Jean Moebius Giraud 1938 – 2012

A week ago a big influential and truelly great artist passed away. This here is my humble tribute to that man.

Staying true to posting sketches and works that led to my paintings and drawings, here´s a piece that got made in the process of making the image above.

Syndicate concept art

Hello, people of the world!

I was planning on doing this update last friday but I didn´t have time then so here it is a few days late. The reason for this post is that friday last week was my last day at Starbreeze studios as a concept artist. I´ve had a few great years (four and a half) there and made some truelly wonderful friends along the way but I have decided to move on to work at a different company.

So in honor of this I´ve picked out a couple of designs from Syndicate to go along with this post. I haven´t had time or energy to sit down and go through everythings, and besides that I´ve never really been one for spaming out tons of stuff,  so here´s just a few things. All this stuff is years old btw.

 

The final concept for agent Merit. The spiky hair (that I love) he´s sporting in-game was added during the 3D modelling by the AD.

This design is my own personal favorite from the game. But then again, how could it go wrong when he´s voiced by Michael Wincott?

 

The final concept for the Cayman-Global Reactive armor enemy. Some might think that the logo on his head and shoulder is different from the way it looks in-game and that is totally correct!

 

Co-op´s Emma Thalos. If there was a competition to put as many straps on a character as you can, I think I would win with this one. Seriously though, there is an idea behind the design choices and in this case I wanted all the straps to symbolize restraints since she´s supposed to be kind of a reckless brawler at heart but she has to function as a team player and therefor has to control her temper. The tatoo (that later was changed to a necklace) symbolizes a collar and she has claw-like knuckles to give her traits of an attack dog.

 

 

This is one of the few environments I got to design as well as being one of the last designs I did for the game.  This was used as basis for the final boss fight area in the single player campaign.

 

 

That´s all for now.

Giant robot and girl

A friend of mine, Axel Torvenius (you can find a link to his stuff in my link section to the right on the blog so gogogo!), made a sketch of a girl with a big robot and it somehow turned into me having to do one as well as some weird challenge thing that really isn´t a challenge… Anyway here it is.

Fun theme, I might do more on it later.

Conan

I´m not a big fan of the new movie or even Arnold´s slaughter of the classic character by Robert E Howard. However I am a big fan of the old covers Frazetta did for the Conan books and I love the comics published by Marvel in the 70´s (especially the ones drawn by John Buscema) so when a friend of mine sent me a link to a community challenge to draw Conan I got inspired and hammered these out.

The main one:

And a couple more I squeesed out just because it was to much fun:

 

 

 

No.1R

So this time around I´ll show of one of my very own characters.

I was ordering some Ashley Wood-books on amazon while going through old film noir-images as I was sketching and one thing led to another. One tiny doodle, while being extremely rough, sparked my interest, so I turned to a fresh sheet of paper and refined it into this character I like to call Number 1R. Or No.1R for short. A bit obvious but I never claimed to be a clever guy.

I also did a quick backview of the character but the paper was acting like a total douchebag and wouldn´t take the ink properly so it´s a bit smudged and washed out in places. I´ve bought new paper as well as new pens after this, purely out of frustration.

And here´s the forementioned doodle that started it off.

Might do more with this character down the line.

Dune book cover

This is a piece I did a while back now. The main reason I did it was that two friends of mine named Andreas and Brad, who don´t know eachother, separately told me they wanted to see my take on a Dune image. So one sunday as I was suffering from a hangover (don´t drink, kids) I decided to take them up on their challenge and this here is what came out on that afternoon.

I posted the image on a community (deviantART) and after a while I got contacted by a publisher, namely Gollancz, an imprint of Orion books,wanting to use the image as the cover for their new printing of the book. Ofcourse I accepted. They wanted to adjust it a bit to go with their artdirection and I, not feeling comfortable leaving it in the hands of others, did the changes for them. The publisher was really easy to work with btw, always a pleasure when that happens. Anyways, up to now I haven´t shown the adjusted version online but here it is.

Yesterday I got my grubby little hands on the book and could check out the final result. I think it worked out really well in the end.

So that´s the story of how a piece of fan art went to being an official cover for the very thing it was meant to tribute.

Axe Cop

Some fan art for the comic Axe Cop by Malachai and Ethan Nicolle. It´s brilliant. If you haven´t read it or don´t even know what it is you should check it out at http://axecop.com/

For this first one I wanted to do something kind of funnybooky, over the top and really campy. A bit of He-Man´esque sillyness to it.

As for the second one I wanted more of a sense of the character being to serious. So I tried making him a bit Dirty Harry-ish.

-I know what you’re thinking. “Did he chop six times or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a fireaxe, the most powerful weapon in the world, and would chop your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, badguy?

That´s all for this time!

Lobster Johnson

Was bored out of my mind yesterday evening so I started drawing some Lobster Johnson (created by the great Mike Mignola). He´s, if not the best, one of the best comicbook characters ever. Putting down “mad dogs” left and right. Hundreds of them.

 

Here´s the initial doodle to the above image:

 

And then I had an hour to spare (really, I got bored again) so I scanned a sketch from my sketchbook and threw some simple colors on it.

Speed paintings

I do warm ups at work in the form of 20 minute long speed painting sessions. Haven´t done them in quite some time now really so I´m a bit rusty at the moment but I thought I´d share a few of the ones I´ve done. So here they are.

 

TMNT

These were actually drawn before the The Marquis image but who needs continuity when dealing with things like this? Not me!

 

 

And that´s a (ninja) rap!