DOMINANCE WAR – RISE OF GODS

I know, the title is in all-caps, but that’s how DOMINANCE WAR – RISE OF GODS sounds in my mind: in all caps.

Anyway, DOMINANCE WAR is a recurring international contest that concept artists and modellers alike await in anticipation for months.
It’s like, you know, the World Championship of Drawing Cool Stuff.

It’s fun and you have to exchange opinions with the best artists around, and it’s fun, lots of it.
And also fame and glory for the winners, although winning DOMINANCE WAR is as likely as winning X-Factor, so to speak.

The deadline is by the end of May, which gives me time enough to think about the Tsunami Project as well, which I’ll talk about some other time.

I’d like to put some links but I’m on the sofa defeated by Man flu and on WordPress iPhone there’s no way to do that.
Anyway, just google DOMINANCE WAR – RISE OF GODS to experience the awesomeness.

Hell Cat

As it happens, the other day I really felt like drawing while watching Supernatural on the other monitor, but I didn’t exactly know what to do.
So I started with a random splodge of black colour, and it looked like an S.
Nothing else.
I also noticed it looked like a cat, but I hate cats and I’d never paint one. Hellcats are cool though, so I added another pair of legs and a few flames.
Hellcats > Cats

BTW, I was forgetting, Thank you Vic for the refurbishing!

Fishing Party

The other day I was thinking that I rarely paint water, so I decided to practice a bit and I ended up with this.

It has been really difficult actually, the usual silly friend was behind my shoulder being annoying.

I gave me not entirely pointless advice though.

Illustration Friday – Surrender

Right, to be honest this drawing has been a pain in the ass. I’m practicing with a technique I am not familiar with, I painted in black an white first and then I applied colours on a few Overlay layers.

It took a while to get something I even vaguely liked, or that at least I didn’t completely hate.
Then I wasn’t happy with the composition, and kept pulling a pushing and moving things here and there and getting rid of stuff.
Then Photoshop crashed, and kept crashing, and I had to reinstall it.
And retrieve my preference files, brushes and whatnot buried in my old backups.
And my friend Dave was lurking from behind my shoulder, being annoying.
Ok, his advices were good, but he was still annoying.

Anyway, I finally got to the point where I couldn’t be asked to change anything else, and the file made it out of the Forever Unfinished folder.
The big guy is beaten but hasn’t surrendered yet, so it would be a decent entry for this week’s Illustration Friday.

A Two Weeks Old Post (I never had the time to post it).

Soooo.
We’re all settled in Cambridge, surprisingly enough this time around the house is already box-free after only two weeks since we moved in.
Last time it took about two years. By the time we finished unpacking we were ready to pack things up again and move to another country.
Anyway.

Tomorrow it’s the first day of my new job. Oddly enough I’m not nervous at all, although the other night I dreamt about being in my office naked from the waist down, wondering if by acting normally my colleagues wouldn’t notice I went to work without covering my junk.

I wonder if my subconscious is trying to tell me something.
(note to self – remember to wear trousers tomorrow morning).

We didn’t go out too often during the past two weeks, the weather has been miserable most of the time and after all we were quite busy making the house a livable environment. Today instead the sun was shining, and I just realised that what we did, instead of – say – going punting on the Cam, was going to a museum.

The exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, though, was great.
The second floor was all dedicated to the Iranian poet’s Ferdowsi (Hakīm Abu’l-Qāsim Firdawsī Tūsī, 940-1020), whose epic poem Shahnameh, despite still being regarded after a thousand years as a literary masterpiece of the Persian culture, is poorly known in the western world.

Don’t tell me I’m the only one in the western world ignoring the unspellable Shahnameh because I won’t believe you.
However, I have to confess that my Persian isn’t that good, so I actually went there for the beautifully illustrated pages.

Without going down the road of commenting on a form of art I completely ignore, I was actually surprised by the clarity of certain illustrations, and how ideas and stories were conveyed so effectively even with a taste a thousand years old.
Some of the layouts and the composition choices were incredibly modern, with figures and scenes often spilling over the decorated frames.

As for the rest, well, Rostam – the Persian equivalent of Hercules – should have his seat in the Hall of Fame of the badasses.
He slayed dragons, ripped hearts off demons’ chests and all the other stuff that every hero should have in his portfolio.
I mean, in a bar fight I would chose him over Hercules to watch my back any time.

He even has his own comic, I mean.

And also, err, a movie. Maybe that one still needs some TLC:(

A Battle

For many reasons this month I couldn’t manage to go to the gym, so during my lunch break I stayed in the office playing Runescape or drawing random stuff.
This is one of the quickies I’ve done (most of them ended up in the bin or in the “forever incomplete folder”).
It was meant to take only one hour but I eventually took my time drawing the small details on the big robot so it’s more of a 4-5 hours thing now.

I have the impression that my palette is getting a bit too predictable so I decided that after I move into the new house I’ll start printing my drawings and pinning them to the wall.  That way I’ll have everything under control all the time.

Plus, it will be easier for me to realize that, if I am given no briefs, I end up drawing a battle scene or robots. Or robots in a battle.

Some New Concepts

I’ve had this stuff sitting on my desktop for a while now, but never the time to post it.
I found out I really like the entire 3D mockup thing, and as I said before I’m going to build a quick 3D scene every time the environment is a bit too complex to make experiments.
In this case there were too many columns to be bothered building the perspective every time I wanted a new point of view.
So, there, this is a crypt environment I wanted to concept from beginning to end.
I used the 3D scene to come up with a few different points of view and I drew a thumbnails page with quick sketches.

I picked up the view I thought was more interesting and coloured it. I confess I used the good old warm-cold combo because it’s safe and always works (I didn’t have much time to experiment alternatives).

After the mood study I drew a few thumbs for the props I would use if the scene had to be modeled in a game.

Then I thought “ok I’m done, I’ll post it on my website” and forgot about it for about three months.

So Long Sunny Yorkshire

Today I woke up with a snowstorm raging outside my window.
Well it wasn’t actually raging, just the normal bunch of snowflakes falling silently from the sky, but a raging snowstorm makes for a more effective first sentence.

Anyway, while moaning my way to work, dodging happy kids throwing snowballs at each other, I thought how unfair growing old is, meaning you can do more and more stuff (like driving, voting, spend all your money buying crap on the Internet with your credit card and such) and at the same time being denied forever what made life great as a kid.
Like staying at home because schools are closed due to bad weather.

After only 45 minutes driving the 3 miles to work I made myself a coffee, sat down and suddenly was told to go home because of the weather.
In your face kids! Now I can drive, vote, spend all of my money buying crap on the Internet with my credit card AND stay home because of the weather.

During the following 45 minutes it took to get back home I thought of all the beautiful things I could do with my unexpected spare time. Long walks in the woods with my dog, a snowman with my daughter, snowball fights with the kids outside. Maybe even carve a sledge out of pinewood I could personally go cutting down.
So I made it home, my cosy, warm home, and suddenly realised this was instead the perfect day to reorganise my iPhone themes, because the mess you leave after a few months of customizing is almost intolerable.
Once that issue was sorted I resolved it was about time to write something on my blog, which made me think that I haven’t yet written about the biggest news of this year, hence the title of this post.

After almost five years we’re leaving Yorkshire and at the beginning of January I’m starting to work at Jagex in Cambridge as a Senior Concept Artist.
As much as I’m happy to tackle the challenges of a new job and a new place, leaving has a bitter after-taste.
Working here and drawing Worms has been fun, and there are some really good friends we’re leaving behind, not to mention those couple of good pubs where “everyone knows your name”.

However, I found out that bitching about the place you’re living in (well, about to live in) is always quite natural, and after only a few hours house-hunting in Cambridge I was already moaning about the fact that they can’t possibly define that spongy blob they make as “Genuine Yorkshire Pudding”.
In a few months I’ll probably start to complain about the lack of rain, I’m sure.

So, we’ve started packing, the house is more messy than usual and we’ll probably have our Christmas dinner served on cardboard boxes, which I can’t deny has its own appeal.
Actually at this very moment I should be disassembling furniture and filling holes in the walls, if it weren’t for all the emails I still need to reply to and the few facebook friendship requests I still have to process.
Gosh I love snowstorms.

Spider Riders

Well, I finally finished this thing that had been sitting on my To Do folder for a few weeks now.
I had planned to draw something with a race going on, like spiders climbing tall buildings in a big city or something like that, but as usual I got distracted by something shiny in the meantime.
Maybe later.

Life Drawing and Stuff

I can’t remember where I read that musicians always recognize other musicians even when they’re not playing, artists recognize artists and so on.
Yesterday my friends and I went to Life Drawing Class (hey, our stuff is already online, well done!) and while looking for the place we got mixed up by mistake with a group of disgruntled studenty-looking people who were being given a tour of the studios nearby.

When we joined the lot, most of them gave us the cold shoulder and I thought “wow, the grumpiest artists I’ve ever seen, this will be fun”.
After a couple of awkward minutes we realized the mistake and found the right place, where we were greeted by shiny happy people fiddling with drawing pads and stuff.
“A-ha! These are artists” – I thought – “much more fun people”.

Anyway, the class was great, it was ages (gosh, ages, really) since the last time someone mentored me with drawing and I enjoyed every bit of it.
We were also impressed by the model’s skills, we ended up sketching 10-seconds poses (I found out that I suck at it. 30 seconds are fine, 10 seconds are not even close to be enough!) and, well, I realized I couldn’t even think of going from one position to another in that short a time.
Ok, I have the backbone of a ninety year old, but still, hats off.
So, thanks to Kath, Zane and Ally, and if anyone lives in Yorkshire and fancies some awesome drawing classes, join here.

In other news, I just received my sketchbook from *THE PROJECT*, and, damn, it’s 80 pages to go. It means more or less a couple of sketches a day if I want to finish within the deadline, which is dreadful considering the amount of spare time I have.
But I’ll try.

(Do or do not! There is no try).

I have been told my portfolio lacks completely in vehicles and I want to fix that.
Like, I’ll start to work on something from tomorrow.
It won’t be easy, since I am maybe one of the two-three Italians who have never given a crap about cars and moving machines in general (due to ninety percent of my family being made up by females I suppose).
I mean, I find farming machinery more interesting than sports cars.

Hold on. Ok, I’ll start concepting farm machines then.
Laser powered farming machines from space, maybe.

In further news I got in touch with an illustrator I’ve been following for a while, and apart from being ace, she’s also really kind and spoilt me with good words. She said the website is really well designed, so I’ll pass the compliment to The Maker.

I’ll end with this link that has been sitting in my favourites folder for a couple of weeks with the intent of posting it on this blog (ok, I’ve been busy).
It’s the collection of the top 20 microscope photos of the super awesome 36th annual Nikon Small World competition.
They’re all coloured shiny images, enjoy.