Here are my first few sketches for Dominance War Five.  I only made it through the pre-production phase because real life came a knockin’, but it was a really fun side project for a couple of weeks.  This year’s DW theme was “Design a God“, which is actually an overwhelming amount of freedom…

The first thumbnail sheet above is actually the third (most post-worthy) page of random shapes that I’d created.  It’s a slightly more fleshed out version of the six best designs.  Designing a character, is just a succession of elimination.  I’ve already discovered what I don’t want in the design, but there are more choices to be made!  My favorites being:

• God of the Wild:  Worked as a spirit/ghost that would turn a camp-fire into a forest fire or harvest poachers!
• God of Captivity: Strong emotional ties, loved the cage on his face and could be pushed further to guilt?
• God of Pestilence: Wasn’t one of my top choices at the time, but looking back, it’s quite unique.  

The second thumbnail sheet  above contains, what I thought, were the two strongest designs.  Some folks following my thread over at CGhub commented on the one’s they liked and wanted me to flesh out (or didn’t like).  It was along the same vein, so they were fleshed out (Some people were interested in God of Insanity, hopefully by name only, because I’m not particularly keen on his design).  The chosen God’s were pushed a little further to:

• God of Nature:  Being tree like (and moose-like), with birds that dropped unnaturally bright feathers as warnings to unwelcome humans (or animals) and a lantern to collect their souls.
• God of Guilt: Feeding on human guilt, the birth of burden mimic orphaned children to lure in extra batteries…

The third thumbnail sheet above is the winning character’s study.  The God of the Wild has a nice narrative along with a never-ending supply of ideas:

• “A”: Calm/serene, forest-dwellers would pray at a totemic tree stump for rain/water, wisdom or protection.
• “B”: Particularly ruthless predatory animals would be turned into servants to do the bidding of the God (I liked the idea of a herbivore being master to a carnivore).  He also has a “womb of rejuvenation” for the injured, ew.
• “C”: Needing to pray through snakes to get to the God was intriguing because of the evil biblical connotation.  Plus, how scary would snakes that spun spider webs be?  *faints*  

Overall, the project was off to a solid start.  I’d like to keep at it, but spare time is more fleeting than free time.  For the record, I was leaning toward “B”.  If anyone’s interested, you can check out my W.I.P Thread at CGHub.

www.CGHub.com hosts some dedicated artists with outstanding gallery’s, useful critiques and there are lots of art contests you can join!

Make sure to check out the Title Track on bandcamp!

Since I have a full-time job working in a surprisingly fast paced industry, I’m a bit selective about the projects I take on outside of work.  When I was approached by UIGG, a local heavy metal band here on Prince Edward Island, about the possibility of creating the cover artwork on their upcoming album… I was pretty stoked.  These guys had a clear idea of what they were looking for art-wise, and with a title like “Of Moose and Men” how could I refuse?

The basic idea was to have a sort of “Were-Moose” creature going all Godzilla on a town.  The moose himself needed a plaid, lumberjack styled shirt along with ripped jeans (the garb of a standard Canadian).  Finally, it needed to contain fire, havoc, destruction and panic stricken civilians.   A lot of the reference from UIGG was monochromatic, so I tried to stick with really warm tones.  I actually made the image completely grayscale, created a colored version through blending modes and added a “concept art” feel to it with a blotchy/opaque paintover at the end.

It was easily smoothest freelance transaction I’ve ever been through (or heard of, to be honest)!  The Band gave me a brief synopsis of what they wanted, and then picked out a few key points that they couldn’t part with.  The rest was open to my interpretation.  Pretty smooth sailing in comparison to my normal labours of love.

When redesigning a website, it’s important to make the transition to a new design easy and without the loss of old content…

Unfortunately, I did exactly the opposite, on both accounts…

The new design requires different permalinks, image parameters & shortcodes, and I’ve set up the FTP structure to actually make sense this time (Yay, organization!).

As for the old content, it has withered and died.  Sorry to anyone who wanted to immortalize their well crafted comments into the staple of internet architecture that is TYLERNOILES.com, you will have to start anew.   Though, I can promise that I won’t delete everything until at least version 4.0 again.

The whole “restart from scratch” did present me with the opportunity to rummage through some backup from the old site and decide what to carry over into this brave new world.  Here are a few that made the cut: