Robotpencil Mentorship

So I've just fiished up a month long mentorship in 'Dynamic Lighting' with Anthony Jones. Needless to say, I've learned a hell of a lot. My head is still reeling as I try find the time to incorporate what ive learned into some new artwork. Here are the finished portfolio pieces from the mentorship along with other paintings I've done in between them. Hope you like them!

Piece 1, 'Red'

Piece 2, 'Gyo The Great'

Piece 3, 'Homeland Security'

Brainstorm Design Challenge: Steampunk Ironman

Artsource Illustration, titled 'Spawn'

Hunt and Gathers' Dead Celebrity Exhibition Submission: 'Amy'

Speedpainting, titled 'Outpost'

First post in a long time!

I've really been neglecting this blog! My Facebook page has taken over as my primary blog so if you want to know what I'm currently up to, heading there would be your best bet. I have a lot on my plate at the moment anyways, I've an exhibition in a weeks time, a mentorship with Anthony Jones, Commissions and a VFX Summit to look forward to. In the meantime, I thought I'd post a few bits I've been working on for the past couple of weeks. Enjoy!

Commisioned Illustration for Animated short Titled "Blood"

Environment speedpainting from a personal project

"Project Stellar", A Brainstorm Design Challenge

Samurai Orc

Commisioned Illustration Titled "Hannibal Ad Portas"

Speedpainting of Martian Landscape

Updated version of a previous piece, "Sunken Temple Mk2"

'Shoot' Wins Best Animation at The Fingal Film Fest

Our student film 'Shoot' just won best animation film at the fingal film fest. Happy days!!

Bridge To The Spirit World

'Bridge To The Spirit World', 1h30mins with 20mins of searching for good photos. Good practice as I'm trying to improve at matte painting

Time-lapse of process found HERE

Journey Across The Kingdoms

2 hr Speedpainting

I started this sketch with the aim of improving my use of colours. Having started with no perliminary sketch i quickly ran into design problems and not long after with values. I reckon my brain can't tackle keeping track of  values, good design and colour theory all at once and eventually I ended up quite frustrated. Looking over the time-lapse highlights the importance of a solid drawing to provide structure and finialise a design and a value pass to establish the lighting so that colours can be dealt with once all the hard stuff is out of the way.

Blood Wizard

Speedpaint for Super Speedpainting Funtimes Facebook Group

Real Time: 1hr 14mins

Went way over the 50min time limit. I decided on a major design change quite late into the sketch which cost me a lot of time. At 50mins it looked worse than at 20mins so had to try salvage what was left by goin over time. Hopefully I've learned for the next one. Heavily influenced by Anthony jones. His stuff is outrageously good.

Timelapse Video found HERE

The Sadness of Titans

 A painting done for the Super Speedpainting Funtimes Facebook group. This is my first post to the group. I spent too much time fiddling with the overall composition because I went into the painting with no planning and before I knew it, the time was up! I know better now for the next piece. These speedpaints are a great exercise for fine tuning your workflow. Ive also started to record all my paintings as it reveals patterns in my problem solving process that I need to work on.

Real time: 50mins

Robin Williams Caricature - Timelapse

Facial Study/caricature of the great Robin Williams. R.I.P

Hi-res image HERE

Brainstorm Design Challenge 4

Very bad for posts the last 2 weeks. Being kept busy with commissions but here is my entry for Brainstorm Design challenge 4. A mixture between a vampire squid and a bat.

Brainstorm Design Challenge No.2

Design challenge for Brainstorm this week. Military crossed with dinosaur bones. Was fun coming up with ideas for this. I settled on this concept, an off world sniper stationed on some sort of prehistoric desert planet. Going for months at a time in isolation behind enemy lines, he uses his training, oftentimes scavenging to stay alive. That's basically the story behind this character so I hope that reads in the final piece

Value Study

Quick value study between illustrations.

Brainstorm

Here are 2 pieces for a design challenge hosted by Brainstorm. I did the first one quick last night and hated it so started again this afternoon. It's crazy how much faster you can learn when your work is put up alongside the best in the business.

Busy with commissions/Job hunting/portfolio prep so havn't been able to post much this week. Did these quick colour studies yesterday as a warm up for illustration work.

Speedpaint

Speedpaint done late at night someday last week...

Studies done last week

Quite busy this week with commissions so thought I'd re-post these studies from my FB page onto here. Really enjoyed these, lots learned!

Lifestyle Sports Chalk Drawing Press Release

Our chalk drawing made it to pg.3 in yesterdays Irish Independent! Unfortunately they forgot to metion my teammates Helga and Jeff and spelled my my name wrong but at least the drawing looks good!!

Lifestyle Sports Chalk Drawing

So the past 2 weeks have been fairly mental. I was commissioned by Presence PR to draw a map of the world in chalk for their client, Lifestyle Sports for The World Cup 2014. The drawing had to be large enough for models to be photographed standing in their respective countries meaning the scale of the drawing had to be 14 by 30 metres! The delivery time was at 11.30am this morning so we (Helga and Jeff, my awesome teammates) started at 5am. Having previously done a test run 2 days before our method was fairly solid but the ever present threat of crap Irish weather ruining everything was enough to deprive one of sleep for a few nights leading up to today. Luckily for us, The weather was glorious and everything went according to plan (literally couldn't belive how smoothly it all went, we even finished it with time to spare....). The drawing was actually really quick. The grid on the other hand, was painful. Two and a half hours of delirium. Will post a link of the photo call after the press release, Want to thank Paulie G for hookin' me up. Was good craic!   

Bus Drawings

Bus drawing... because while you mind your own business, I'm drawing you from a distance.....Plenty of interesting folk on Dublin buses. Awkward gettin caught though, feel like a major creep.

Work from The Bridge

Heres a few quick comps I did for Jam Media for a kids t.v show still in devevlopment. At the time, nothing was defined as far as the look of the show so we were encouraged to go crazy with the visuals. I'm not mad on designing content for children but working on this project got me to get out of my comfort zone and the results hopefully reflect how much i enjoyed working on these. These are about a year old now so I'm seriously fighting the urge to go in and fix some of the mistakes. Anyways, I've got loads of these so expect a few more while I work on some darker content.

Shadow Moses

Ok, so posting a sketch a day might have been slightly ambitious and I have failed horribly thus far... but not because I havn't been painting, but because posting unfinished work sucks balls. I have however been working on this. I'm trying to get my work to the next level so the past few days has been a lot of experimenting and frustration. I wouldn't call this piece finished but I've taken it as far as it can go without throwing my laptop out the window. It's my take on 'Shadow Moses' from 'MetalGear Solid'. Brilliant game!

Shoot!

Here is just a brief overview of my main roles within the making of my group student film "Shoot!". These primarily being texture and lighting artist. I did concept work and animated a few scenes also. The team consisted of (Rory Conway, Kieran Noone and Dave Slattery). Check out their work!

Vic-Viper

So my sketch for today is going to be my entry for a design lab challenge on Conceptart.org hosted by Sinix Design. The challege is to re-design the Vic-Viper spaceship vehicle that adheres to specific design criteria. 1 vertical "wing", 2 side "wings", and 2 forward facing "wings". I started with the silhouettes before doing the rough line drawings. I chose the one that was working best to paint but is currently a WIP because I'm goin out to see Terriers and Lumigraph tonight !

Sketch 'a' Day

I'm going to try to post a sketch a day to keep up my productivity and to try to improve my skills. And also to put out more content for everyone who is following my page. To start off my 'sketch a day', I'm posting this portrait i did this morning of one of my favourite writers/philosopher, Manly Palmer Hall. It's a bit more than a sketch but I need to get back into painting. Pretty straight forward study from photo reference focusing on values and trying to be a bit more selective in terms of where I put details.