Rolltop Desk

My parents bought this antique rolltop desk several years ago and I thought it would be a fun prop to model. It's a relatively complex piece of furniture and I wanted the model to be as adjustable as possible. This was my first time using 3DS Max's Path Deform modifier, and it worked like a charm for the desk's namesake rolltop door, or "tambour."

om nom nom

Thesis Art

This is some more art from my 2011 thesis show. Above is a movie poster made for my animated short film, Ascension. I wanted to have a little fun with the design of the poster, so the character has the clichéd, back-to-the-camera pose, and the overall feel of the poster is perhaps a little more serious than the film itself. It also wouldn't be a legitimate movie poster if there wasn't an abundance of blue and orange.

Below is an image I had printed several feet wide, that showcases the three main scenes in the film. Each third of the image is a wide shot of each scene, which I blended them together at the seams to create one continuous picture. In the bottom left, you can see the film's main character, and in the top right is the mountain peak that he eventually climbs atop.

Spellsword

Journeyman Project 3's Chameleon Jumpsuit

Recently I was inspired to create my own rendition of the Chameleon JumpSuit from the 1998 adventure game The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time, one of my favorite PC games when I was younger. Maybe I'm looking at the game through nostalgia-tinted glasses, but I remember Legacy of Time combining interesting puzzles, a decent story, and often hilarious writing (primarily for the main character's AI companion, Arthur) into an overall entertaining adventure. The game can currently be purchased at GOG.com and I would highly recommend it to any fan of older adventure/puzzle games, especially those featuring fmv.

The Chameleon JumpSuit allows the wearer to assume a holographic form of any person they come across in a given timezone. This allowed for a number of puzzles involving the player interacting with other non-player characters under the guise of another character. After all, you wouldn't want to travel thousands of years into the past and freak out a Tibetan monk or Atlantian with your time traveling suit.

The only CG characters in Legacy of Time were a handful of aliens. Much like other games released around the same time such as Myst and many of its sequels, all human characters were portrayed by live actors superimposed into CG environments. Consequently, the game's iconic time travel jumpsuit was a practical effect worn by an actor during cutscenes. Since the Chameleon JumpSuit never got the 3D treatment, I decided to do my best at creating a modern rendering of the game's distinctive piece of art.

The Chameleon JumpSuit was designed by Phil Saunders, the creative director of Presto Studios, and constructed by Emmy award-winning special effects artist Don Pennington. Presto Studios, the development team behind the Journeyman Project series, among other titles, disbanded in 2002. The suit itself, however, was later donated by former members of Presto Studios to UC San Diego's Science and Engineering Library.

Finding reference images for the suit ended up being a little tricky. Since Legacy of Time is 15 years old, there aren't many high-resolution images of the game available on the web. The games cutscenes are pretty low-res, and proved too fuzzy to serve as adequate reference material. Thankfully, I was able to find a number of more recent photos of the suit displayed at UC San Diego. Even then, I never found a decent image of the back of the suit, so I had to make the best of what I had.

The left image depicts the suit in an in-game cutcene and the 

right image shows the life-size suit on display at UC San Diego.

Disclaimer: The Chameleon JumpSuit, The Journeyman Project, and Legacy of Time are property of Presto Studios, Inc. I am in no way affiliated with Presto Studios, Red Orb Entertainment, or The Journeyman Project series in any way. This artwork was created for strictly non-commercial purposes.

Norwegian Stave Church

My Norwegian heritage served as the inspiration for this project. The iconic stave churches of Norway are incredibly interesting structures built throughout northwestern Europe around the 12th to 13th centuries. Most surviving churches, however, reside in Norway. The photos below are of one of Norway's most well-known and best preserved stave churches, Borgund Stave Church, located in Borgund, Lærdal, Norway. This particular church is a triple nave stave church and served as my primary reference during the modeling of the church shown above.

3D Printed Characters

These are some photos of two 3D-printed models I had made for my 2011 thesis show. The model above is a viking character I had created a year or so before, and the one below is the (sort of) self-portrait character model from my 3D-animated thesis short film, Ascension.

Both models were printed using a powder-based printer, though I don't know the printer's exact specs. The printed models cam out white, with a rough texture, and were pretty fragile at their thinnest points. I painted on a type of super glue to harden the material and greatly increase its durability. I also gently sanded them to tone down their rough texture. They could have done with some more sanding, but being my first 3D-printed models, I was a little paranoid about breaking them. The final step was covering them with a combination of brown, black, and gold acrylic paint to give the models a bronze look. Pale green was later added to cracks and crevices to create a faux patina.

The viking models measures neartly 7 inches tall, while the other is about 6.25 inches.

First Post

This blog's purpose is to primarily serve as a companion to my portfolio website. I plan to use this blog as a place to put various sketches, scraps, and works in progress. It will also give me a place to discuss the finished pieces featured in my website and give readers a better idea of who I am as an artist.