A Color Design Exercise

 2008                                                2012

As a quick practice exercise outside of work-related-art this evening, I decided to grab an old PSD file from 2008 of a character of mine, and completely re-tackle the color design. I wanted to try to grasp the warmth and mood I'd hoped for but failed to attain a few years ago. Around 15 minutes of tinkering snagged me the newest version of the image, whose color I'm infinitely happier with. Thank goodness for an improved eye and skill with each year's passing experience.

Cheers,

Mel

CCS Film Showcase Article

Much thanks to Tiffany Esshaki for including my work is a recent article for candgnews.com. The article features information on the work by myself and a number of good friends of mine to be hosted at the CCS Film Showcase on, July 28th, by The Stratton Foundation. The article also mentions the ARMSmasters Project - promotion greatly appreciated as the Project itself furthers its Kickstarter campaign. You can read the full article here.

And as always, you can help make the ARMSmasters animated pilot episode a reality through our Kickstarter fundraiser, and get awesome swag for your donations!

Charity And The Boys - Completed Lines

Finally, line art complete for all 7 gangstas! The above are Voth, Brunner, Paz, Charity, Marquard, Zahn and Cameron on commission for Renee. These will be in full color, and are currently all completed up through the flat-color stage. Now, on to paint.

-Mel

New ARMSmasters Trailer Track

Check out our updated Animation Teaser for The ARMSmasters Project; now featuring a demo of music crafted just on our behalf by Andrew Prahlow who was an assistant composer on The Legend of Korra and Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness among other things. His generous donation of time and creativity yielded us the first of our ARMSmasters specific tracks and enabled us to update our teaser. Thank you, Andrew! More updates from this past week are forth coming on the ARMSmasters Production Blog.

Help make the ARMSmasters animated pilot episode a reality through our Kickstarter fundraiser, and get awesome swag for your donations!

Tyr In Action

Here's another quick collab with my buddy ~mikewinn - his drawing and flat colors, my lighting and shading of Tyr, one of the main characters from The ARMSmasters Project.

Want to see more of Tyr in action? Help us reach our funding goal on Kickstarter for ARMSmaster's animated pilot episode! (You'll get some awesome swag for your donation as well!)

I ended up unexpectedtly having quite the ARMSmasters ART weekend there - added some snapshots from my Art-and-XFiles-o-thon below.

Thanks, all!
-Mel

ARMSmaster's Aeslyn: Magic Caster

Another collaboration with Michael Winn - this is Aeslyn from The ARMSmasters Project. Mike drew and flat-colored this one, I added shading, lighting, and VFX.

For anyone who has not yet had the opportunity, I'd like to encourage you to check out our fundraising efforts for this animated pilot over on Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/760823342/the-armsmasters-project-the-animated-pilot

It's an exciting opportunity to not only make this action-adventure animation a reality, but to support Michigan artists and our local film industry.

How do Kickstarter donations work? Here's a great explanation from Mike:

Kickstarter is a crowd source funding website where you can back creative projects financially.(No withdraws happen from your bank account until after the end of the funding deadline)

As a result: If you have intentions of backing us and haven't done so - it's actually a good idea to just go ahead and pledge. You can always adjust your pledge amount afterwards and it helps push our project further by increasing our backer numbers and our current figures. The more backers we have and the higher our totals the more we get noticed, so please back us sooner rather then later if it is your intention to do so. :)

Thanks again!

- Mel