The Captive Planet is a planet rich in natural resources, a valuable asset in any star system that’s just begging to have its riches extracted. Appearance-wise, it’s somewhat similar to Mars, but with its denser atmosphere and extremely hot temperatures, that’s about the only similarity they have. It’s mined by Hephaestus, a ‘wall’ that spans the entire circumference of the planet, and contracts into itself as it scrapes layer after layer off the surface of the planet, leaving behind little more than dust. Hephaestus is a crawling city, inhabited by miners and their families.

In the game, the player gets stranded on the Captive Planet at some point and is presented the harsh realities of living in ‘the Wall’ and choices that will determine the future of the planet and its inhabitants. I’m having lots of fun with this assignment, and I hope to keep you guys in the loop with several other very cool environments and designs I’m creating.

I’ve never really had the time to spend a week on a painting, so this, too, is one in a series of speed paints. But it was my first actual ‘commercial’ painted work on my tablet. These days, I’m spending a lot more work on design work for games for iPhone and other platforms, and I’ve actually been using my tablet a whole lot. Painting is very different from my usual approach to designing, which involves making vector shape layers for everything. I’m far from actually painting for a living, but I can recommend designers to try doing more ‘free’ artwork design as well every now and then.

Quite a fun departure from my usual work: I’ll be able to show off a lot of cool stuff in September! Also, this month I will resume my regular posting schedule, including releasing a few more wallpapers and icons.

The lineup of speakers:

• Delicious Monster‘s Wil Shipley
• 280 North‘s Francisco Tolmasky
•  Dirk Stoop from Sofa
• Joachim Bondo of Cocoa Stuff
• and me. Perhaps an excellent chance to give away a shirt?

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It’ll be held Wednesday June 10th, 7-9PM, at the Stockton St. Apple Store in San Francisco.

I’m really looking forward to WWDC this year. Hope to see you all at Cocoaheads or elsewhere during the week!

And yes, those are little Xcode hammers in the smoke.

I know, I know, I totally promised to update weekly or at least biweekly on my tablet progress, but life’s not always easy that way. Right now, I’ll try to do something monthly, because it’s a lot of fun to do.

So, my Airport was an obvious choice. But I soon found that it’s not that hard to see a little guy in an iPod Nano either:

Would be pretty neat if it actually did that.

Obviously, these were all drawn in about 20-25 minutes each over the course of last week. I prefer to do quick drawings, because actually turning one of these into complete ‘paintings’ would probably take me all day. The devil’s in the details indeed.

And there’s my primary workstation, the Mac Pro. I did a few sketches and ended up with stuff that looked more like a Jawa Sandcrawler from Star Wars, so after a few more drawings I found a look I really liked. Sort of like a jellyfish on your desk.

My Canon digital SLR camera made a good subject for the last speedpaint. I always wanted it to be smart enough to zip around on its own and follow me through the office so it’s there when I need it.

Come on, Canon, just put some wheels in those side grips. It’d make for an excellent little transforming tank-camera combination.

I haven’t really settled on a format for these weekly updates yet, so please do leave feedback on what I should and shouldn’t post. I’ve excluded most of my sketches and doodles. Techniques from painters or wanna-be-painters are of course, also welcome. For these speedpaints, no reference of any sort was used, except for the Portal speedpaint.

The landscape studies were interesting. It’s quite a lot harder than I’d expected to draw landscapes; especially getting down a firm idea of space, scale, and depth is a real challenge. I intend to train this a lot more, barring the sudden appearance of funny robots that force me to take priority.

Vegetation is so much fun. In a few basic, calligraphic strokes, you’ve got nice shapes down and you can let your mind fill in the rest of the details. Lots of work on that this week.

I’ve also done some speed-paintings of objects as I walked (jumped, portalized?) through Portal. I think you’d expect no less from me with my twitter user picture and funny web service. I like how the turret looks:

And, as I mentioned, my first real client work with this tablet. I’ll reveal more about this when the release comes, but for now, check out this detailed portion of the artwork as a teaser of sorts:

It’s been really fun stuff. Let me know your thoughts on the format of these posts! Up next week: Robots, animals, and anatomy studies.