ARCHIMERA- A.R. Christensen Illustration and Concept

Armadillos

2012-02-08T21:05:00.000-08:00

I love critters. And I'm constantly sketching them. Unfortunately, most of those sketches haven't made it on this blog because I always forget to scan them or get distracted with other projects. So I'm going to make an active effort to share some of these critters on the blog.

Its funny how you sometimes think you understand how the anatomy of a certain animal works, only after doing some research realize that your mental picture was a huge oversimplification of the amazing designs found in nature. When looking up reference images for these sketches, I was fascinated how the armor plates of an armadillo interlock perfectly, allowing for a large range of motion and protection. Also, they're surprisingly cute.

Freya

2012-01-29T18:30:00.000-08:00

For my life drawing class, we were instructed to use our in-class drawings to create a new a piece inspired by another artist. I chose Arthur Rackham, and decided to re-depict Freya, the Norse goddess of Love, Fertility, and War. Rackham's Freya is lovely, but a bit dainty and boring for my tastes. I wanted to give her a more epic treatment, but still borrow from Rackham's trademark sensitive lines. Freya supposedly owns half of the Valkyries, and therefore gets half of the fallen warriors. So here are Freya and some Valkyries being pretty. Between spilling ink everywhere and almost ruining the original drawing and then accidentally saving over the hi-res file and having to re-do the entire digital coloring... it almost seemed like this piece wasn't going to make it to completion. Maybe Freya was determined to see it through, and I'm fairly happy with it.

SENIOR THESIS PART 1- Rocky the Unruly Canine Companion/ Possible Harbinger of Apocalypse

2012-01-26T12:08:00.000-08:00

I love canines, maybe more than a rational person should. Once I knew that the city's mythology was going to be inspired by Norse mythology (which I haven't gotten into here, because frankly this game is hypothetical and nobody wants to actually read it in depth) I knew that I HAD to make the terrifying wolf of destruction who brings about Ragnarok, Fenris, a main character. (Hence, "Rocky." Budum-ching.) My very early concept for this character was much more wolf-like. I thought of him as a stoic animal companion. Maybe a stray, who would mysteriously appear and join you on your quest, similar to Red XII in FF7.

(At this early stage I was still trying to chose between a flat or rendered style. I'm glad that I experimented during the summer)

Quickly, I realized that the tone of the game was quickly becoming less serious and I decided that Rocky needed to be more dog like and goofy, to contrast his very serious and high-strung owner, Maroon. I quickly injected him with some Scooby-Doo essence, and was careful to not make him TOO cartoonish. He still needed to tear monsters apart.

I also did some gestural studies of wolves in motion, mostly for fun.

Rocky only gets one final form because his fate has pre-determined...He is Fenris, bound up in the form of the dog, and will "break free" towards the end of the game to help the party defeat the final boss.

SENIOR THESIS PART 1- Trevor the Magic Junkie.

2012-01-26T11:55:00.000-08:00

Oh, Trevor. This was my favorite character of the bunch to design. I'd been imagining a green Iggy Pop, when I first thought of the character, long, spindly, and able to bend his torso in bizarre ways. A musical theme also seemed appropriate. Like all of the characters in the party, I wanted him to be lovable and flawed, but still someone who could actually fight. Designing a troll presented infinite opportunities to squash and stretch his anatomy around, and I had maybe too much fun designing various misshapen noses and ears.

I got a bit carried away with thinking about possible Troll anatomy, even going so far as to try and figure out how his toes would move and splay. I also drew his broken and mashed up nose to figure out how the forms would actually work in light. Not necessary to the project but at least I had fun!

As for the moral paths that Trevor can take, both hinge on his tragic addiction to dark magic. In the world, the Trolls who live on the outskirts of the city have developed a love of Black Matter, a toxic by product of the city's industrialized magic. While leathal to humans, it amplifies the Troll's natural magic in mysterious and sometimes dangerous ways. A player can chose to get Treavor some rehab and cleanse him of the dark magic and become a sniper. Or if they'd like they can take him down the dark road of addiction, where his magic will become extremely powerful, but at a price...

SENIOR THESIS PART 1- Maroon the Double Agent

2012-01-26T11:36:00.000-08:00

Maroon was a big challenge for me. As a female gamer, I'm constantly getting annoyed with over-exposed, over sexed female characters. I wanted Maroon to be attractive and formidable, without resorting to cliche big boobs with a big gun type of thing. She is a cop (possibly a double-crossing one if players chose to take that route) who has a sharp shot, a sharp mind, and a sharp tongue. Despite her talents, she is a newbie, unaccustomed to intense situations, and has a tendency to loose all rationality and start shooting fire balls everywhere.

Her costume was tricky. Initially, I was making it TOO badass. Too many spikes and bells and whistles for a gal who was new to the force. I decided to go with a uniform instead of a trench coat, with some pinstripes and a tie to reference crime noir.

I wanted her outfit to be form fitting, but also believable as a cop outfit in a fantasy world. I also liked the idea of a goofy geometric cop hat to cover her horns (remember what I said about ties to a demon-mafia...?)

Her good form is achieved if she takes down the mafia and gets promoted to the elite Valkyrie special forces squad. Her dark form is unlocked if the player choses to give into her fiery side by betraying the police force and siding with the mafia.

SENIOR THESIS PART 1- Vincent the Garbage Man.

2012-01-26T11:19:00.000-08:00

Vincent was the easiest character for me to design. I knew I wanted him to be big and lovable, a bit of a Jack Black type character, with a potential for badassery. As the main character, I knew he had to be easy to relate to, but I didn't want to make him a generic, muscle-laden, hero, but instead a guy with both physical strength and emotional range.

For his Heroic path players could chose to make Vincent quit his garbage man job for the evil industrial company and become a renegade knight for the people melee- type character, or they could chose the path of evil and accept a promotion with the company, granting Vincent access to some high-tech magic machines.

SENIOR THESIS PART 1- Spektrum City Character Development

2012-01-26T11:08:00.000-08:00

My last semester was spent focusing on developing a team of characters for a hypothetical urban fantasy RPG loosely based on Norse mythology. I knew I wanted to play off of the classic Warrior-Ranger-Mage-Pet type of party dynamic and put a new spin on it. I also was interested in designing potential "good" vs "evil" evolutions for the characters that would develop in-game based off of player choices, just like in games like Mass Effect and Fable.

The game is set in a semi-futuristic city that runs entirely on industrialized magic. The hero, Vincent, is just an easy going run-of-the-mill garbage man, who collects the expired magical batteries and hauls them to the dump on the outskirts of the city. While on a routine run, Vincent discovers a dark secret behind the city's power source and becomes an unlikely hero...involved in a quest to prevent a major magical meltdown.

The supporting characters include, Maroon, a high-strung rookie cop who may-or-may not be a double agent working for the demon-mafia,
Rocky, her well-intentioned but destructive canine companion, and Trevor, a punk-rock troll who is addicted to dark magic. Together they form a lovable but dysfunctional team.

My first step was to break down the characters into extremely basic shapes, again playing back to classic fantasy RPGs with an elemental team of earth, fire, water, and air.

I then did some quick headshots, just to get my gut reaction of what I wanted the characters to look and feel like. It's interesting for me to see how this initial essence changed in some ways and remained in others when carried to the final designs.

Here is the final team, and in the following posts I'm going to go into developing each character a bit more in depth.

Life Drawing

2012-01-22T19:02:00.000-08:00

I took a a life drawing course again last semester and it was extremely liberating to just focus on understanding the underlying rhythms of the body and the nuances of how the human form exists in space.

These last two were an interesting experiment. The image on the left was completed in a state of extreme concentration. I was hypersensitive to slight gradation of value and was very slowly trying to carve out the forms. It took about 45 minutes. The one on the right (which I think is a much better drawing) was done rapidly in under twenty minutes, attempting to capture the "energy" of what I was looking at and not allow myself to get caught up in detail. It was interesting to see how shifting my mental state between deliberate thought-driven mark making and pure spontaneity could manifest into two distinct styles. Also, its funny that I projected myself into the model's expression, unconsciously rendering her face grumpy and intense in the left drawing and slightly more serene on the right.

Spongemania

2011-08-14T14:31:00.000-07:00

I've been in a bit of a rut this summer, so I just decided to let loose and do some cartooning. No ambitions or pretenses here... just Spongebob doodles. I just took a faber-castell and went to town. I want to color these guys when I get back to Baltimore and have a functioning tablet.

CROSS- Male Krell drone

2011-04-10T21:53:00.000-07:00

A lot of revisions went into this bad boy, but I'm really happy with how it turned out. His momma is coming soon...

CROSS-Gangsters

2011-04-03T08:35:00.000-07:00

Here are two for now, I'm going to update soon with others! These names may or may not be placeholders...since these are minor characters I haven't thought about that too much.

Digger is a seemingly useless member of the Helix gang, but he is actually one of the most valuable because of his ability to tunnel behind enemy lines and steal supplies. As you may soon see when I post some more of the designs for the Helix gang...these aren't supposed to be the most intimidating kinds of aliens (I have the Krell for that) but instead are able to compete with the other gangs due to the unique ways they can adapt to the landscape.

And here is a ranger type character from the Aces. I'm not quite sure how she manages to hit her targets without depth perception, but she does.

Who needs pants when you have a skull club and warpaint? Not this kid.

CROSS- Character Development dump 'o thumbs

2011-03-31T19:31:00.000-07:00

Here are some thumbnails/ sketches of some minor characters. The Krell race is still in development, but expect to see some of these guys rendered up real soon!

I'm going to push these guys a bit further, they look a bit too wise here...I need to make them more confrontational and stupid looking.

Here are some thumbs for the different types of gangster kids that populate Cross.

More to come!

Location: The Stacks and The Pipeline

2011-03-29T16:34:00.000-07:00

Here are two more environment pieces for my Lord of the Flies in space world.

The Stacks are slums built by nomadic traders, which have since been vacated by the government. A group of young gangsters known as The Aces have taken over this empty shantytown.

The pipelines supply the government facilities on the planet. I'm still tweaking this concept and will probably work back into this one.

Location: Hell's Cradle

2011-02-14T12:24:00.000-08:00

This is a location on the island of Cross, a sacred ground where the reptilian Krell used to lay their eggs, before the human refugees claimed the location for its defensive positioning. The Krell temple is surrounded by geothermal ooze... filled with deadly bacteria that fester in the 400 degree water. The stone statues that surround the temple are called "bowing stones" they were carved by the Krell thousands of years ago.

I also whipped up some color variations.

Welcome to CROSS

2011-02-14T12:20:00.000-08:00

This is a Map of the world I will be creating for my advanced concept art class. I'm wanted the map to look like it was drawn on some wreckage by the young refugees who call the planet their home.

Cross is a desolate island stranded amid a steaming ocean of geothermal goo, on a tiny planet located somewhere in the armpit of the galaxy. The intergalactic government uses it as a dumping ground of sorts, for underage undesirables. Children of rebel planets are kidnapped from their homeworlds and brought to Cross to be reformed. The government intends to break the rebellion by breaking the loyalty of its youth and turning them into tools of the empire.

When refugees are brought to the city they have two choices. They can chose to enroll in the Academy, where they will be guaranteed safe housing and warm meals (so long as they attend the mandatory classes and brainwashing sessions) or they can take their chances and try to scrape a life out for themselves in the dog-eat-dog wreckage of Cross.

The army allows the island outside of the protective electric walls of the academy to exist in a near anarchic state, only dropping meager supplies into the district on a sporadic basis. As a result, gangs have formed are constantly warring for territory around the Drop Zone. The three most prominent gangs are The Black Stars, who hold the ruins and temple, The Aces who dominate the slums, and The Helix Kids, who have THE GUN and the position closest to the Dropzone.

The kids aren’t the only ones trapped there. The native reptilian alien race, the Krell have been pushed to the edges of the island and driven underground. They too have different clans joined together in an unsteady alliance against the invaders. Their temples and cities have been bombed into oblivion, and are now overrun with refugees. Now they make their nests in caves and among the geysers. Due to the scarcity of food, the refugee children sometimes raid the Krell and steal their eggs for food. And a Krell won’t hesitate to devour a stray kid, without even batting its double eyelid.

There are two ways to get off Cross. The first is to be granted a passport upon graduating from the Academy. The second is the option offered to the hoodlums who refused to go to the Academy- they are permitted to enlist in the army when they turn 15. Some accept the offer, but a greater percentage commit a ritualized suicide as a sign of defiance. As a result there are almost no residents of Cross over 15.

Frazetta Tribute Reloaded

2011-01-30T15:31:00.000-08:00

I spent too much time on the acrylic version of this piece to let it rot in all its foamcore warped glory. I took the best parts into Photoshop, and gave it another go. I'm pretty happy with it so far... I still have some work to do on the background and gems on the monster.

Swamp

2011-01-18T15:08:00.000-08:00

This was a projection for the Snow Queen. I went a little crazy with brushes and textures but it was good to loosen up.

Ravana-bot

2011-01-15T22:30:00.000-08:00

Another character from the hypothetical sci-fi Ramayana. This one is Ravana, the demon-nemesis of Rama.

Makara-Son of the Monkey King.

2011-01-15T20:37:00.000-08:00

For one of my final projects I designed this little guy. He is loosely drawn from Hindu Mythology. I imagined him as the spitfire little son of the monkey god Hanuman, existing in a sci-fi version of the epic Ramayana. Perhaps he accompanies Rama and Hanuman on their adventures, or maybe attempts to help but ultimately causes more problems for them. He is cute and feisty, an agile fighter, and a little annoying.

His weapon is a sun mace that doubles as a speeder. It's a little to heavy for him to lug around on his own, so the rocket helps him swing it.

Bandit Girl, in the flesh.

2011-01-15T20:27:00.000-08:00

I had the privilege of working with the illustrator Marcos Chin and director David Drake on a theatrical adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's short story The Snow Queen. My primary responsibility in the show was to envision and construct the costume for the Bandit Girl character (described by a classmate as "Socially Awkward Girl with a Knife.")

The Bandit Girl is a really fun and quirky character. She rescues the heroine Gerda from a band of savages, drags her to a cave against her will, and then releases her after a dramatic change of heart. To me, the character represents the untamed and desperate qualities of human nature. She is someone who has never been able to emotionally connect with people because of the dangers of living in the wilderness.
For my early designs, I wanted the costume to be both sexy and earthy, and indicate the season of Fall. I'll admit, I went through some pretty hilarious sketches before I settled on a final idea.
As Marcos and I discussed it further, we decided to make the costume multi-layered, centering the design around a wolf head dress and a cloak made of leaves. I also decided to toss some catholic school girl, roller-derby, and gold bling into the mix.

I found it really interesting to design for a physical costume. I was much more focused on the concept and materials than the actual technical aspects of the drawing. The real work was yet to come...

It turns out the David asked me to play the character in the show (I wasn't too surprised...) so I had the learning experience of figuring out how to make a costume that fit me. Through much trial and error I managed to construct the headdress from a bike helmet and cardboard, devise an excuse for a shirt out of white fabric and safety pins, and don't even ask me how the skirt managed to stay on my body, but it made it through 3 performances. (Hot glue is my best friend.) Here are some shots the final product taken during the show:

Into the eye of the Noodlestrom

2010-09-08T21:03:00.000-07:00

Chicken Pasta, that's all I have to say about this.

Summer Doodles.

2010-09-07T13:14:00.000-07:00

I fell in love with faber castell brush pens this summer. Too bad that I'm so rough with them, I probably blew through about 8 within a month.

On this one pencils (mostly) by Brandon Wallace, inks are me.

Big Ole' Spring Semester Sketch Dump

2010-09-07T13:06:00.000-07:00

Here is a batch of sketches from my spring semester sketchbook that I finally got around to scanning. I've long since stopped treating my sketchbooks like precious objects, so many of these scans are smudged and wrinkled with scribbles from the other side of the sheet showing through. With every passing semester, it seems like my pages get messier as I'm progressively easing up on self-censorship. These are ordered more or less in chronological order.

Deadsurfing

2010-08-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

I've been working almost exclusively traditionally this summer, but due to the craptastic nature of my family's scanner I won't be able to show any of that batch of new work until I get back to MICA. Until then, here is a new digital piece. I've been trying to make my work more dynamic, playing with motion, distortion, and stylization. Unlike my more realistic pieces, when I cartoon I let myself go impulsively and imaginatively nuts, trusting that the fundamentals I've learned will hold things together.

Oops

2010-08-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

Here's some stuff that's now a few months old that I forgot to post, during the heat of finals last semester.

Mock Gig poster-

Concept-

Generic angst-ridden dudes, created in the fury of a custom brush explosion-

Piano Ghost Comic

2010-04-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to post this but I decided to do it anyways, if only because I spent so much time on it. We had to do a 4-8 page comic for Narrative illustration, and I ended up going more towards the 8 page side... I was essentially cramming a 12-16 page story into 7 pages, which was a little frustrating. I wish that I would have had time to ink this, but I did the best I could with what time I had. I might go back this summer and draw the flashback page about the girl's past (instead of cramming it into a speech bubble.) Anyways, It was a great learning experience in terms of pacing a narrative and working with a lot of dialogue. (also a good lesson about biting off more than I can chew...)

Drawing from the Tablet work

2010-04-21T11:38:00.000-07:00

Here are a few recent assignments from my tablet drawing class. The first two are partially from life, finished from a photo and the last one was done exclusively from a variety of photo refs. (thank you katie for helping me out with that.)

Working on color, instead of focusing so much on rendering. I'm learning a lot in this class. Colors got a bit squashed as usual... I really need to figure out how to fix that.

detail:

Speaker for the Dead book cover

2010-04-11T11:29:00.000-07:00

Here is a mock cover I made for one of my favorite books, Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. (Yes, it recently came to my attention that the author is a homophobic ass- a revelation that came as quite a shock and disappointment...) The book begins with the gruesome murder of a human scientist by a race of seemingly peaceful native aliens, called Piggies. The scientist's adopted daughter, who feels responsible for the incident, calls a Speaker for the Dead to come to the planet and discover what happened that night. I wanted to symbolically depict the incident, which serves as a catalyst for the main conflict between the two races, while hinting at the secret behind the murder.

I've never liked the published cover of the book. Its a generic looking, massive space port on the surface of the planet. It doesn't even make sense in the context of the story, where the colony on the planet is tiny and isolated. In my opinion, good book covers should contain more thought to them, and reveal something about the story inside.

Muse CD cover- City of Delusion

2010-03-22T19:33:00.000-07:00

Slammed this out over the weekend for my Narrative Illustration class. I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out considering the time I had to work on it. Its based of the song City of Delusion by Muse, and designed to be a wrap around jacket type thing.

Amandroid revision and random cowboys.

2010-03-11T11:18:00.000-08:00

Its crazy how you can come back to a piece after a week of not thinking about it and see it with fresh eyes. I realized how flat and colorless this was, that it was basically grey-on-grey with blue highlights and a fleshy blob. Thanks to the infinite ability of almighty Photoshop to make drastic adjustments within seconds, I've tried to make this one pop much more and also work better as an integrated whole.

I forgot to post this for some reason, but here's a random thing that I did in my free time at the beginning of the semester. (I would really like to know where the hell this time came from and where it has gone...) I was messing with overlaying layers and textures on top of a pencil sketch. I might have gone a bit overboard...but it was just for practice.

One more random thing...an environment speed painting that from start to finish took the duration of a phone call with my mom. I'm thinking 30ish minutes...?

Amandroid

2010-03-05T09:57:00.000-08:00

This inevitable illustration was brought into existence by stretching the parameters of an assignment in Illust 2. We were instructed to draw ourselves or someone we knew with toy or doll-like features. I got away with doing a robot. Do I even need to say that this was inspired by Masamune Shirow? (I titled the file "meintheshell" haha.) This one took about seven hours, which actually seems a little too long. I've come to embrace the fact that I am an extremely restless an impatient person, and need to be doing either a ton of projects at once or short focused assignments. Blogger desaturated the colors as usual (reds especially.) Does anybody know how to fix this???

Anyways, I'm trying to get faster and looser at digital painting, and not get obsessively sucked into rendering something to look perfectly smooth and seamless. I'm past the point of trying to make my digital work look like "real paintings," instead I want to capitalize on the speed and versatility of digital media to create unique effects. I'm a huge fan of custom brushes, and think that when used with a normal hard round they can add a spark of individuality and contribute to the "cool" factor of a piece. I'm also trying to incorporate the energy and messiness of my drawings into my finished pieces, since I normally find myself looking from a finished piece to the sketch wondering why the heck the sketch always looks better. In this case, my painting improved on the sketch (the face, geez...) but remained true to the original sense of form and light.

Also, a massive dump full of cowboys and depressed people is on its way...I just need to get my lazy butt to a scanner.

Dan Deacon Done

2010-01-26T18:41:00.000-08:00

My enthusiasm for this project evaporated after about 3 hours of working on it, and my neutrality towards his music took a downward turn after about 30 minutes of sincerely open minded listening. Blogger kind of nuked the colors... I have nothing more to say about this or Deacon's music. Crit welcomed, of course.

First week back and the whip is already cracking

2010-01-23T14:46:00.000-08:00

Here are the two main pieces I've been working on this week.

This is a WIP for the first assignment for my Illustration2 class with John Malloy. We were supposed to make a 9x9 square composition based off the music of the Baltimore musician, Dan Deacon. I feel neutral towards his music, but I enjoy how cooky the guy is, and I wanted to include some of the bizarre characters he has created to show the quirky cartoonish style of his music.

Just a basic black and white self portrait... a very expected first assignment from my Drawing with the Tablet class. 5ish hours.

Killroy and Medusa

2009-11-20T12:48:00.000-08:00

(Is it a blogging faux paux to post twice in the same day? Oh, well...)

Two recent pieces of very different styles.
The first is a piece I whipped out in a day for Illustration Club's Out of Orbit book. It's a very old character of mine, Killroy the space cowboy. I've neglected him this year, so I figured that he deserved some attention. This was really fun to do. The explosion and stars were made with black ink on a separate paper, then scanned and inverted. I used a custom brush made from a photo of a telephone line for the techy- ground that he is standing on.
Here's the other piece, which was an assignment for Illustration I. It was a pretty straightforward assignment- draw a greek myth. After about two weeks of sketching and indecisiveness and restarting three times, I settled on Medusa. For some reason, I wanted to do something romantic. I think everyone knows the basic story of Medusa, she turns people to stone when she looks at them yadda-yadda. So this guy is wearing a blindfold so he can be with her...Okay I'm going to stop with the cheese now.
Unlike Killroy, Medusa sucked a huge chunk of time out of my life... I don't even want to say how many hours were spent staring at the computer screen. The sad thing is, I feel like I over-rendered it in some areas. Overall though, I'm really happy with how this turned out, especially the tones of color in their bodies.

Visual Journalism Sketchdump#1

2009-11-20T11:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a bunch of work done for Visual Journalism, a class where we go out to different places in Baltimore and just draw from observation.

My early work was very much a struggle for me, since I was much more comfortable drawing from imagination then I was drawing from observation. I played around with simplification and color, but I got frustrated and bored. Some of the ways that I was thinking about breaking up space with rectangular shapes carry over to my current work for the class.

I've been taking a different approach for my more recent work. My goals for these spreads were to fill the pages with as much information as possible (get the most out of this expensive moleskin haha) and to pay attention to the overall composition. I'm interested in a geometric breakdown of the page using line and blocks of writing. I think of it like an intuitive puzzle, trying to figure out where to put lines, blocks of text, organic forms and selectively rendered areas. The fun part is that its all from life, and the pages read to me like a collage of memories, thoughts and experiences.

Please forgive the nonsensical formatting of this post... I'm still trying to figure out how this all works and I'm sick of trying to fight with it right now haha.