It’s no secret to my Twitter followers that I’ve been very involved in games for the last few years, and I’m happy to announce that a part of my working time goes to UI and concept design for a game company. Apart from a lot of fancy interfaces (yay, holograms) I’ve been doing environments for an upcoming science fiction game, and I’m very excited with one I’ve come up with and was allowed to share: the Captive Planet.

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 did this cover design for Sun Tzu’s ‘the Art of War’ eBook in Classics. It was done quite a while back, when I was just starting to use my Cintiq, but just recently the 1.3 update for Classics hit iPhones and iPods with a the latest bunch of new books.

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.

As I mentioned in my Pokémon brands post, sometimes the strangest ideas hit you, and given their perceived coolness, they stick in your mental lists of weird things you should indulge in as a designer. Ever since I got my Airport Express and took it out of the box, I thought it resembled a robot head. A cyclops robot head, perhaps, but a robot head nevertheless. After that, I couldn’t stop thinking of the ways my hardware tools could come to life in robot form. I did a few speedpaints to see how that would look.

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.

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As promised in my last post, I’m reporting on my progress of picking up drawing and painting again with a Wacom Cintiq. A selection of speedpaints this week, with a lot of landscape exercises and one teaser of my first real client ‘painting’ work!

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.

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I’ve been averse to using tablets since I got first introduced to them. Don’t get me wrong, I really love drawing stuff. I think I’ve been drawing before I learned to walk. But tablets seemed counter-intuitive. “You don’t draw in one area and look at another!”, my mind screamed. It took a lot time for me to reconsider. What really made me reconsider was something a touch more… futuristic.

The Wacom Cintiq is a pretty neat combination of an external monitor and graphics tablet. It comes in 12 and 21 inch flavours, and for the sake of digitizing my sketching and contract signing process, I’m trying it out. The 12 inch model, mind you. There’s no way I could fit one of these on my desk next to my (really) big Cinema Display. Since I’ve barely used tablets, and haven’t done drawing with colors since I was a freshman in the Academy of Arts (quite a few years ago) I’ll share some so-called ‘speedpaints’ with you every week. This way, you can follow my thoughts on getting used to such an interesting piece of hardware and see the results.

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