Apple Study

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Egg Study

Not exactly sure why I wanted to "paint" eggs today, but I did.  Discovered some different types of chicken eggs.  Maran chickens lay beautiful, deep brown eggs.  Araucanas lay light blue or green eggs.  

User Interface for Dragon Game - Final

And here we have the completed piece.

User Interface for Dragon Game - WIP 2

The UI is coming along!  The little dragon needs the bulk of the work still.  Other than that, need to work out some more details on the ropes and texture of the wood.  Happy to have found a font that works for me.

Baby Zedonk

Saw a picture of one of these and really felt the need to draw one.  They're so cute!  Anyway, a new scanner has been acquired.  Much easier to work with but still need to learn how best to tweak the drawings.

User Interface for a Dragon Game - WIP

A couple of months ago I made the dragons below heavily influenced by the iOS casual game trend of raising dragons.  The three games that I used as reference were my favourites - Dragon Story, Dragonvale and Dragon Skies.  There's two possible eggs, a baby and an adult version of one type of dragon.  

Taking the above style into account, I've decided to make an Options menu for a game to start off the UI portion of my portfolio as I've become pretty fascinated with the job of UI Artists.  If this were an actual game, this is how the UI might look.

First, these are my preliminary sketches (excuse my quick scrawl for the text) using both the wood and stone nests.  

I have started with the wooden, more tribal version which I am currently calling "Stick Tied".  Here's the progress so far.  Still a ways to go yet:

Undecided about whether or not I'll actually develop the stone or Greek version or not.

Materials Test - Wood

Found this a nice tutorial on Pinterest on how to draw a wooden plank.  The text is translated, so the English leaves a little to be desired.  However, it's broken up well enough that you can totally get the gist of what they want you to do and then add your own touches.

This is my result.  I feel like I learned a thing or two about stylized wood.

Society6 Shop Pick

Society6 is one of those websites where artists can sell their artwork.  With mostly minimal fuss you can upload your work and create different products on which is can be made.  As long as you follow their size requirements, it's fairly simple.  When someone chooses to purchase an item with your desk, you get a small commission.  The company is keeping the bulk of the money because they're actually the ones purchasing the template items and printing it.  

I'm pretty excited that I got an email today from Society6 saying that this print here, Happy as a Fox balancing an Umbrella in the Rain, got picked officially to be part of the Society6 Shop.  I'm not 100% certain what this means yet but I do imagine that it means my piece will get more visibility.  One would hope that means it would actually sell as well.  So far, I've only sold one set of stationary cards of this particular design.

I can also say that it makes me want to make more pieces like this!

Material Test - Metals

I could tweak this forever to keep trying to get it "better".  However, sometimes it's good enough.  You've learned what you set out to learn and you need to move on.  I feel like I have the basic principles of gold, silver and copper down now.