PK: SPRING

Spring swag for Parallel Kingdom!

PK: ST. PATRICK'S DAY

Parallel Kingdom swag released across two updates.

Got some nice compliments on these from our players in the forums. :)

WOOT SHIRT: UNLOVABLE

My first shirt.wood derby entry in quite a while, and I'm hoping to get back to making it a regular side hobby. I took a darker approach here in order to explore some interesting textures.

If you're a woot member you can vote for it!

PARALLEL MAFIA IS ANNOUNCED!!

Very excited that my employer has officially announced our company's new game, Parallel Mafia, a robust location-based MMORPG set in a dystopian future ruled by crooked corporations and cybernetically enhanced mobsters. This being my art blog I'll be emphasizing my own work as usual, but several people on our art team have been working really hard on the graphics side. And of course many of our talented PerBlue employees in every department collaborated to give life to this new project, but I have to focus on the art aspects here or I'll just go crazy singing praises for all of my creative cohorts.

The website features a taste of the items and NPC's I've been working on:

Another exciting development is that the Parallel Kingdom website has been completely overhauled, and now features a lot of the art team's concept art.

ROMANTIC PINEAPPLE

A pineapple comprised of hearts. This had some meaning a while back but doesn't anymore, let's leave it at that.

PK: VALENTINE'S DAY

Our swag for Valentine's Day was split into three separate releases.

PK: THE BIG GAME JERSEYS

Lots of jerseys for our players to celebrate an important upcoming athletic competition.

PK: CHINESE NEW YEAR DRAGONS

Dragon float decoration and water dragon enemy, added to our game to celebrate Chinese New Year. Hi-res and pixel art versions.

PK: HIGH-RES ART! (part 2)

More high resolution artwork from Parallel Kingdom. I tried to mostly show off images that I painted or redesigned myself, but again, the game art we create for PerBlue is often a team effort. Many of the original character designs were conceived by our lead artist Alayna, and all our artists readily share input and criticisms.

PK: HIGH-RES ART! (part 1)

Up until now I have only been posting the finalized pixel art I've been creating for my job, but a lot of our drawings don't begin at the small size. We create much of the art at a larger size and then reduce it for export into the game. After the size reduction, most of the pixelated images require more touch-ups and highlights to make them readable on a cell phone screen. Some types of images are easier to create at the small size initially, or don't need to be all that detailed before the resizing process, which is why I don't have polished high resolution versions of everything I've ever made; but to celebrate the end of my first calendar year with PerBlue Mobile and Social Gaming, I've decided to post the high res versions that are finished enough to stand alone as art pieces. I will be posting a follow up to this, with all the monsters I have made.

JESUS IN LOVE: DAVID AND JONATHAN

The website that featured my MFA illustrations ran the David and Jonathan image again as part of an article on the two biblical figures, which contains depictions from other artists as well. It's wonderful to see other renditions, going back centuries.

The full calendar is available for purchase on my deviantART page.

PK: NEW YEAR'S

Celebrating New Year's in Parallel Kingdom with a countdown ball and fancy party gown (my co-worker Beau handled making the matching tux).

PK: CHRISTMAS KNIGHT

Concept sketch and final images for the Christmas-themed knight swag.

PK T-SHIRT: PHOTO FIX

This photo was taken to promote our Parallel Kingdom t-shirts on social networking sites. It came out a bit fuzzy and with a double exposure, but I worked some Photoshop magic on it. For the words on the t-shirt I actually removed them completely, and used the original logo file to bring it back in, warping and shading it to conform to the t-shirt folds. And yes the model is me too. :)

PK: SNOWMEN

As we continue to celebrate the holiday season at work, our programmers came up with a fun update for our players which introduces collecting snow, having snowball fights and building snowmen. I designed the four types of snowmen available: troll, dragon, zagharu (ice bird) and snow fort.

PK: MONSTER OVERHAUL

Been going through the old monster artwork and adding more details, and full bodies to the creatures that had been represented by only a head or a bust. This work was fun, and since a lot of the heads had already been designed by other artists on our team, it became a sort of collaboration project; as well as a challenge to me to maintain consistency with their styles. Alayna had originally designed the dragon heads and most of the original monsters, and Kyle was responsible for the large death knight, nosferatu and werewolf.

INTERVIEW: JESUS IN LOVE

I was interviewed by a LGBT-affirming spiritual blog called Jesus in Love, regarding the calendar illustrations I created for my MFA degree.

INTERVIEW

The full calendar is available for purchase on my deviantART page.

PK: BUOY DECORATIONS

Fun decorations for our players to place on their buoys.

PK: THANKSGIVING SWAG

A few swag items I made to contribute to our celebration of Thanksgiving. Turkey puncher brass knuckles and a feathered headband.

UPDATE: TEAM RANDI

My t-shirt design for JREF has made another public appearance, this time appearing on a zombie-dressed skeptic protester joining D.J. Grothe and others who demanded answers from alleged "psychic" James Van Praagh, who makes a living by exploiting the emotions of people grieving for dead loved ones.

The event was covered by the Huffington Post, with more details on the JREF website.

PK: HALLOWEEN PT. 2

More swag, and a full sized painting that doubles as a loading splash screen, and desktop wallpaper.

WARRIOR UPDATE

My employer is allowing all the artists to choose an image to print large on canvas. I added some textures and tweaked some color of my warrior desktop wallpaper.

CONTENT OF CHARACTER

A humorous design lightly poking fun at MLK Jr. while, I think, still honoring the gist of his social message.

PK: HALLOWEEN SWAG

Classic monster movie costumes to celebrate Halloween.

BUILD MADISON 2011: ZOMBIE CRAFT

I was invited to participate in Build Madison, a 24-hour create-a-thon where local artists and programmers get together at the Sector67 hacker space to create products overnight. My co-workers at PerBlue created a zombie-themed game, which was initially visually represented by ASCII art. I made more detailed versions of each tile while keeping a very simplistic, retro feel.

UPDATE: Recap of the event HERE. Play the game HERE.

PK: PIRATE SWAG

Sea dragon scale mail and mermaid mail to celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day, arrr.

PK: SPECIALIZATION WALLPAPERS

Wallpapers for our character classes.

Crafter

Warrior

Militia