Sam's Tasty Art

I love teaching for Schoolism. Of course the classes are fun to teach and interacting with the artists taking the classes is rewarding. Bu...

Mickey is such a hard character to get right. Even the smallest mistakes can make him look wrong, so adding our own stylistic twist was a ch...

There was a phase early on in the Marvel playsets where there were a lot of concerns about doing violence to toys, which somehow would be mi...

I am so sorry to all my friends at Avalanche/Disney for the closing of the studio. It is an unfair thing and the world is worse off for the...

Some things I did for Blizzard I haven't posted yet.

I'm creating lecture slides for the workshop I'm teaching with the IDEA Academy this Summer, and thought I'd share a glimpse ...

There are a lot of reviews on papers for markers out there, but not many that are focused on creating character design-oriented work: what I...

I'll be teaching a 3-day workshop at the IDEA Academy in Rome this summer. The workshop is going to be on how painting can be used to fa...

Here's a critique I did for a student, from my "Lighting for Story and Concept" class. The lesson was on material design for...

Here's a book I illustrated the cover for last year. Getting the composition to work with all those branches was tricky, and I still no...

This time in Stockholm, at the end of May! If you want to come, go to www.schoolism.com and use the promo code NIELSON before February 15th ...

I'm headed to London and then Berlin with Schoolism this Spring, click here to find out more if you're interested in attending eith...

RIP Alan Rickman. He had a way of stealing every scene he was in.

The premium classes are the number one reason why I love to work with Schoolism. My development as an artist I owe almost completely to the ...

I'm going to give a presentation/workshop at CTNx with David Dibble , who came from Blue Sky at the same time I moved to BYU last yea...

Something I painted for the "sculpting with light" demo in my digital painting class at BYU. The class is for animation students s...

Something I did for the "Grand Tournament" expansion for Hearthstone.

An image I did during very early explorations for Disney Infinity. At this point, the hope was that we'd have all sorts of types of toy ...

I did a bunch of work early on Disney Infinity 3.0, which is coming out in a week. Here are a few of the concepts that I did that I've s...

I was asked this question by another professor during the interview for my job at BYU. Now that I've been at BYU for almost a year, I un...

The one on the left is from early exploration when we were trying to figure out the style of Infinity. The right was a modification I did ...

Various concepts for the Sakaaran enemies in Disney Infinity.

Something I started for a demonstration at the Toronto Schoolism Live workshop this year. Finally finished!

I was asked to design a robotic flying turret for AIM, but I figured there was no reason why it couldn't have a pilot.  A car-size...

Something I forgot to post with the others. This is the image I did the demonstration at the end of the atmospheric effects lesson.