Single Cell

Way back in 2006 me and my friends in college came up with a concept for a short film that we gave the working title of Single Cell. The idea of the short film was that human civilization had ended and the single cell microbes evolved from our ashes. The story takes place where their evolution had reached a tribe level. For awhile now I have been working on compiling a concept art portfolio; Laura was looking at my old Single Cell designs and sketches and said that I had a lot of good stuff here and should try and use some of this for the aforementioned portfolio. I looked at it and I did have a lot of things going but I remembered a lot of the details about the world. Though looking at the old stuff I knew I could do better so I started working on it again. Here are a few paintings that I did for this project.





















This is Ero, he is the main character a young boy who would rather play his flute then participate in his coming of age ceremony. He is reluctant to grow up and become a warrior/ hunter like his father.



















Here is Ero making an expression, I figured that for the most part this would be a short film with little to no dialogue making the performances having to tell the story. I knew it would make for stronger animation and look better on all of our reels.





















This is Ero's dad, who we never gave a name to (if any one has a suggestion I'm all ears). They live in a hunter and warrior society and Ero's father is a revered warrior, there is a blade hidden in his walking stick. Ero's father being a proud warrior wants his son to participate in the ceremony and doesn't really understand why his son isn't excited to become a man, so to speak.




















This is a pen and ink drawing (that I started to paint, though I'm not a fan of the painting) of Ero meeting the Shaman (who also should have a better name or title) for the first time in the Shaman's hut.

There will be more of this world coming up. I have decided to to start posting it now to share and get feed back and get any one who remembers this to get excited about it again.

Why Be Blue?

Here is a painting I did for a friend of mine, Ricky Burger, who is a Sacramento based musician who I happen to think is going places. She has asked me to do animation for one of her upcoming music videos

video so I have started to do character design for her, beginning with the main character, the sad accordion. I thought he would make an interesting painting and allow me to explore him more as a character so I painted him as an abandoned instrument in an attic. There will be more about this project in the future.





















The musical note he is saying is a B flat, a dumb joke I know, but I love it so.

Lady Skull Face in the Big City

I revisited Lady Skull Face in this painting of her in a desolate city scape.





















I think I will be doing more works featuring her in the future.

The Crusher of Hearts

Earlier this year I did a sketch for my daily sketch blog of a female Luchador crushing a heart and named it "Yo Soy La Reina De La Trituradora Del Anillo" which in Spanish means (or at least what meant I meant it to mean) "I'm the Crusher, Queen of the Ring." Named after the Ramones song "The Crusher".

I really liked the sketch but i wanted to do more with it and so i decided to redraw it here are a
few sketches.

I wanted to capture more of the whole scene in the painting i want to do. So I wanted to make sure to draw her as full figure in the ring. For some reason I have a habit of drawing characters too big so that they don't fit on the page, so I wanted to make sure I had the whole figure. The Idea was to make it maybe like the end of the fight and she has ripped out her opponent's heart and she is surrounded by the dead. I love little Dia De Los Muertos statues and they were my inspiration for the audence members.





















I felt that the most important part of the painting is her squeezing the heart. I didn't feel like i had a good position for her to stand in so I worked on the on some detail sketches of her of her standing in a different position planing to go back and drawing the whole scene around her when i found something I was happy with.



















In this sketch trying to iron out position and posing so she looks like she is crushing it. I was also trying to get back to the original sketch design and try and recapture some of what i loved in that drawing.





















I decided to move from here to a test painting, i wanted to make sure that I had the hand gesture correct and I wanted to make sure that I could paint her well, it has been a long time since I painted with water color so I was a little uneasy about starting it.

Here is the first in a series of paintings that I plan to do with Luchadors and in particular La Trituradora de Corazóns.

I tried a new technique where I painted over the sketch and then inked the painting, it works, but the only benefit is my black outlines are darker, so I don't know if I will do it again.

Family Christmas Card 2006 (Drunken Gnomes)

Well seeing the idea that [the last post Seasons Eatings (or a zombie Christmas)] was rejected I feel that it is only appropriate to show the idea that was chosen by my mother to grace the Royal family Christmas card that year. As usual I made a lot of suggestions that were obscene and devoid of traditional Christmas cheer, leaving my mom no choice but to tell me what to draw. This year she wanted something less "Christmasy", whereas the cards of the last couple of years have all featured Santa.

2002

The Swedish Santa

2003

Why The Elves make the toys

2004

Santa Stuck in a Chimney

2005

Christmas Eric
For 2005 Mom wanted a Santa free card. At first she was interested in something styled after old fashioned Christmas cards that featured Father Time and the Baby New Year. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Father Time was rather like Santa Claus in appearance; I had always seen Father Time more as the Grim Reaper, or simply as a very old man on the verge of death. And so these were the sketches I drew.

New Year Sketch 01

New Years Sketch 02

Of course, these sketches were rejected by my mom, and so this idea was abandoned.

Instead she decided she wanted gnomes. I liked this idea because for the previous two years I was pushing for more Norse mythological Christmas cards, having read the mythology, I saw many Christmas traditions based in it I thought it would be good to use. However, my mom wasn’t as keen on having Thor grace our Christmas card, and said she didn’t want to have to explain what it meant. She always liked gnomes, and as they were an easy way of touching on our Swedish heritage, we went with Gnomes, the pointy hatted, big bearded, itty-bitty people of the Scandinavian mythology.















Gnomes and faeries 01
At first I did a couple of sketches with faeries because they are also part of the Scandinavian mythology, but I didn't go too far with that particular concept because the gnomes were just more fun to draw.












Gnomes and faeries 02

















Gnome sketch 01
Happy Gnome!
















Gnome sketch 02













Gnome Card Sketch 01












Gnome Card Sketch 02













Gnome Card Sketch 03












sketch with ink Overlay












Outlines












Color












shading















Final Version

From Our Gnome to Yours
Have a Merry Christmas
And a Happy New Year

The Royals