more portland hipsters

Portland Hipsters

Two field sketches of hipster from my recent expedition to Portland. Note the varied adaptations of hat and glasses.

Kidbot

Here are some character designs I did for a short I made several years ago about a robot who goes to elementary school to learn how to act human. It's called Robot Rumpus and you can watch it here.

here's how he finally turned out... realized as a life-size puppet, built by Robert Miller and puppeteered by David Hartkop and Brendan Gill.

Planet Krypton concept art

So we had a flashback sequence in Smallville to the city of Kandor on planet Krypton which I had to design for Entity FX. I referenced mainly the original 1978 movie for the natural formations, but tried to innovate somewhat with the design of the city. The first thing we knew we wanted a reddish cast to the the thing, reflecting the red sun of Krypton.
I had this idea about the building having a glassy look, which would catch and reflect the red sunlight and do some interesting things with it. I figured maybe the towers were grown, just as the fortress of solitude is an organic, crystalline structure, but that the towers were also carved and polished by human effort, and not as chaotic as the fortress.


I had this idea in mind of a cathedral-like structure, out in the middle of a vast wasteland.

And the final sketch...

I refined the landscape into a hi-res matte painting, while Kaz Yoshida built and rendered the structure in Maya and Metal Ray. I then assembled all the elements into a final composite in After Effects.
Click here to see the final shot and layer breakdown.

Haunted cave

Concept art for a horror movie from Sony, involving a haunted cave which rebellious, unsuspecting teenagers use as a hangout.

3 statue-guys

Sketches made from three statue-guys at LACMA.

pointy-faced knight

I like this one, for some reason.

Dick Cheney

...an extraordinary rendition of our creepiest leader.

Self portrait threatened by stormtrooper

Businessman

The Ghost Island of Singapore

.. also known as Pulau Hantu.

I started this one without really knowing where it was going. Here's the evolution..

scenesters

Tallinn

The tower of city hall, sketched in Tallinn, Estonia.

Ugly bird

An Egyptian vulture from the Natural History museum in London. A fine specimen of ugly.

modern art guy

A guy I saw in the cafe at the Tate modern. I spilled some beetroot hummus on the page while I was drawing it.

Tomb of Elizabeth Finch

The tomb of Elizabeth Finch, at the V+A Museum in London. She has kind of a pained expression on her face. Her life must have sucked.

Old woman on bench

A sketch of an old woman on a bench in Bath, England... sitting near the cathedral, thinking about something.

Old man on bench

And old man in Bath, England. Look at the way he holds his cigar.

British Museum

This is the Lion statue from out front, sketched while I was waiting for the museum to open.

cool skeletons

...pre-production design sketches for a horror film from Sony, involving conquistadors and the supernatural. More to come...

Sargent knock-off

Another reproduction done with a Wacom tablet and photoshop.

Freak of science

Lobotomized wrestler

Smallville super soldiers

So Lex Luthor has this secret lab inside a dam, where he's building an army of experimental super-soldiers, and, according to the script, we see a vast room filled with them. First, I started with some quick-sketches to establish the basic design of the room.





The feedback I kept getting was that the frame was too busy and complicated. Keep it simple and go lighter on the sci-fi.
I removed the central tower altogether, and added racks of soldiers in the distance. Tim Ketzer and Glenn Curry built some 3d soldiers to stick in the background, and projected the extreme foreground guys onto crude geometry to get some believable parallax out of them, and I assembled the rest as 3d layers in After Effects.

Here's the final shot

Mr. Mustard

zen tree

From Nanzen-ji temple in Kyoto.

Venice Beach Holy Man

...preaching all things Venice to tourists.

spy show concept art

These were two designs for a network pilot involving a spy and a supercomputer.

They were never used, and never made it past the sketch phase.

spooky cabin

So for the opening shot of the Smallville season finale, we needed a spooky cabin. They cut in some stock shot from the Warner library, which I incorporated into a larger matte painting.

Victorian space probe

These are designs for a victorian-era deep-space probe, complete with bellows cameras and cylinder recording system, which I planned to be the central character in a music video for the song Televators by The Mars Volta. Unfortunately, they went with a different treatment, one which did not contain any old-timey robots or skeletons driving flying steam-sleds.

Eugene Juillerat

A portrait of Eugene Juillerat. Who is that? Who the hell knows. I just ripped it off.