Dune book club: SHAI HULUD

I write SHAI HULUD in all caps because I am PUMPED! I was talking to Smo earlier and somehow after reading Dune the first time I forgot about so many details in the story. It's like reading it completely anew and I'm getting frequently surprised. So stoked.

I took a stab at creating an image of a Dune sand worm / Shai Hulud. So frickin pumped about this! Just 3ish hours in Photoshop and a volcanic hot sand worm is screaming across my desktop.

Dustin Harbin is a prince for getting me to read Dune again. Check out the discussion here! http://www.dharbin.com/blog/2009/11/dune-book-club-week-03/

Environment: River tree speed painting

I'm trying to get back onto the environment train today. I think it took me about 20 minutes, but I'll pay closer attention to the next few.

Environment thumbnails 2

More thumbnails. I decided to shelve the creeper castle one for now in favor of something different. Most of my horizon lines were safe and in the middle before, so I wanted to try some more extreme angles (birds eye, worms eye...high and low vantage points). The upper left one in this new batch has me really excited so that's where I'm headed next.

Environments: Cradle of Life

I think this is done for now. I added in little white birds flying around the tree and nesting near the water pools. Now, onward to the creepy castle!

Environments: Cradle of Life in progress

Here's as far as I got today. I'm calling this one Cradle of Life, depicting a tree / oasis in the middle of an arid desert. I'm going to try working in some birds and little critters flying / crawling around the place.

I sort of feel like it's not totally an environment piece but a design for this tree, but it's got me working on stuff that's not character / creature related for now. Gotta start somewhere!

After doing this image which is turning out to be very optimistic like I'm probably going to want to do the skull and spine castle...

Is that Bambi over there behind that root?!

Environment thumbnails

So Daily Demons are on hold again. Work has been keeping me busy (a good thing!) In my spare time I'm gearing up to get back to portfolio development time in the area of environments.

In most of my recent illustrations I've been including settings, but I don't have many pieces that are environment only. Time to fix that!
Look Bill! It's not all creepy stuff! Sure there's a skull cave / castle in the mix but there's also a big tree, cliffs, giant crystals with anchors...I'm going to pick a couple of these to render over the next couple weeks. Then back to thumbnail land and repeat.

Vegetable / Mineral / Structures / Props

I started my Daily Demons back up again the other day but I haven't been dwelling entirely in creature town. I've been working on spending more time sketching on organic / mineral forms and structures (tall image warning!)