"Nick"Nerf Gun finished shots

Shaman Bug

"Nick"Nerf Gun painting WIP shots

A generous donation from Nick Southam when he left Vigil ! Almost done with it and there will be some clearer shots coming .

Space kitty Finished

finished up space kitty earlier this week .will be posting it up on Etsy soon

Space kitty WIP shots

Darksiders 2 Death Minecraft skin fan art

a little fan art for the project im on .

Starhawk Emmett Minecraft Fan skin

Congrats to the LightBox crew for making an awesome game! my fan tribute:)Go mine some stuff as Emmett Graves.

the making of our wedding cake topper

     I decided I had to make our wedding cake topper pretty early on but i hadn't sculpted anything  in like ..12 years maybe? Its been for ever anyway and i had to figure out how i was going to do this and do it in time .Here is some of that process

1-It was hard to know where to start so i just started with a stick man in Photoshop to establish proportions.

2-next thing i did was copy the stick man 6 times onto a 8.5"x11" sheet of paper and printed it out really light so i could draw and ink over top and do some thumb nails .I used the same figure for both of us even though she was going to be a mermaid and i was going to have a beaver tail.

3-i ended up liking a feature here or there and because they were all the same size when i scanned them in i could easily copy and paste what i liked all together.

4-Here is the cleaned up color version that i worked from .probably didn't have to go this detailed but it did help me work out a few things .I then printed this out to scale to build the wire armatures on top of .It was nice to be able to cut out the scale version and look at it and see if it was the right size for the cake .I guess between the point i painted this picture and the time i painted the topper i figured out i wanted a pink tie .

a quick note: I did a quick side shot of both figures for proportion in Photoshop (not shown)and in retrospect i should have spent more time on this step and figured more out on paper because it was a struggle to figure out in clay. 

5-I created wire armatures and then made segments in Sculpey (an oven bake modeling clay) and then bake them so they were firm and i could then bend and pose them.

6-here they are posed with their joints filled in and baked .this is where i realized there heads were giant and their necks were pencil thin and this was going to be a challenge .pretty much every time i baked it they cracked and i sanded it and filled it in until eventually it was strong enough to hold the heads .

7-this is a few detail bake passes in .we look scary!i think there was a bunch of sanding at this point .

8-were close but were not holding hands! the next few passes were a lot of fiddly bits involving cutting bits off and sanding .for the hands i think i cut all there hands off  and baked new slightly bigger ones separately including the set holding each other.After that i connected them back to the arms and sanded it .

9-primed and sanded and glued to a base !

in the sun !were ready for paint!

10-final paint job! i used acrylics for this which was pretty much a lot of craft paint and some artist paints .this went fairly smooth . Finished with many layer's of gloss coat for protection followed by a few layers of dull coat to cut down on the shine .

 our mermaid and beaver butts!

you look ready for Italy!

    We decide to wait until we got back home to post this up so it would be a surprise for everyone to see when we got there.They survived the trip there and back quite well which was a relief  because repairs would have been very interesting while traveling:)

Now they sit in our home as one of the many reminders of our amazing Day on our Amazing trip and the amazing love we share .

the art of Honey and Dan's wedding

I made a bunch of art over the course of us planning our wedding and i though i would post it up to show people .

This was the header for our blog.

this was the map i made for our blog which we didn't end up using .

an attempt at our save the dates

some save the date /invite ideas .I was Ham and Honey was cheese and just did a bunch of pieces of us out doing Italian things .If i had done more one of them would have been us flying off the road in a Ferrari.

your delicious !no you are!

mmm vino!

stomp!

were so lost! this ended up being very true some days .

If this was us in real life we would have both had our own bowls of pasta and been sharing .Even the simplest pasta was so good there!!!

weeeeeeeeeee!!

Nerf gun 3.0

the 2.0 version

after a visit to Home Depot for PVC tubs of different thickness and some hack sawing ,gluing ,sanding, painting and an internal mod kit i upgraded my old mod.

the 3.0 version

my mine craft skins are all online

yesterday i posted all my Minecraft skins up on minecraftskins.com .

If you go here you can download them all .http://www.minecraftskins.com/288226/DBeau/

studying the medieval inn

Exploring a few different configurations as a study . I'm going to do some rough thumbs to play with different shapes and silhouettes  and then tackle the final piece.

13 heads

I have 12 inch army action figure and i was thinking it would be fun to modify it and put a new head on it and paint it .you know kinda one of those classic GI Joes. I'm pretty sure in my last post i said i need to focus but i this is flexing the drawing muscle so its all related :) I don't think any of these are going to work but i learned some stuff so that's cool .More to come in the quest for the action figure head winner!

Tatatata tuh tiger face!!!

     This is a rough idea from my sketch book that i inked in .Im using it to make a stencil that will go on another project .i think that's another post all together .Its funny at times what looks fine roughed in gets inked and looks very skewed . I don't think it takes away from the piece but a good reminder to measure twice early and get the proportion right then lock things down.


    So I'm throwing together my portfolio Just because and i cant help but see massive gaps in it .I realized not to long ago i wanted to move my career in the direction of concepting and illustration and looking through my work I'm finding this to be extremely unrepresented .I mean I of all people should know what work I've done but i almost find this shocking .Between side projects doing things at work  trying to upgrade my skill set with z-brush dabbling in traditional media  I'm not giving myself a chance to focus on the thing i really want .


      I do thrive on doing random projects so i realized i cant simply ditch all that and honestly i don't think i could if i wanted to .Just like the rest of the things in my life I have to prioritize .do x amount of concept pieces and then make the mushroom monkey sculpture for example .I'm also trying to get rough pages together for my comic book which is also not materializing as fast as i would like so that needs to fit in there as well .


    The reality of refocusing your career is that your not likely to get the time you need at work or the assignments you need to create the pieces needed to expand your body of work .Honestly its not fair or realistic to put this on your Job and doing so will ultimately stall you out and make you resent your job.  It really boils down to your own time management and getting things done outside of work .


     Not beating myself up but its interesting when you get a chance to take a step back and assess the scope of who you are and what your doing and see if it matches up with whats in your head . Neil Gaiman used the example of a mountain as your goal and you can go to the left and the right to some degree but you have to make sure each thing you do adds up to you getting closer to the top of that mountain .


   I guess it will always be a struggle back and forth when you do something for a living that is your work and your play.

    I am going to try a self experiment . I am going to brain storm some portfolio ideas and put them on blank sheets and insert them into my portfolio and then fill them in .I think it will be motivating  and fun.