First Turn Fold

Hey guys! So for the last few years, I've been producing music along side my visual art under the project name First Turn Fold. You should check out my soundcloud page and take a listen! Music has become quite a passion of mine. Iv'e had the honor of composing for some brilliant directors of animated short films over the last couple of years in addition to the personal music you'll find on my soundcloud.

Let your ears bathe in the incredibleness below:

First Turn Fold

Commission painting number 8(I think)

Hello good peoples!

I haven't updated in a while, which is shameful of me, so I thought I'd correct that by posting my latest commission painting: a mountain landscape in acrylics on a 40x30in canvas. I finished this last night, and presented it today to my patrons, to their glee. These paintings aren't easy to get going on, but when they go, they go well, it seems!

--Ben

Global Game Jam 2012

Hey guys!

I've been spending the weekend (long distance....over the internet) with some of my fellow graduate friends participating in Global Game Jam! For those of you who may not know what that is, it's THIS. A 48-hour event during-which small teams around the planet try to develop a fully functional video game, simulating the pressures and lack of sleep and food that manifest themselves during "crunch time" at a real studio.

So, I've been helping out my team with that. Mostly with music and sound effects, but some visual art along the way. As of this moment, the event is over and we failed miserably due to team members getting sick in the middle... Oh well, such is life. haha. We did get a lot of work done, and we plan on continuing the project and finishing it over time.

In the mean time, have a look at the new logo I designed for our little indie dev. company here:

Nintentroll Project

Hey guys! It's been a little bit, eh? I have been doing a lot of updates to my website, and not paying enough attention to sketching and posting my experimental work on here, so let's fix that!

A short while back, just for the fun of it, I wanted to try making some conceptual posters of various Nintendo characters with befitting "troll faces" (by-which I mean the memes, not the ugly old toys). It was mostly to brush up on my Illustrator skills, as well as cross-converting work from Illustrator to Photoshop.
So I did and here's the result:

Then after I'd finished those, my favorite one was definitely awesome face Link, so just for further experimentation and enjoyment, I made a Wind Waker themed splash featuring the aforementioned modified character (and a few others):

"Noral and the Ue Rune" pt.4 --

So, here at the 4th stage, much has changed. Eloh (the background character) has been taken out, as he was far too close to Noral and was cluttering up the composition. The background has completely been changed from the cliff-side to a series of columns. The closer feeling makes the composition more comfortable to me.

The next few iterations should see some finality (unless my revisionism takes hold again).

"Noral and the Ue Rune" pt.3 --

Alright, after another sitting of painting, the lighting is now (very) roughed, and Noral has a fair bit of base shading detail. I threw in some foliage for background contrast, but that's not necessarily staying. We'll see.

Up next: More lighting detail and foreground refinement.

"Noral and the Ue Rune" pt.2 --

So, after a little bit of Photoshop work, I have a decent (and typically hideous) underpainting to go off of:

...So yeah, I hate underpaintings. They never look anything remotely like what you are ultimately aiming for, but they are necessary for grounding your color areas. Naturally most of the color here will change drastically in the next few stages.

Onward toward the color and lighting rough!