November Conventions

Unless you are an evil villain, you will be pleased to learn that I am no longer making zombies. And now that PS3's hunger for carnage is momentarily satisfied, I have some time to work on a few new oil paintings and make my plans to survive the rest of this year's conventions.

The first is Illuxcon in Altoona, PA on November 12-15. Illuxcon is a show dedicated to fantastic illustration and will have the largest display of original fantastic art to be found on this planet. I am really looking forward to being there. If you are in that neck of the woods stop by for a visit.

Then our tour of America continues as we hit CTN in LA on November 20-22. If you are there, stop by booth #37 where we will be rocking California's socks off. I will be giving demos and taking part in a few panels. I will also be stalking the floor looking for a copy of Peter De Seve's new book.

So with these conventions looming ahead I have been in the lab working on some new gems. Over the next few weeks I will be posting some process shots of the ones that I will be taking to these conventions.

Hope to see you there.

Photos from Comicon 2009

So then he looks right at me and says, 'No Disintegrations.' I mean, seriously? Say, have you seen Portland's new Booth?

Justin: "That print is overpriced."

Cory: "Yeah, great. Why aren't you wearing any pants again?"

Giving the SDCC Committee for Awesomeness some straight answers on being awesome.

Looking Good. Taking Care of Business.

San Diego was rocked again. It was an fantastic convention, and I am worn out. We met a ton of great people, got to see a lot of really incredible art and ate entirely too much awesome food in the gaslamp district.

We didn't really see much of the floor this year, because the booth was a madhouse. But we did make it out to see Donato and Manchess bring some shock and awe again this year with their demos. (Check out their work on Irene Gallo's blog here.) We also had the chance to meet and talk with Peter DeSeve. He has been a huge influence on me. I learned how to illustrate in watercolor from the Step by Step guide on him. (The one that Cory stole) Peter DeSeve is a great guy.

For the action in video format, head over to Cory's blog and watch his yearly Comic Con recap.

Photos by Matt Silver and Kitty Mach

The Mad Bull Developmental Work

Concept Development work of city scene

Early production still from city scene

Building our city and assembling the Minotank

This was most complicated scene in the project and was the one I had the most fun assembling.  It was like building cities with legos as a kid. 

The purpose for building lego cities is self-evident; they are built to be destroyed. 

The real tragedy for me is that all this work is only up there for a few seconds. 

The Minotank was also great fun to assemble.  I love steam-powered, clockwork machines.Or at least, I love the idea of steam-powered, clockwork machines. 

Danny, who constituted the entire animation team on this project, worked some real magic in making the Minotank come to life.  I gave him a baffling assortment of gears and plates and pistons and smoke and I think it nearly killed him, but he pulled it altogether. It was really exciting to finally see this thing stomping around, knocking over buildings and billowing smoke.  

Early storyboards

There is a story contest for this on the Portland Studios Blog. 

I am really curious to see what people submit for this. 

The Mad Bull

The Mad Bull is a spot animation that I have been working on Portland Studios.  Its a mini commercial of sorts, involving the efforts of several magical creatures who work here at the studio.  

 

I provided the imagery and conceptual development work. I am not really much of an animator, and most of the moving elements are thanks to the effects work of our in-house, digital guru Danny McNight. 

Although I am relatively new to the animation field, I love working with moving pictures and sequential art. There's something wonderful about making worlds come to life with movement. And although painting imagery for animation has many similarities to the illustration I am more used to, it is interesting to me just how different an undertaking it is to doing static images for animation. 

I will be posting some of the development work next week.  Until then, drop in over at the Portland site and check it out.  

Cory Godbey Show

Cory Godbey has announced that he is having an art exhibition April 3rd. Prepare to have your socks rocked off.  If you are in Greenville, SC around thereabouts you should stop in and check it out.  

I have been able to go over and spy on him as he has been working on the show a few times in the past few weeks and it is looking really great. (He did most of the show with his arm in a sling. See example here.) 

He has posted a lot of progress on the paintings on his Lightnightrains blog as well as the back stories to these images.  One of my favorite aspects of Cory's work is his really wonderful sense of color theory. These thumbnail color comps for the show are really splendid: 

This show will be rather unique in that he will be displaying a lot of this developmental material at the show itself. It should be a really great insight into how he develops his images. I'm really looking forward to it.

Spectrum Fantastic Arts

I am going to take a brief break from the Hobbit posts today for some shameless self-promotion. 

Spectrum 15: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art was recently released by the awesome folks over at Underwood Books.  

I am honored to have 2 pieces that made it into this years issue, one of which, "Beowulf and Grendel," got a full page. 

I had the pleasure of meeting the book's wonderful directors, Kathy and Arnie Fenner, at the San Diego Comicon this year, at the Underwood Books booth. (I nearly perished when they told me I got a full page this time around.)  Also at the booth, I met Irene Gallo, the awesome art director at Tor books, who bestowed upon me both artistic wisdom as well as a Tor.com button. I also met and talked with Jon Foster, who is one of the best illustrators of our day and a great guy.  I also got to kick it with Donato Giancola and Gregory Manchess, both of whom possess uncanny powers.  Not only did I meet these people, all at one awesome booth, but the three of them went on to do a few live demonstrations that rocked my face.  It was hands down the coolest booth at Comicon.  It was a big, greasy cheeseburger in a vast wasteland of tofu.  

Our friend Kitty Mach helping us sell shirts so we could afford to travel home when the party was over.  Our booth, cramped though it may have been, became a central hub for young aspiring youtube filmmakers, ancient rock stars, science fiction stunt doubles, and a real live World of Warcraft army.

Speaking of the San Diego Comicon and awesome booths, Portland Studios will officially be back at Comicon for 2009. We have received our package, and we have our spot. And this year, we have four times the floor space! That's four times as many faces that will be rocked in 2009.  Four times the action! Four times the excitement! We plan on bringing giant robots and sentient bears to wow audiences. And, as always, we will be bringing a lot of new art and new stories about fantastic adventures in average places. For some more shots of Portland's booth from last year, as well as some video of us in action, check out Cory's blog.  

The Ace of Spades

This is an entry I am doing for Zach Franzen's forthcoming post on the Portland Studios Blog. You should check it out. He got most of the staff at Portland to submit an illustration on the theme of cowboys, rendered on a 4x6 card. There are some real gems there.

I love doing these little things. I'd like to put together a full set of these gunslinger playing cards at some point...

Civilization

Recently, Zach Franzen, our once-peaceful Keeper of the Blog here at Portland Studios, in a moment supreme enlightenment, discovered that civilization, as a concept, is best described with the tea. (strange, I know, bear with me)
When he arrived at this illumination, he was immediately impelled on a terrible, terrible crusade. In a stupor, he went downstairs to the Dollar General and acquired ten thousand packets of the most inferior and evil looking tea I have ever seen. He threw all those packets (and a rock badger and a spare tire) into a huge vat and boiled them for 3 days and nights. When he was finished he brought in a super concentrated brew of semi-liquid death and held all of the artists here at gunpoint, forcing us to paint pictures of "civilization" with only this evil concoction of his. Waving an AK-47 in the air he cried repeatedly, "Either you paint with this bulwark of civilization, or I'll make you drink it! What's it gonna be people!?" He threw out all our computers, he burned our pencils and he flushed all the watercolors down the drain.
I hid under my desk while he cried, "In the new millennia, there will be, only TEA! No longer shall we wear the stains of our high fructose corn syrup! No longer the cold, synthetic hum of fluorescent lights! No longer shall we be shackled to the chains of these poisons and greasy black machines! NO! Society will be green! Civilization will be pure! No longer bereft of the blessed sap we, as a collective body, united in Tea, shall be transported to new heights! TEA! TEA! TEA!"
Fearing for my internal organs, I painted...



He has written his sinister manifesto on the Portland blog, for any who are discerning enough to see through his glittering generalities to the underlying poison written between those tea-stained lines.