A blast of the past

Afraid I was working on projects I can't post on here for most of today, combined with going around town handing in CVs, so instead, here's a compilation of characters I designed for a group coursework last year!
It was a project to create a short (less than 5 minutes to play through), educational game to be used in schools to educate people about the options available to them after high school. Ours was the one which relied most heavily on the educational aspects while discarding gameplay, as such we had a simple point-and-click 'RPG' for the students to play through.
The characters to interact with had on-screen sprites, as such:

Which, when you interacted with them, popped up on screen in a Recettear-style so talk to the player.

(Not all at once!)
As 24 characters in total were needed, plus the 2 main characters (1 male, 1 female), these characters were edited to create multiple other NPCs in order to save on workload. The only character which was only used once is the second from the right, who was created near the finale of the cycle and saved me from going mad while I was working on the pixel art for the rooms.

American Dork

Keeping up with emulating well-known styles, The Boy and myself as American Dad characters!
Not much to say about this one, it's important to have very crisp line-art which, for the most part, I think I achieved here. The Boy's cheek is a tad jagged and the arm-crossing seems a little off, but I'm not dwelling too long as I've been working a lot today on other projects and this was my fun-evening-work. :)
Overall, I like this piece! It's easily recognizable and, while The Boy thinks he looks a bit too cocky here, at least I captured a little emotion.
Not 100% sure yet, but may well be a monster or a weapon tomorrow, as I've already done the other things people voted for me to draw on my deviantArt poll : http://krillatron.deviantart.com/
See you tomorrow!

I'm hungry...

[Click for full size]

After a long day of traipsing around town, I came home and remembered my muse from yesterday. You see, myself, The Boy and one of my university friends played through the new, still-in-beta level in Left 4 Dead 2, an interesting level with cool mud-men special infected, a Mario-esque tank-at-the-top-of-some-ladders, and a lot of slogging around in water.

But it also featured some of the ever-impressive Valve movie-poster art! I've always been a fan of the style they portray in these and wanted to try it out for myself, and, as such, the resultant above image occurred.

Hope you enjoy it! Now I'm spending my evening raiding on Warcraft and doing some pieces for a project I'm working on with some people from university.

In the Game of Thrones...

You win or you die.
Well, I for one am excited for the new episode out tonight! But before we get into that, I've finished university (other than the actual graduation) and have settled in, as such, from today onwards, expect 1 new blog post per day!
Today I have 2 pieces for you, with an additional scribble thrown in for the hell of it.
As you can probably tell, I'm a huge fan of Game of Thrones and am hoping to get the books once I've got a Kindle, till then though, I'm surviving on the weekly episodes. One of the things I love about the show is how well the actors were chosen, as in today's post I'm hoping to try to capture the essence of some of these characters!
As such, the image below displays one of the POV characters.

Any guesses who it is?
Highlight below to see if you can't guess.

Arya Stark

A big problem I had with this piece was getting the age seem correct. She actually has quite a lot of lines on her face, with pouches under and above her eyes, a split-chin (can't recall the correct term for this) and usually displays puffy cheeks, though in adding lines to an image usually denotes an age of which this character is no-where near. As such, I had to go for the prominent buck-teeth and her usual way of wearing her hair to emphasize who she is.

Next up!

Personally, I find this character much easier to both draw, and to recognize. The hair-braiding, scowl and wavy hair all join together to form Cersei Lannister. When I was looking for reference pictures, however, I noticed she pretty much always makes the same face, particularly the face I've depicted here. The pursed lips, scowling eyes and one raised eyebrow all form, well, this face.

Quldn't quait for quis quone!

[Click for full size: 1080p]

Sorry for the long wait between posts! Between exams and playing games because I've now finished my exams, I've not had as much time for art as I'd like, however I've been rectifying this!

As such, I present you with the female Qunari!

As you can probably tell, one of the games I've been glued to as of late has been Dragon Age 2. I've been putting off playing it as I knew I'd go full swing into it as soon as I started it up and, indeed that has been the case. However, after playing it for around 3 days straight (I'm not even sure any more) I've taken a break in order to get back to The Plan and produce this!

It took me two days, but I'm very happy with the result, and believe this to likely be my best piece yet. As such, and because it took so long to complete, I've included a guide to it's creation which you  can view below, but before we get into that, a few things about this piece:

• It began as a 3cmx5cm sketch in my notebook as the bottom image (you'll see in the walkthrough)
• I cumulatively used more techniques on this piece then I've ever done before
• After I've finished typing up this blog post, I'm going to do a WoW raid then disappear back into DA2 for the rest of the night

Hope you enjoy this piece, feel free to use it as a wallpaper, it's 1920x1080, or re-size it yourself for other resolutions.
Now, onto the walkthrough!

The mouse hunter becomes the...mouse hunted?

So, I've been addicted to a great little game called Mousehunt recently. If the last 2 years can be classed as recently. It's a social game on Facebook, you build a mouse trap out of a trap and base and use it to catch mice, it's simple early on but it builds you up into there being multiple mouse types (shadow, fire, water, tactical, etc.) which need specific trap types to counter them. You can also get charms to buff your trap and craft improved traps out of parts you find, or you can smash traps for parts to new traps too.
Anyway! I was speaking to one of the artists over at Hitgrab (the company who produces Mousehunt from out in Canada) and, after a great conversation about his work, the company and how to break into the industry, he commented that, while he liked my style, they hired people with a more painted-style.
The below 3 images are NOT produced by me, but were the reference pieces I used in creating the upmost image. The top piece is some fan art I did of the middle piece, the Pathfinder mouse of the Nerg tribe.

As such, what do you guys think? Is my art going in the right direction here?
Did I capture most of the feeling of the Pathfinder mouse?
Do you like the bad-ass dreadlocks?
Am I finally using enough contrast?

BRINKady-doo-dah

Finished it! Click to full screen.

Well, the BRINK image is complete, now with a more interesting Founder's Tower and super-cool-textured-colour-effects behind the characters. Also, the green head on the right is meant to be a mask, not an alien head as The Boy presumed.

The colour was achieved by adding in 2 new layers below the image layer. On the lowermost layer, a white-green-blue-white fill effect was used while a pure-white fill was used on the above layer. The erase tool used on the second layer completed the swirling effect. 

The texturing was a simple opacity-and-size-varying wet media white brush dabbed over the colour.

On another note, I found a great stock artist a while ago who goes by the DeviantArt moniker of SuannyStock 

She gracefully allowed me to use some of her stock to create this:

Which received more favorites faster than any other image I've put up on DeviantArt to date!

The erasing-through-the-layers trick was also used here.

Enjoy!