Character Design Concepts

One of my updated portfolio sections is for character design concepts. I've been pulling together various concepts that I've worked on for CHOW over on conceptart.org, even if I didn't have time to participate due to other projects. There's always a nice variation of character topics to be get inspired from in the community activities over on CA. I'm also adding characters from some of the concepts developed for picture books or other stories to show a good range of my character art development.

In any case, I'll be including a selection of initial sketches and turnarounds of various characters that I post, and then the final color concepts in that section of the Concept Art portfolio category. Much like what's included for a character sheet when developing characters from a comic book script. Which reminds me...back to work!

More sketchings

Studies of a character in progress. The plan is to finish this up over the weekend and then do the final selections of images for my updated portfolio.

I'm also in search of an art agent to work with me to expand my client list in childrens book publishing, and possibly additional companies that contract for product concept art development -- need to broaden my illustration and concept art markets!

Tree Studies

Did some tree "life studies" and a few quick sketches based on photos; and then scanned the drawings and put them on various layers in Photoshop...and eventually came up with this layout. This was one of the preliminary comps I did for the illustration I'm currently working on for "Winter's Daughter".

Kitten Studies

Some sketch studies of kittens I did for an illustration that I've been working on this week. My website is almost done (yeah, when it's work for myself I seldom make my own arbitrarily set deadlines...sigh) and will still be re-launching this week, although I didn't hit Monday.

Random sketchings for the New Year

I've posted a few rough sketches from my sketchbook done in the past month.

I've been in the middle of artwork for an upcoming SCBWI local meeting to pull together a promotional dummy book for critique and review. It's been awhile since I've gone so I'm looking forward to checking it all out again and meeting some of the local childrens book writers (and hopefully, illustrators!). I've also been rather busy creating some new administrative forms for my "illustration studio" using the Art Office book as a guideline, as I've been recreating the forms in Illustrator, with much customizing targeted to my own use and the type of projects that I currently do rather than focusing on gallery work: book illustration, product design concept art (specializing in Christmas) and so on.


Of course, I have various other creative projects going on as usual...and, once again, it's past time to update that online portfolio/website of mine -- the deadline is January 31! :)