The battle of the blog.

I'm getting ready to put together a comprehensive post on a book cover I did for a studio class last semester. the post will be relatively long and include several images. So I thought I'd try my hand at a quick warm up post. I haven't posted any images yet, and based on my lack of entries, I'm sure you can all assume I am unfamiliar with how to work with my blog effectively.

The warm up.

This image is of a monster I created for a contest at school called the Monster Battle. I won last year and I wanted to create something even more evil and dangerous than before.

The contest is not actually an art contest, but a hypothetical death match. The entries are divided up into pairs and set up in a single elimination tournament. The judges decide who wins by determining which monster in each pair would beat the other in a fight to the death. The decision is supposed to be made based on which monster looks like it could kill the other. Contestants are required to represent their monsters powers visually.

This particular little guy was a just a vision in my mind since last year. I opted to go with something else at the time (Pictured below. I'm glad I did, because I ended up winning). So I saved the idea in my mental filing cabinet for later.

My monster this year was about 1-2 hours worth of work. I started with a pencil sketch and worked over it in Photoshop (last year I didn't know how to use photoshop. I used a good old micron, which at the time was about the only medium I could use). I didn't use any reference, which is pretty obvious. While I was working I just tried to let the mark making spontaneously determine most of the forms. Towards the end I added the light tones and highlights vaguely based on a lightsource and threw in some internal nuclear glow and there ya have it.

A Fat, evil, cleaving, muscle bound beast with a nuclear powered laser cannon and a machine gun....that lost in the second round to a creature I nick named "stabby mcstabstab." I was sad, but congrats to Charlie for the win and the cool drawing, and thanks for vengence (Charlies monster destroyed Stabby McStabStab in the championship round).

(the images above are a test to see how the whole imaging posting thing works, so i apologize for any size/quality issues)