New book - The Crash Bandicoot Files - Dark Horse Comics

Hey there folks. Heard about this a few weeks ago and wanted to let you know that a new book was published this past Tuesday on March 27 from Dark Horse Comics. It's called "The Crash Bandicoot Files: How Willy the Wombat Sparked Marsupial Mania". The publisher is Dark Horse Comics. 

Well for those of you wondering what the original Crash production bible contained this looks to be it. You can purchase it at the Dark Horse Comics site or on Amazon. The front cover features some of my early sketches of Crash back when he was still called Willy. If I new back then that they'd be using these drawings and others for the cover of a book 23 years later I'd of done a better job. These images were just preliminary doodles. I didn't think in terms of a public presentation. Ya never know what can happen in time! 

Here's the cover. Authored by Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin of Naughty Dog. Has a lot of Joe Pearson's art and also David Siller's work. 

Character concept demo backwards

Hello there! Hope you're doing great and thank you for continuing to follow my blog. It's been pretty darn intense lately as my school and life in general keeps me very busy. When I'm in these phases I just hold on tight and ride the bucking bronco waiting for a window where things slow down a little and I can catch the wind and go on to smoother sailing.

Earlier in the month I created a demo for my students in Character Design 2 which involves creating images with more complexity especially in the area of human anatomy. This is what I ended up with.

Before that the drawing was taken to a black line level on top of the blue pencil sketch.

And before that this is what the blue pencil image looked like.

And in the beginning we started with establishing the basic anatomy of the character.

If you take this approach with your own work you'll likely wind up with a stronger composition and solid characters. It's all about fundamentals!

Character concept color sketch

I have a project in mind and thought I'd do a quick doodle in color to explore one of the characters. Primarily in terms of costume and general appearance. Not necessarily in personality or attitude just appearance. Something simple and fun to do using the open source software I mentioned before called Krita.