More Dizzywood concept art.  Early on the idea came up that your character would have a pet dino you could ride around on.

Below, Wildwood forest ideas.

I can’t remember what these devices were for, but they were fun to come up with nonetheless.

Below, various ideas for animal scientists.

These guys were to be a part of this underwater maze ruled by an Octopus king.

Above, Groomfur, the resident fashion expert would set you up with a new wardrobe. And below, some arrival tubes.  These were how we were thinking characters would arrive to Dizzywood.

See also:

Dizzywood Part I

Dizzywood Part II

Dizzywood Part III

These top two character sheets were from early on in the project.  I was finding the voice of the characters, like how cute and anthropomorphisized they should be.

Below, some more environment ideas.  Jungles, raceways, town centers…

Above, one of those drawings might look familiar because I rehashed the idea for Inktober day 26.  Below, skater dude character designs.

Growing up in Arizona gave me an advantage on this last set of environment designs.

See also:

Dizzywood Part I

Dizzywood Part II

Some more Dizzywood concept art.  Again, the emphasis was to just come up with as many ideas as possible.  The folks at DW had a team of artists that would then polish and refine my ideas, or re-purpose them to suit the needs of the site.

Ken Marden, one of the creators and the creative lead of the site, was who I spent most of my time working with.  Ken is an enormously creative individual and came up with some exciting ideas for Dizzywood.  Each week I’d show him my drawings and eagerly await his next assignment.  One week he’d need blimp designs, the next would be something like tree house ideas.

Below are a lot of environment ideas from early on.  The idea being the player would start in an European style seaside village, and then start to explore outward via balloon.

There was an idea that a character named Presto would have this bohemian wagon town set up where you could change your looks.

In the town there would be a steam powered arcade owned by an industrious little primate named Monkey Wrench.

Strange  ruins might have clues to unlock secrets in the game.

These were designed later on.  Some sort of strange optical devices.  Can’t remember what they were for.

They also asked me to do a map.

See also:

Dizzywood Part I

A couple years ago I had a pretty sweet freelance gig designing a world for a children’s online game called Dizzywood.  There’s an informative wiki page for it here.  I may have mentioned it once or twice in the past.  I was recently looking through the artwork again and realized for whatever reason I neglected to share it here.

The guys at Dizzywood were less concerned with finished polished designs and instead wanted the emphasis of my work on developing ideas.  This was extremely liberating for me as an artist. I wasn’t concerned about cast shadow, and bounce light.  The rendering of an object was minimal, instead I went for an instant read, or to dish out just enough information to get it, then move on to the next.

I drew for them about 8 hours a week for almost two years and the whole time tried to churn out as many sketches a week I could.  An interesting thing happened as I did this.  As I focused on quantity, quantity, quantity, the quality of my sketches actually improved.  It was my own version of the pottery parable (read about that here).

I’ll see if I can dig up some more stuff from the project. In the meantime, enjoy these:

This is a book cover I did for Fish, by Gregory Mone.  I had a lot of fun with this assignment, and thought I’d share a bit of the process with you.  Below is the finished cropped cover, just part of a whole wraparound the publisher asked for.  Wraparounds offer a bit of an artistic and compositional challenge because the illustration has to work primarily for the front, but also for the back, and both flaps.  Consequently, the image can feel unbalanced, and a bit awkward. Keep that in mind since the illustration isn’t really intended to be seen laid out flat without text on it.

Ok, so lets get down to it, shall we?

Step 1: Rough idea sketches

The art director sent me some super rough thumbnails of ideas he had for the book cover and asked me to polish them up a bit as well as come up with a couple more solutions. I sent him these. They’re each about 4 x 5 inch sketches, quick and to the point.

I was keen on bottom left, but we both felt like top right had the most draw. So the art director asked me to develope it further and with a wraparound in mind.

Step 2: Small Rough Sketch

I sent him this drawing. Small, quick, and dirty. It’s purpose was just to see if this is the right direction. He liked it and it got approved to go on.

Step 3: Full Sized Rough

In this stage I started drawing a bit larger than the actual print size.  So I think this drawing is like 21 inches wide.  I took some photo reference of my son standing on a chair to give me a good idea of what the legs and feet should look like.  In this stage I’m planning out where the ship and the main pirates are going to go.  Again, keeping it very loose here.

Step 4: Tightening Up

The art director noticed that the ship I had drawn wasn’t a sloop like the one described in the book, so I had to hunt down some sloop reference.  Found some nice photos of a model ship that gave me everything I needed. I also got specific descriptions of each of the pirates that needed to be shown.  I tightened up the sketch considerably at this stage in order to really nail down what everything is going to look like. One final note was to change the two women to dirty man pirates.

Step 5: Linework

Got a big piece of paper and a sharp pencil and made a nice clean drawing.

Step 6: Coloring

Started laying in color. Art director felt like it was getting a little too warm, and pink.

Step 7: More Coloring

Got rid of the pink and tried going for a dusky almost moonlit look. Laying in shadows and desaturated the pirates some. There’s lots of noodling and experimenting at this stage.

Step 8: Finished!

Again, because the illustration is meant to be seen on the flaps and cover you won’t notice that even though the sun is setting behind them, there’s a major light source casting shadows across the hull of the boat. It’s all about selling that front cover image, and letting the rest of it garnish the back and flaps of the book.