robo patrol sketch

Still exploring a more impressionistic digital technique

Fantasy Monster Doodle

Experimenting with Shaddy Safadi's great minimalistic plein air digital painting brush set...

Old Demonz

A couple quick (unused) demon sketches for Blur's Hellgate: London cinematic that we did like forever ago...

Some Zbrush Stuff

I just got done taking Bryan Wynia's "Character Creation in Zbrush" class at the Concept Design Academy in Pasadena, and I can't recommend it enough! I've dabbled in zbrush before, but this class really helped me break through some barriers and get comfortable with the interface. Here's some of my homework, some demon dudes, a bug monster, and a creepy quick Bert sketch...

"This looks like a good place ot take a leak..."

a quick sketch painting to experiment with a new brush I put together...

Bots 'n' Such

Some sci-fi-type sketches...

DC Universe Online: Cyborg

Did this apocolyptic redesign of the DC character "Cyborg" for Blur's intro cinematic for DC Universe online a while back. He got all of a second of screen-time before getting taken out like a chump, but he was still fun to draw!

-Sean

Bone

This is a piece I did for Blur as a show of interest for the forth-coming "Bone" feature film. We didn't end up animating the movie, but I still got to do this piece (Which in no way reflects the look of the movie. well, except that the bone characters will probably be in it, and I would be shocked if there were no rat-people either...).

Incidentally, Jeff Smith, the creator of "Bone", is an alumni of the Columbus College of Art and Design, where I went to school...


-Sean

Homework

Took Carlo Arellano's Advanced Entertainment Design course at he Concept Design Academy last winter/spring. It was a great class and I would recommend it to anyone, regardless of experience level (although it IS an "advanced" course, so I guess not ANYONE exactly...). It did a lot to get me back into actually drawing stuff out a little more and focusing on design rather than a fancy painting. Anyway, here's some of my homework. We had a fun time redesigning stuff from "Avatar," which always seemed like a mixed bag to me in terms of design...i.e. those blue cat people are a little to close to being furries for my taste!

-Sean

Carlo Arellano's Blog

Concept Design Academy

Old orc sketch

a quick sketch that I did YEARS AGO, back before Blur did the intro for the warhammer dawn of war PC game. I was really excited about the project, but turns out they didn't need any concept work from us... oh well.

-Sean

Why Creationism is cool...

here's a rough sketch that I'll continue in later posts...generic as hell, I know, but I need to let my mind turn to jello sometimes and just play with brushes (painter 9's flat oil brush in this case)...




Now, I won't say that creationism is the most scientifically sound theory to explain the history of life on earth, but any belief system that involves dinosaurs and bikini cave ladies occupying the same slice of space and time deserves a second look...

more later!

-Sean

Goon Film Test Footage From Comic Con...

A week ago, footage from our animation test for "The Goon" was premiered at comic-con. If you haven't checked it out already, take a look:

The last shot was based on a production painting I did for the pitch package a

while back, which is this one here:

As I was working on this one, it occurred to me that if you leave the noses on zombies they tend to just look like really sick old people, which is really disturbing because then it looks like the goon and franky are just plowing their way through a crowd of ailing elderly folks...

I'll post some non-goon stuff soon, I promise again!

-Sean

Yes I'm Alive

Some recent creature scrawlings to take the place of actual art....

Halo Wars: Covenant Destroyer

I also got to design one of the capital ships that the bad guys use in our cinematics for halowars. It was a lot of fun sketching this up, especially since I don't often get the opportunity to draw sci-fi vehicles very often (on account of Chuk, Hugo, and Francisco being so good at drawing them!)...





-Sean

Halo Wars: Arbiter redesign

Halo Wars just came out, so now I can show the world how I almost completely defaced one of the icons of video-gaming history: Halo's Arbiter. Here are a few of the sketches I drew trying to sort of re-invent the character for our cinematics. I remember thinking this guy looked pretty hokey in halo 2...especially for what a bad-ass he was supposed to be. I mean, who is he trying to impress with his parrot-beak helmet anyway? So Dave Wilson, who is an animation supervisor here at Blur, and I set about trying to "cool him up".

The first round of sketches yielded this radical departure from the established arbiter. He has this kind of funky "claw cape" thing on his back, and his helmet snaps shut to completely conceal his face. Also, Dave thought it would be cool to change up the weapon a bit and give him some sort of a halberd thing, so I flipped around that plasma sword thingy from the game and made it into some sort of axe...



Ultimately, this version was deemed too far from the original concept, so I tried to reign it in a bit, and ended up with this:


it was still too different from the original, so I made a few more modifications, but tried to jazz it up with a cape and a retractable face-guard...


This was still not close enough to the original arbiter, so we ultimately made it look almost exactly like the one from halo 2...wah wah! But I still got to supe-up his laser sword and make it look kind of like those old-timey decorative sword-hilts...




-Sean

I can smell the fear...in your pants!

Whoo hoo! Finally, its time for some original (although old) art! Here are a few sketches I did for Blur's 2006 short film, "A Gentlemen's Duel", which I had the priviledge of co-directing and writing with Francisco Ruiz Velasco. The artists pulled out all the stops in every aspect of this film, and it turned out beautifully. Although it was ultimately snubbed by the academy (Apparently they dont like dogs peeing on things...), it has gone on to win quite a few awards in both domestic and international film festivals...

Fanboy Alert!

To further foster the impression that I have not an original bone in my body, here's a Hellboy bust Iworked on tonight as part of "Blur Skulpt Klub" here at work, where a handful of us gather every Wednesday night to poke and prod lumps of polymer clay for fun. This is my own interpretation of hellboy, with the horns rooted near the back of his head and more prominent cheek-bone armored thingies...you know, real creative stuff....


took these out-of focus pictures with my iphone...I'll take better ones when its done and painted...

I guess I shouldnt mention I was actually wearing a "Hellboy" T-Shirt while sculpting this, eh?...

-Sean

More (old) Goon Crap!

Heres some more stuff I did for "the goon" as a show of interest on the part of Blur Studio about a year and a half ago (maybe more). The car piece was used as part of the initial announcement of the film project on the internet...The Fishy Pete illustration wasn't...I guess hook-handed, fish-headed dock workers don't sell movies as well as firey gangster zombie car chases involving ax-wielding squids...


I promise I'll post some non-Goon related art eventually...

-Sean

oooh, this Bandwagon is comfier than I thought...

I've finally entered the 21st century with my very own sketch blog (which is kind of an inaccurate title, seeing as how I'm gonna post finals here too...).

Anyway, here's the first post:



This is a poster I recently painted (digitally) for the San Diego Comic Book Convention in order to announce the partnership between David Fincher, Blur Studio, and Dark Horse Comics in bringing Eric Powell's "The GOon" to the big screen as a computer-animated feature film. Here are the thumbnails I did for the poster:


And here's an in-progress version of the painting...




I'll post some more crap later...