The Crabshack Gallery » Paintings

Paint it Black

MashPotato — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:03:21 +0000

Woo, I’m on an update roll! School’s almost done, and I’ll be going back on Project Zomboid fulltime :)

I quite like how this one turned out, especially as I did pretty much all of it in one day :) My favourite painting in a while.

The Little Mermaid, Part 3

MashPotato — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:55:14 +0000

The exciting conclusion to the Little Mermaid trilogy! It’s like the other two, but bigger with more explosions! ;)

The castle of the sea king, based on coral. I really tried throughout this project to keep everything very organic.

The Sea Witch’s lair. Once again with the organic origins: her chair is a dolphin skeleton, her cauldron is a giant clam, and the lights are little phosphorescent fish trapped behind films (which you can’t really tell in this picture, but that was the idea behind it ;) )

The Little Mermaid, part 2

MashPotato — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 23:05:35 +0000

Here’s more selections from the Little Mermaid project :)

Character expressions:

Character poses:

Maquette made from super sculpey:

The Little Mermaid, part 1

MashPotato — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:19:52 +0000

So… I’m back ;)

For anyone who visits here but not The IndieStone (and why would you do that? ;) ), the update of Project Zomboid has arrived! It’s not fully official yet (we’re still squashing bugs), but if you can’t wait, you can download it here.

So here’s some stuff I’ve been up to on the non-PZ front in school: some concept art based on The Little Mermaid. I went with the original Hans Christian Andersen version, which is really a beautiful story and makes me cry every time ;) I decided to make the mermaids more fish-like; a bit monstrous, but pretty in their own way.

Here’s a character lineup: the little mermaid (based on a copper-banded butterfly fish), the sea witch (angler fish), generic merman (royal blue tang), and the human form of the little mermaid.

A character rotation of the little mermaid:

And a closeup action shot!

More to come later!

Three Pages

MashPotato — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 21:55:27 +0000

Well, here I am at the end of my semester, and I find myself updating for the first time since it started. This blog format was supposed to make me post MORE :(

Here’s a sequence of 3 pages done for a children’s illustration course in which we illustrated an Aesop fable. I did the North Wind and the Sun :)

Ahoy thar!

MashPotato — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 18:31:22 +0000

Wheee, end of second semester, and two more to go :)

A character design for a bloodthirsty harlot-turned-pirate. I have more of her, but I like this one best :)

I’m Tired of Looking at Me

MashPotato — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 03:46:58 +0000

I made about 5 self-portraits within the span of about two weeks…eep. Anyhow, here’s one I finished tonight :)

Hopefully I can take a break from these for a while ;)

Mona Lisa(ish) after Sophie Griotto (sorta)

MashPotato — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 20:26:35 +0000

It’s nearing the end of my first semester in my illustration program, and so I should have a small slew of things to post when I get some time. For now, here’s a painting I did in which we were to reinterpret the Mona Lisa in the style of a different illustrator. I chose the fantastic Sophie Griotto, whose lovely website you can visit here. I couldn’t really capture her style, as I just couldn’t mimic the loose spontaneity of her work… it’s more of a weird hybrid between her art and my usual style. If you ignore the point of the exercise, I think it turned out okay in itself ;)

Btw, I’m going to be erasing all my book reviews, as I highly doubt anyone really cares about my opinion on books, and I update my reviews so sporadically it just ruins the flow of the blog ;)

To Fly…

MashPotato — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 23:12:24 +0000

You can do it, Mr. Beaverton! Just believe!

I re-jigged this painting from one I did a few years ago. Seeing the change is pretty neat–the original looked more like a falling groundhog than a flying beaver :D

Not just PAWSed, but at an end

MashPotato — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 02:38:19 +0000

Yes, what I had long suspected has now become official: PAWS is cancelled.

It’s sad that it will never be released, as it was a fun game and with more time put into I think it would have made quite a spiffy game; however time is a resource that is in scarce supply. To find out more about what happened you can read Lemmy101′s blog entry about it (it’s more to do with his and CaptainBinky’s experience with another project, but it does go into why PAWS is not possible).

On a more positive note, I did learn quite a bit from the experience (my first runcycles, tiles, and more), enjoyed working on it, and I’m hoping to use the sprites I worked on in another project so it won’t be a complete loss :) I may release some more art later on, but for now here are two character portraits from the selection screen of Mr. Spiffo, the sly raccoon, and Pancake, the cheerful hedgehog: