When I first started thinking through ideas for the Seven Deadly Sins art show I felt like I either had to represent all of the sins (Pride, Envy, Lust, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Wrath) or just focus on one. Lust seemed to be too easy, so I played around with some sketches for each of the sins and came up with the concept of Sloth as a fat dragon. And what makes Sloth a sin? Why it’s crushing undeserving spawnlings under the weight of your laziness.

After trying out some different ideas with the fat dragon, I sketched out another dragon laying on the fat dragon. It made me start thinking about how I could incorporate a representation of all the dragons in the same illustration.

The scribble on the right was my first concept for the final composition. I started working out details of the piece and thinking about ideas for each dragon.

Playing around with lots of ideas. Part of designing characters is working through the  cliches first. Eventually you have nothing left to do but come up with some new ideas. Fortunately I liked enough of my ideas that I actually didn’t have a place for all of the ones I liked. A documentary on lizards on the galapagos island helped with inspiration.

The “final” thumbnail. I blew up this sketch and refined it with marker paper.

To get this:

From there I took it into Photoshop and refined it to the sketch in this post. One thing you’ll notice as the sketch is refined is the changes in relative scale. One of the things that was important to  sell the concept was having interesting contrasts in scale. In the initial sketch the dragon queen was too large compared to the other dragons. I scaled here down, and cropped in on the bottom dragon to make him seem more massive; as if he is emerging from below. I think I could have pushed his size even more.

From there it was ink, ink, ink, color, color.

Still some work to do on the Background, but it’s basically there.

Something I’m working on for the upcoming Seven Deadly Sins art show.

Still no news on when or how the next Green Monk will be published. This will probably be the last pages I’ll post until something is figured out. You should be able to get a good idea from the story, if you’ve been following along. By this time I’ve started to work with a combination of brush and micron. I still love brush for larger shapes, but microns really come in handy when I want to fly on drawing smaller objects.

I’ve been meaning to post these for quite awhile. It’s been over a year since Monopoly Streets has been released, but there’s still a bit of stuff I wanted to show. I just wasn’t sure how best to post this, and I hope this work okay.

One of the assignments I got was to take the first pass on storyboarding a promo piece of Mr. Monopoly “planting” a city. I love it when I get a chance to storyboard, and I try to find the right balance of communicating as clearly as possible without taking too much time to make things look nice.

I try to really push the boundaries when I’m doing this stuff. You can always pull something back if it’s too far out there, but playing it safe is just playing it safe. I got a particular hard time from my art director on this project about a shot he likes to call the “Nose Punch”. See if you can find it.

I recommend clicking on the link that says “View with PicLens”.

[View with PicLens]

So, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about when the next Green Monk will be coming out. The best answer I can give right now, is that I’m working on it, but I haven’t yet nailed down how I will be publishing the next book, so I can’t really say yet when it will be released.

That being said, I have been working on the next book. As proof, here are the next couple of pages.

Enjoy, and I hope to be figuring out the next step soon.

Thought I’d take a break from the Monopoly art to show the start of Green Monk Book 1. I’m making a big departure from the mini comic in a couple of ways. First of all, I’m relying much more on brush, and only using microns for detail work. Second, I’m trying to use a lot more blacks. It’s been fun. Hopefully, I’ll figure out what I’m doing as I go along.

You can see the rough pencils here.

One of the funnest things about doing character designs for Monopoly Streets was painting up the characters. For the most part I relied on a technique that I’d been playing developing for several years, inspired by Lowell Hess and other mid-century illustrators.

It’s a fast technique. I can finish a character in 1-3 hours. It’s what I used to do these demos for CTN-X, and it’s what I’ve used to do most of my artcasts.

It communicates texture, color and shape nicely and its fun to do.

Initially the designs were very specific to a classic Monopoly feel. I was trying to match the vibe of the Community Chest and Chance illustrations, and as a result the characters feel like they belong in pre-Depression American city. AS things developed it became clear that we needed a look that was either more contemporary or, at the very least timeless.

I was also asked by my Art Directer to start pushing the paintings to be more 3-dimensional and have greater dynamic range. In other words, give us an idea how the characters would look in the actual game.

I was pretty happy with my first attempt, although it took a lot longer than my previous process, and never really got to a point that I was totally happy with.

I wanted to try and see how quickly I could accomplish something similar. The next couple of images were completed in 2-3 hours. I discovered some cool things, but didn’t quite get to the point on wanted to with them. Sadly, this was near the end of the character design process, and I didn’t get to refine this approach any further.

And of course, of all these designs, only the cop, the kid in the suit, the soldier and the maid made it in to the final game with little alteration to their designs. But it was worth it anyway.  Another chance to learn a little more, and add a couple more pieces to my portfolio.

For Monopoly Streets I was given the privilege of designing a cast of characters to accompany the classic tokens from the boardgame.  I’ll post art for my favorites, and ones that didn’t make it, but first, I thought I’d show the process for one character.

We we’re trying to come up with a character to accompany the wheelbarrow, and the first thing to come to mind was some sort of farm type. My first pass was a back-woodsy-hill-billy type.

This ended up being one of my favorite sketches.

The next stab was a more Joadsy-type farm feller.

I thought he ended up looking pretty good with color.

Alas, it was decided we needed more diversity of the female variety, so I started trying variations on the farm-girl.

As is the case with character design, we decided to take bits and pieces form sketches we liked and combine them in one.

From here on out, for every revision I laid a sheet of marker paper over the previous sketch and refined it.

Another pass.

Trying to give her a bit more personality.

Okay, let’s just give her a nice happy expression, and no bulging biceps.

Part of the process is putting all of the character together in a line-up to make sure their silhouettes are all unique and that they contrast well with one another. I did about 20 of these with all the changes we made to characters. Maybe I’ll do a post with just the line-ups sometime.

Finally, I get to color.

The final model (not done by me). This model was probably the closest to the original concept.

And she’s off! They grow up so quickly…

Not much commentary to make here. Some of this stuff ended up in game. Most didn’t.

An early attempt to try and design around the established iconography of Monopoly. One of the goals of the game was create something novel that still felt immediately true to Monopoly. The block letters were one of the first things to go. When you have to translate a game into other languages, block letters can get very expensive.

My first attempt at the GO building. Taking inspiration from Tekkon Kinkrete and early Atlantic City architecture (the city Monopoly is based on). This was the one case where it was decided that the block lettering was worth it and had to be modeled in every applicable language.

The building below actually was modeled (and improved on by the talented Ken Lim). It didn’t make it into the default board but ended being salvaged for the “Monument City” board.

Another design that didn’t make the cut. Here you can see the two different rendering approaches I work with. In the approach above I build the structure out of shapes, then render over it. I like it because it gives a nice painterly finish, and is closer to what things look like in game.

The approach below is nice because its quicker, and still has a nice polished look.

The one that survived the cut.