This time with Peter

I decided to add Peter into the scene. I think it helps.

Grandfather's house

Too many irons in the fire

I've been working on a bunch of different things, and I can't seem to finish anything. One of these days I'm going to have a lot of new art to show, but for now you'll have to settle for cropped previews.

Water Troll

This is a really off-balance drawing, but I am starting to get more comfortable with these watercolor pencils.

Caricature from life

Cool model today.

Inktober Sort of Died

Partially because I got busier, and partially because I discovered some really cool Watercolor Pencils.

My watercolor pad is really small, so I didn't have room for much more than a head or so per page.

Peter

Just something for fun. Many thanks to Ben Simonsen, Jason Kim, and Matt Armstrong for the great last-minute feedback.

Trying out ArtRage

My review is this: if they exposed the controls to the brushes a tiny bit more, this would be a seriously cool painting program. As it is, it's barely more than a neat, but frustrating, toy.

Masters of Anatomy

I've been asked to contribute to this book, along with a whole bunch of artists that I look up to. I'm honored to be a part of such a project. The Kickstarter was put up a few hours ago and it has already reached its goal, so it's going to be a reality. Here's a link if you want one too.

Inktober 8 and 9

Inktober 5, 6, 7

Inktober 3 and 4

Inktober

I decided I'm going to try and participate. I probably can't post every day, but I will try to do several each week.

Why a unified style for Infinity?

I read the comments on the Kotaku article that linked here and there were several wondering why we chose to do a unified style for the game instead of just mixing the styles like Kingdom Hearts did.
The answer is really simple. Pixar and Disney said we couldn't mix their characters as is. John Lasseter told us that the only way we could get approval is to make them all from the same toy line with a unifying aesthetic. This is also why the "Disney stole from Skylanders" thing is silly: we were always doing toys or Infinity would never have left the drawing table for approval reasons. Getting everyone on the same page with the characters' looks and the Infinity style was nothing short of a miracle, not to mention that it was the first time any of us at Avalanche have had to design physical toys (which also created huge obstacles for the style).

I don't know what strings Kingdom Hearts pulled to get all the characters together in their original styles, but that option was off the table for us. And frankly I'm glad. Maybe it's the persnickety artist in me, but even though I like Kingdom Hearts, I find the complete shifts in style jarring.

Other Infinity Monsters

For the really early work for the monsters townspeople, we tried a couple different toy types. That was back before we knew we were doing Monsters University

I had to design the final townspeople so their limbs and parts were swappable.

Infinity Lone Ranger

I didn't do a ton of work on the Lone Ranger, but here's some of what I did with characters.

Very early in the playset we were testing whether to introduce toylike mechanics to the villains to soften the fact that you were going to be shooting a lot of people with a gun in a Disney game. They ultimately solved this problem through the sound and effects.

The first version of the dynamite bandit had a cigar for lighting the dynamite (which they made me put in his hand instead), but he had to be redesigned so you could recognize him from a distance, so I did the middle version. Red Harrington a tricky problem as well because she had so much detail and patterns, and she bounced between multiple artists up until her model was finished.

Infinity Vehicles

I always enjoy designing vehicles but I don't get to do it often. Which is probably just as well since I'm not a technical artist.

How do you design a dinghy with paddles? That's what the team asked for, since they didn't want to add a rowing mechanic to an already huge game. I think after seeing the top concepts they realized that the idea didn't work, and asked for the bottom concept, which was a tag-team between me and Ben Simonsen.

Very early in the Pirates playset, we brainstormed things that would be cool to do in hopes of inspiring the design team. One of those ideas was making the ship customization change the behavior and gameplay of the ship. The idea didn't gain any traction, though.

I don't think the magnet helicopter made it into the game. The top right ambulance was from a sketch by the amazing Scott Gwynn.

As you can see, I did do a lot of helicopters. The top and bottom right helicopters are the ones that were approved to go in the game.

Infinity: Captain Jack Sparrow

Jack Sparrow went through just as many iterations early on, but I didn't do as many this time.

I included my (slightly) touched up version of Jason's awesome drawing, as well as Jon Diesta's final design.

Here's where the final model ended up for comparison.

Schoolism Sale