Buh.

Hullo! Here's some character sketches I did for the nice folks over at CHRLX. How's it going anyway? Y'alright?

Mad bMX

After the apocalypse I'm gonna be rockin bikes 24/7 yo. In fact, I've been prepping for years! I have an 'arage full of half restored rusty-ass rides and the furious missus to prove it.
Bikes are reliable, plentiful, hardy, fuel-free, all terrain, stealthy and easy to fix - no wonder we never see supercharged V8 muscle cars in post apocalyptic films or videogames, they make no sense at all!
So when CO₂ emissions, oil wars, nuclear bombs and your uncle's farts finally kill off what remains of this flimsy oh-noez layer I'll see yous in the desert for some sweet wasteland wheelies.

Dis/Connect

Here's another piece I did for the faaaaabulous White Cloud Worlds Vol2.
Although it doesn't really look like it I spent an arseload of time on this painting, probably more than any other one I can think of. It illustrates the moment an advanced prototype robot first disconnects from its diagnostic systems, briefly achieves sentience and then permanently seizes up. It seems that gaining access to lab records and learning the history of discarded prototypes, wasteful development processes and the stresses caused by crushing deadlines caused the guilt sectors of the emotion circuits to collapse and result in catastrophic failures across the entire OS.

Signed print available! Only signed by me unfortunately.

Make Tanks Not War 2.0

Oh now would you look at this - White Cloud Worlds Vol. 2!
I am really proud do be involved with this book and am very flattered Paul Tobin got drunk enough to ask me to do the cover. There's so much rad stuff in it, over 40 artists this time and some gobsmacking images reside within. If your gob is overly sensitive to smacks stay well away!
It's a revisiting on a piece I'd been meaning to have another crack at for ages and is kind of a sister image to this old fulla - another point of view from the Great Crustacean Invasion of 2028. This one represents the sentinel tanks that bravely defended our shoreline.

This is available as a signed limited edition print from my friends at Eyeball Kicks over here!

whitecloudworlds.com
eyeballkicks.com

Fast Track to Phobos!

Hi! This right here is an illustration I done did for the guest artist section in Breg Groadmore's beautiful new book 'Triumph'. If you love photographs depicting the rich history of salt mining in Tunisia, in-depth statistical analysis of office workers typing speeds throughout the 1940s and fascinating insights into the production of those stretchy bands some people use to hold their glasses on DON'T BUY IT. It doesn't have any of that stuff.

Weta's Triumph page
drgrordborts.com

Presenting White Cloud Worlds

Here's a vid I made to celebrate the release of White Cloud Worlds in the US. Churs to Brian for all his work and Ben for giving his life. Rest in pieces dude.

Once Were Trees, Now They're These

Three books I have drawings in all arrived like blim blom blaow! What a noisy mailman.

One's about hot rods, one's about robots and t'other is about an alcoholic space moron. That's pretty much all the bases covered!

Here's a picture from one of them, can you guess which book?

No you idiot, it's actually supposed to be a hot rod.

You can get Masters of Chicken Scratch vol 2 and check out a bunch of Dwayne Vance's rad stuff over here

Battle Sandwich - ImagineFX

Here's a little summin-summin' I did for an ImagineFX workshop in the current issue. There's a making-of video and brushes and stuff I used on the disc that comes with it and I seriously think it covers absolutely everything I know about painting in photoshop. If you like my drawings it'll answer any questions you could ever have and if you despise my stuff it'll be a great guide for what not to do, just do the exact opposite of every step! Literally something for everyone.
Thanks to Ian Dean for the commission, it was fun!
ImagineFX

1.5 Arsed?

Do three half-arsed drawings equal one fully-arsed piece? Nah mate, dreamin'.

Clown Car™

Hard-Out Doodlin'

Some of the scribs I mushed together for a White Cloud Worlds sketchbook that was sold at Spectrum Live.

Jungle De-Rumbler

Audio-tracking bot from the Mechanised Anti-DJ Division packing a 60Ω RifleMic™ discovers evidence of enemy drum and bassery

rumblejungle.co.nz

Cheers for the job Aaron!

The Adventures of Tintin

A couple of early character concepts from that film.

I've given up trying to shoehorn a bunch of galleries and crap into this blogger format so I started up a new website over here that'll have crap shoehorned into it like crazy! It'll be a fairly static portfolio kinda thing, mostly work stuff that everyone is sick to death of seeing. Well imagine how sick it made me when I had to draw it!

That gallery button over there > links to it too. How thoughtful.

Oh yeah! There's a whole book of this stuff: The Art of The Adventures of Tintin

P-Dirty Eight!

Formula Fun!

Flipbot™

Avatar Pistol

Here's the handgun I designed for Avatar waaaaay back in dickity-six. I don't really have anything to say about it except that it got approved in the first drawing which has never ever ever happened to me before for anything ever. Ever! Never!

District 9.... Things

District 9?! What is this ancient junk? Stop living in the past Christian, it's 2001 already!
These are very early weapon and tool designs. You can see these and many more of the designs I contributed to the rubbish bin in our reasonably priced Art of District 9 book.

SalesBot

Under The Mountain

Here's a couple of early Wilberforce and environment concepts for Jonathon King's Under the Mountain from waaaay back in 2007. That's so last decade now!

Boneless!

A doodle that got scanned. I coloured the pencil linework on this which was... refreshing! Then I coloured in the background like a big boy. Well how about that!

Esoterra Doodles

I think this video is awesome, he invents more funny characters in that 3 minutes of miming than most funny character creators create in 5 minutes of funny character creation. I was all like "I must draw you, poorly". And so I did.

Motorbikes!

Quick variations of the same basic engine and frame arrangement.
What was the line from George Orwell's classic allegorical tale, Automobile Farm... 'four wheels good, two wheels bad?' Especially when I draw 'em! As relevant today as when it was writ.

Mecha-Gojira!

Emoticon Anatomy 1

Dragster! I mean... Dragon!

I musta started this drawing 4 years ago. I dug it up this evening and says to myself I says "you're not going to bed til you've finished colouring it in!"
Nah stuff it, I'm going to bed anyway. G'night!

Doodle Dump

Damon Packard!

A drawing of one of my favourite film makers as his character Bob in Reflections of Evil. I was pretty blown away when I first saw that film and the character really stuck with me.
This was my first attempt inking with the dip pens I'd seen my pal Matty using at work with great success . I had less success but I reckon if you could get the hang of 'em you could bust some pretty clean lines.

Sawmill Incident

Peyow-Peyow!

Here's a quick 'un I did for the far too talented Scott Spencer. He has a tutorial in the current issue of 3D World where he sculpts this sucker up in ZBrush

Make Tanks Not War

Here's one I started 'ken ages back that I just finished painting about 54 seconds ago. I had this pencil sketch that I started dolloping virtual paint onto now and then, just kinda picking away at it over a few weeks.
The idea was that it was an umanned sentry that would be dropped into disaster areas to ward off looters or any invading forces. It has a real low level AI and a super slow hydrogen extraction system that draws energy from the atmosphere, you pretty much give it enough charge to toddle itself into a tactically sound position and forget about it.
"Unmanned eh? Why the hatch then dickhead?" - maintenance and for the off chance it may need to transport survivors. Yep, it makes heaps of sense. And take it easy with that dickhead stuff will you?
I had it deployed amongst all this rubble, collapsed buildings with a bunch of gruesome stuff going on and had it pretty much finished at the start of the year. Then Christchurch got decimated by quakes followed by Japan and I didn't want to look at it any more. I painted out all that stuff and parked him at the beach in the sun.

Oh yeah, those weird looking wheels are inspired by/burgled wholesale from those rad AIRTRAX forklifts

Bellflower

I don't really know anything about this film but when I saw the car in the trailer I bugged out like crazy! That thing is badass! I did this little doodle of it and then I coloured it in. Cool story eh?
Check out the Bellflower website, looks like it's gonna be pretty cool and their custom cameras they shot it with are fascinating.

Anna Coddington's Album Cover!

Alohahaha! I told Anna 'ken years ago that if she didn't let me do an album cover for her I was gonna give her a hiding. I guess she took me seriously cos she's mean as at karate now, also she let me do this one.
To start with we went through a bunch of images I put together and agreed that an Alphonse Mucha ripoff inspired piece might be a good starting point.
I wanted to make this painting as Nu Zillund as possible without putting Buzzy Bees/jandals/tomato sauce in it. The view is looking across from Manu Bay near her place in Raglan, a tui is hollerin' at her shoulder and that guy in the bottom left is my idiot cat Lando. The stars are loosely based on our view of the night sky and that bench she's chillin' on is supposed to be like that one you were chillin' on in the weekend eating that pie. You should ease up on those pies by the way.
All the patternwork is based on native plants - kowhai, pohutukawa and putaputaweta. I had a bunch more of that stuff going on for a while but it looked pretty manic.
AC wanted to have some scifi/space elements in there so those weird clouds and ringed planet are ripping off paying a respectful homage to the amazing end image from NZ's own Quiet Earth.
That female humanoid in the middle is meant to resemble Anna Coddington. I traced a photo of her face, so what? I aint trying to do no goddamn likenesses ever again! That was actually pretty challenging for me, painting a recognizable face even though I traced a pic. Fortunately Anna isn't very horrible to look at which made it a bit more bearable.
So that's that! The album's choice, Anna is choice, everything is choice. Wait - earthquakes are not choice.

Album on itunes

Anna's website

Crab Skeletons

Here's a pretty cool little seaside casualty I found the other day. You see these guys pretty often at the beaches here but this one was a bit bigger than most so I cleaned him up and did these sketches.
I hadn't really looked too closely at crab skeletons before and it proved to be a real learning experience. It's cool seeing how these little mammals have adapted to life in the sea. As warm-blooded vertebrates they share a similar basic structure to us but with a few specialised modifications.
The metacarpals and phalanges have simplified and fused into a pair of opposing pincer-like shapes and with their thick epidermal layer they function as highly effective claws.
The wide scapula sits far down the ribcage and forms a strong foundation for anchoring the teres major.
Probably the component most far removed from our own frame is the pelvic girdle which has evolved into a six-socketed form almost unrecognisable to ours.
I painted up a skull study as well - what bizarre little craniums they have! The eye sockets are open with the zygomatic bone being wholly disconnected from the supraorbital foramen - I guess this is due to the stability offered by the hardened epidermis and to allow free movement of the eyestalks.
What appears to be a nasal cavity is actually a food filtering system - the "nasal concha" is in reality a gill-like arrangement for catching too-large fragments in the feeding process. It continues down behind the maxilla.
A remarkable free floating pre-maxilla carries the first battery of tiny teeth with the second, smaller set of mandibles hidden away below.
So there you have it! That was a pretty interesting process for me, learning about these dudes. I find it fascinating how mammals can adapt and transform to live in any environment yet still retain their inherent vertebrate humanity.