of his names that I didn't think of at the time was "Holy Ghost".

This last piece was somewhat inspired by some concept art from the Assassin's Creed video game. This piece was done on my own and not part of a class. It was fun to work on and it shows an example of how the "Hearthound" got his nickname.

 

About two years ago, some friends of mine wanted to put together our own homage to the, at the time, fairly recently canceled Megaman Legends 3. We wanted to capture all of the themes from the game; the exploration, the dungeons, the item upgrading, the mystery, everything. We didn't want to completely rip off MML, but we wanted to pay homage to the series. We wanted to change our protagonist to a strong female to differentiate from Megaman. But we wanted to keep the fact that she is a mechanical being. She is created by scraps of alien technology on a desert planet filled with mystery. The above design was my concept of the character. We never gave her a name. Eventually the project fell apart and we never developed the idea further; people had other projects and busy schedules that had higher priorities. The first color scheme is to match with the desert planet environment. The below color schemes are alternatives in case another scheme fit better.

 

The above drawings are designs for potential enemies. One of the aspects of the game we wanted was to have vicious alien robots that attack the many villages on the planet's surface. But the aliens come from ruins underneath; rather than above. The planet they were on is actually a massive alien structure that is made to look like a barren planet. The humans that crashed on the planet cannot get off the planet as it blocks all signals leaving the planet and shoots down any ships near it's orbit.

My design for the robots were again inspired by Megaman. Dr. Wily, classic Megaman's villain often had skulls on some of his robot designs. So I wanted to turn that into a menacing theme for the alien robots that guard the ruins. But the team wanted to have them look more alien. The skulls were too human looking for them. But nonetheless I still liked my designs. I might recycle these guys in a future project or something.

MML3 Mascot Contest Entry

A while ago, when Megaman Legends 3 was still in production, Capcom's forums had many contests and polls to get the community involved and invested in the game's development. So, the game felt a lot more personal to the fans; this made the games cancellation sting a lot more than others to the fans. Anyway, there was a contest to design a mascot for a faction in the game. This was my entry for the contest, unfortunately I didn't win. I wanted to make something fun and likeable. Megaman had a mascot that was a monkey. I made this character inspired by the same cutesy style as Data the monkey. I named my bat after one of the robot masters from the classic Megaman series; who was a vampire looking character.

Turtle Tuff

Made this in college several years ago. It was for a digital painting class, I forgot my pen tablet at home and couldn't work on my project. So instead of doing nothing I made the first drawing with a mouse. Some time later I got the inspiration to alter the original and I came up with the second drawing. I like them, they're fun.

First post! Link VS Dark Link

This is an extremely old drawing. Yeeeeeeeeears old. Back when my composition sense wasn't as developed. If I had time I would make the distance between them more drastic. It would add more dynamism. Anyway, this is an homage to one of my favorite moments of in Ocarina of Time. Hope you enjoy it.