Heart Nouveau

Gears 3 Enviro Bits

Moar Life Drawing

Portrait from life:

Conté crayon on paper.
45 min pose, but noodled on it a bit afterwards.  Also added the toned paper texture, border and punched the white highlights in PS after scanning.

Gettin' Whimsy Wit it

I did this little illustration for an upcoming Vaudeville/Burlesque show:

It was a quick favor that I only spent a couple hours on, including handwriting the title and doing the layout.

I sourced a photo (NSFW) of one of the lovely performers in the show who also does modeling and turned her into a mermaid.

Life Drawing

45 min  life drawing:

Conté crayon on paper - (Portrait originally on drawn on white paper. Toned background and subtle white highlights added in PS)

1-5 min gestures:

Hellgate Environment

This "concept art" blog has been pretty heavy on the life drawing for a while, so I figured I should post some actual concept art.

It's not any new, shiny, hotness, but it's something.  A piece I did for Hellgate back in 2008 that I never posted:

Life Drawing: Portrait

Recent life drawing - 45 min portrait

Conté crayon on paper - (originally on drawn on white paper. Toned background and subtle white highlights added in PS)

Life Drawing: A few of my favorite ladies

Some quick portraits of a few of my favorite ladies (both as models and as people).

PORCELAIN

20 min life portrait - The original drawing is Conté crayon on paper (I added the wood texture later in PS):

VIRGINIA & ROBIN

10 min (each) life portraits - Conté crayon:

Life Drawing

30 min dual portrait - Conté crayon (stained paper texture added later in PS):

  
(Set of four) 1 min gestures - Conté crayon:

(Set of four) 2 min gestures - Conté crayon:

 

5 min & 10 min drawings - Conté crayon:

Life Drawing

Did this portrait last night (20 mins):
This one is from a few weeks ago (20 mins):

...and just a few 2 min gestures from the same session a couple weeks ago:

Lara Croft Concept Art

This is the final design of Lara Croft for Tomb Raider: Underworld. It's been a couple years since the game came out now and I realized I never posted it. There was lots more development for this character, but this is the final one we landed on. Maybe I'll post more of the development concepts I did later if anybody is interested.

New Facebook Page

Hey guys, I have a brand spanking new facebook "Artist" page. Please stop by and "like" it if you are so inclined.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ben-Shafer/172369386153250

Life Drawings

Some figure drawings I did last week.


Conté crayon on paper.

Mancubus

My take on Mr. Fatty McDoom:

Unreal Tech Demo

Here is something I worked on recently. Congrats to the super talented mofos I work with at Epic Games on pushing what's possible in realtime rendering using the Unreal Engine! This is a little glimpse of the future of the game industry, showing the level of ingame graphics developers will hopefully be able to accomplish on the next generation of consoles. Check it out here:

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/debut-trailer-samaritan/711467

I designed the badguys and the hobo they are beating up, as well a bunch of the signage and some other random stuff.

...and here is a video in which IGN breaks down some of the new tech and features we implemented in the Unreal Engine if you are interested in that geeky stuff and want to know what's under the hood :)

http://www.ign.com/videos/2011/03/08/i...gn-rewind-theater-the-next-generation-of-graphics

Color keys

Well, I hit a year since my last post and I figure that's pretty unacceptable, so I dug up something old that I haven't posted before to keep the ol blog alive. Just a little color key series for Hellgate: Tokyo before Flagship Studios imploded. The idea here was to break up the monotonous, desaturated, dingy brown palette that dominated the original enviros with some more colorful areas and *gasp* some living plant life.

A couple environments for "Hellgate London"

Hellgate Things

Charcoal and black Prisma pencil on the top three. Digital for the bottom one.

Just another quick "Colors" painting on my ds

I did this quick little painting on my Nintendo ds when I was waiting for the coals to heat up on the bbq. Decided to share it, despite it's lack of coolness. :P

Watchworks

Lately I've been strangely fascinated by the inner workings of vintage watches. I came across a few antique watch movements a while ago and have since collected several more. I find the craftsmanship that went into those things really inspiring, so I selected my favorites, tacked them to my art table and did this series of drawings from them. (graphite on paper)

More Underworld Concepts

Here's another Underworld painting and a sketch for the Kraken (also tenderly referred to as "The Underpus" by fans on the TR forums)