And here are the rest of them.
Absolutely loved this project and it was the best education I could have had, seeing as I've had none. Artistically, that is. A degree in Anthropology doesn't really help in art (but is great for referencing concepts!).
Nobody knows who drew these by the way.
Here are some more.
Paul, by the way, is working on an amazing reboot of the Hellraiser franchise right now. It is a fan project of love and devotion which we are all eager to help get off the ground.
I so hope it happens as all the stuff I've seen is amazing and I love Hellraiser!
Pay heed, Mister Clive Barker, Sir, whom I love and admire very much.
Anyway, back to the boards. I learned so much on these: working accurately on my phone, getting used to the software, how to manipulate layers and textures and so on. A lot of the boards I got to do were 'boring' shots, but it was in trying to get depth and feel into these that I actually learned the most.
PS: the director's style sheet was mostly Terminator Salvation and Abrams' Star Trek, hence dirty textures and lens flares.
I just found out it's cool to post these!
A while back I was approached by my good friend and luminary, Paul Gerrard ( www.gerrardart.com ) who had previously worked on many big and exciting hollywood projects such as Battle: Los Angeles and Wrath of the Titans.
He was working on a project with director Mike LeHan and neded some help getting a whole load of storyboards together for a pitch package. He would do the key beats of the scene but needed the rest coloured and detailed to fit in so that as you looked through them they wouldn't stand out too much. Obviously I jumped at the chance to help out and get a taste of the hollywood. Paul sent me his first board and said just make them look similar.
After I cleaned my pants and told Paul that they would look in no way anything close to his fully-rendered cg/photoshop wonderment I started in them. I burned through as many as I could and Paul would message me whenever he had got one done.
It was a wonderful experience and one I hope to repeat soon.
Here then, are the boards in all their 'glory'. I did all of mine on my phone with my finger, much to Paul's surprise as he uses a 24gig pc. Yeah, you read that right. Paul's poop on mine from a great height, obviously.
The second volume of the Dicey Tales RPG is out now to download!
I did a load of stuff in this one: lots of pics for the beastiary and the 30s headshots. All of which can be perused on this very site. Lucky you!
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/108110/Dicey-Tales-%232
Here's a quick concept I did while watching an episode of The Simpsons, to break in my new phone.
Works pretty well.
(PS this is my character for the current playtest of Omnihedron Game's new fantasy game 'Epoch' which is so far proving to be an amazing game for storytelling and interactive, cinematic adventure. And it's designed to be played in an hour! Mighty! Can't wait to see more of this game and very honoured to be involved in it!)
For Heroes of Hellas RPG.
In a forgotten city from ages past a bold thief encounters an ancient lord of the skies. But what surprise is in the thief's bag? And which one is the predator?
Sketchbook crashed on my phone about halfway through this one which was a right pain. Took much longer than it should have!
Another piece for Heroes of Hellas.
The Fox and The Bull have finally reached the fabled Tower of Mists, but what do the ancient spirits hold in store for them?
And will they ever let them leave..?
A two player escalating dungeon of shifting puzzles, riddling spirits and angry wraiths.
Interesting fact, fact-fans: this is actually a tribute to another version which I lost.
Twice.
I wish Sketchbook autosaved.
The first one was much better, honest. You can never recapture that first time, though...
A bold, young demigod on a quest to discover his true nature leads his companions deep into the earth, to a realm which once was and is best left forgotten.
For in the shadows stir dark beasts and darker gods from an age long ago...
Here's another scene done for the forthcoming Heroes of Hellas RPG.
All done on htc desire phone in Sketchbook Mobile with my finger.
I know it's not what actual Mycenaea looked like, but it's similar to the spirit of it and fits in with the epic fantasy version of the Hellas rpg.
A spate of grizzly killings plagues the nights of New York City! Bodies are found horribly mutilated by a,serial killer the press are calling: "The Shredder!"
Oroku Saki was the top killer of the Ashi Clan. His brother, Nagi, ruled with Hamato Yoshi until the love of a woman drove them apart. Yoshi was forced to kill an enraged Nagi and then fled Japan after a vicious assault by Saki and his soldiers.
Saki then assumed comlete control of the clan and turned it into a private army. Driven by visions of his rise to power over the world, he formed Ashicorp as a front for his schemes and made bargains with dark powers. One of which was the mysterious TCRI corporation and it's head, General Kang.
Saki managed to track down Yoshi a few years later in New York. Blinded by rage, he ignored the path of fate and pursued him to his hiding place. He murdered him , but in the process was scarred by Yoshi's pet rat who escaped and on that fateful day, the TCRI truck he was meant to be guarding was caught up in a traffic accident, spilling it's mutagenic cargo into the sewers.
As all ninja know, there are no coincidences...
(It's funny 'cause I typed that wrong and it originally said "The Foof". Sounds like an all types of awesome supervillain!)
Legend has it The Foot were founded when two friends, Hamato and Oroku, killed a demonic dragon plagueing the countryside. They were trained in the mystic traditions of the ninja by the Tengu, mystic crow-men who speak to the wind and first taught men swordplay. Ninja love their legends and, while true or not, the Ashi ('foot') Clan have always been run by the elders of the Hamato and Oroku families, each wielding one of the twin Tengu Swords, ninjato with bone hilts (said to be carved from the bones of that dragon).
Today, The Foot ninja are soldiers of a private army, having fielded in Eastern Europe, South America and the Middle East. AshiCorp is a security contractor who has recently moved into the US. They run the security at TCRIs New York facility; another company shrouded in mystery.
Design-wise I wanted to go for a 'practical ninja' look. Urban combat, body armour, thermal lenses. They use ninjato and silenced small arms. Experts in infiltration and counter-surveilance. 21st Century Ninja. Genuine 'Future Soldiers': this is Oroku Saki's vision.
Casey has always been my favourite. I like it that he's a bit of a nutter. He has no glorious origin story; he just teaches himself lots of martial arts and goes out and beats up criminals. Design-wise, he doesn't need much doing: just a bit of a cooler mask, hood, darker clothes, all to give a bit more menace. His fighting style will be various bits if boxing, kung fu, karate, thai boxing mixed with some good stick skills; kali, escrima, etc. He'll be pretty fast, pretty vicious.
In our story his night patrols to combat the rise in organised crime on the streets bring him into conflict with The Foot and Raphael. He is the super of April's building and has a crush on her so watches over her and protects her when The Foot try to silence her. He teams up with the four turtle brothers to help take down the army of ninja and stop the evil alien Krang from destroying the city.
Mikey loves his brothers: that's what defines him. He just wants everyone to get along and as the youngest, he idolizes his brothers (from a design perspective, this means he takes visual cues from the other three- leo's cloth is copied in his tshirt, donnie's bandana style, raph's pouches). He works hard to keep all the brothers together and communicating. He trains with Leo, he talks tech with Donnie (he's hacked his own xbox and can build a pc) and plays beat 'em ups with Raph. Once a week he gets the bros together to watch kung fu movies and play Tekken or Street Fighter (this used to be a Friday night deal but Raph is out patrolling almost every night over the weekend now).
He plays online games for money, competing in tournaments and farming MMO characters. His love of pizza is unrivaled.
In combat he fights with one set of nunchaku. Using two, while it looks flashy, severely limits the range of techniques which you can employ and pretty much eliminates any grappling moves. He employs traditional taijutsu but embelishes it with moments of flair from Bruce Lee movies and old Shaw Brothers flicks. He always likes to fight to a soundtrack, using his custom-built shell-pod (TM).
He is very easy-going and friendly, but if you threaten or harm his family he has the capacity to explode even worse than Raphael.
I've always thought of Donnie as the spiritual heart of the four brothers. He's the calm at the eye of the storm. Because of this I wanted him to have a certain priestly quality to his design.
I put in some shinto prayer flags on his belt and used the shoulder straps to give him a bit of a yamabushi look.
Rather than worshipping the spirits of places he devotes himself to the working of machines. He creates and maintains all of the brothers' weapons and gear, acid-etching their custom weapons (he did etch Raph's first few pairs of sai but has stopped now as he keeps throwing them at people and dropping them).
He has also constructed a massive hydro generator complex making them self sufficient and has hacked together a city-wide private communications network and routes high speed, uncapped broadband from Wall Street. He also does a lot of online gambling, working the odds exactly and always coming out winning; it's just maths to him. This keeps the family solvent and covers all their expenditures.
He prefers the staff as it is one of the most basic, fundamental of weapons (as my two year old said recently: "It's just a stick, daddy.") and allows him to implement a great degree of physics into his fighting. He uses his environment and his opponent as factors in his style more than the others do. To him, fighting is just a different type of maths.
For those interested here's a little bit of the process involved for these:
I usually start by doodling a very rough layout on some paper in black biro. Nothing fancy, just a4 copy paper, usually folded in half or quatered to fit in my pocket. I like biro as it's fast and easy. The thumbnail will usually be about 2" in size- just a small one to get fhe gesture and anatomy right. Details and such can be fixed in the final piece.
Then I take a snap on my phone (htc desire) and open it in sketchbook mobile. Dropping the layer's opacity down I add another on top and set to multiply. I then draw with a small black brush. This is done on the phone with nature's greatest stylus: my finger. Each stroke usually has to be done 2 or 3 times and this stage really breeds patience, especially as I usually do this on the metro on the way to/from work.
I then drop the opacity of the linework down, delete the reference layer, drop a layer underneath and put in the colour flats.
On another layer above I put in the chunky shadows, nice and fast with a chisel-tipped marker brush. This opacity gets dropped down too.
Over it all I add a scratchy texture with the opacity dropped right down, put on the text and add a grainy border in pixlromatic.
Raph is the angriest of all the brothers (and also the shortest- coincidence?), frustrated that his existence is nothing more than an accident. Master Splinter insists that there are no accidents.
Raph constantly clashes with Leo over everything, they are too alike but refuse to acknowledge it.
When someone trains in martial arts they always hit a point where they think they are invincible and need to constantly seek out combat in which to prove themselves. Getting past that point is a major breakthrough where you discover that you are only now ready to truly begin learning. Raphael, however is stuck with his rage and unable to move on. He patrols the night alone, striking out as a vigilante. The rise in vigilantism has caused the NYPD to form a special task force. It is on one of his patrols that Raph first violently encounters Casey Jones and later saves April O'Neil from The Foot, confirming their presence in the city.
When considering how to coreograph the combat I was first struck by the apparent dichotomy of Raph's choice of weapons: the sai. Why would a violently aggressive fighter choose a defensive weapon? As a tool to get in close to an armed opponent. He'll drop them when he doesn't need them. He has knives strapped to him to quickdraw in different close combat situations. The turtles have no pockets so make use of pouches and webbing.
Raphael keeps track of his kills by carving them on his shell.
With all of the talk about the new Turtles movie I've gotten quite excited. I know people are moaning about it already but I know a couple of people working on it and I have faith that it'll be awesome.
Turtles had quite a big impact on my life so it holds a special place in my heart. I used to buy the original comics with my pocket money from the comic shop in town. I drew and coloured an A3 poster which I kept on my bedroom wall for years. I had done a couple of years of judo when the cartoon came out and it inspired me to keep going and to search out more. By the time the movie came out I was in high school and had made friends with a lot of new guys: through them I found different styles to learn and eventually I found a dojo who would teach me ninjutsu. This had the most profound impact on my life.
As a result I would like to see the Turtles done justice, so, short of working on the movie myself (hi, Mr Bay, please PM me!) I have decided that if at least I can get my vision out there than I have done myself justice.
All that crap said, I'll start getting my versions of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles up for you all to see.
First we have Leonardo, the leader of the crew. He is a devoted son and faithful student. Like his brother, Raph, he is filled with rage and angst but he buries himself in his studies, training harder than all his brothers to keep himself under control. As a boy he read Musashi's Go No Rin Sho every day (who didn't) and became a firm follower of the Ni Ten Ichi Ryu sword style. Recently he has begun to mature and found himself profoundly affected by Yagyu Munenori's Life-giving Sword, seeing it as the true Ninja way to perfection of sword and spirit. Of all the brothers he is the most versed in traditional teachings and is trained to the highest level in all aspects of the ninja.
This film has been preying on my mind of late. I'm working on a Jennifer 6 picture if and when I ever get a free second: hopefully it'll be up soon.
