City Landscape and Commencement

City Landscape, originally uploaded by Ntkufreak.

Wow! It's been a long time since I posted!

Commencement was last week, and it was awesome! Everyone had amazing work. I didn't post up any pictures since they were on my parents' camera, which is now back in KY, but a friend did take a picture of my show, which is here so you get an idea -

All three pieces are from my thesis. The book on the shelf is essentially my print portfolio for interviews!

I've had an awesome time at MICA and now I'm looking forward to the summer, to get this blog more straightened out, touch up the website a little, and I've got time now to really promote myself. I've also gotten a freelance offer which is pretty exciting already. :)

Stay tuned!

Ciel Main Characters

I've been trying a different way of thumbnailing that is less gestural and more specific. I'm not sure yet how I feel about it as a process, though I like these characters. While it simplifies the process of going to the next step (a single or a few colored finishes), I'm concerned about diversity. But these are designs for a character that has to fit in a world that's already pretty defined; it might be useful to try this approach when making a character completely out of context.

Sorry about my lack of posting last week. On April 1 we had the Internship Fair, where a lot of great Baltimore companies came to talk to students about local opportunities for work. It was great, but I think it took a lot out of me!

There was a great panel on the game industry given by a few friends of mine. Colin Campbell of Big Huge Games was my professor for Advanced Photoshop Techniques, one of the best classes I took here at MICA, and Taylor Fischer of ZeniMax Online is a friend of mine who happened to TA that class. Go check out their work!

Colored Characters

Played with Dermot Power's approach in doing these. From now on I'm only going to upload 'finished' pieces to Flickr, and used Blogger's image uploader for WIPs or uncritiqued pieces.

Portfolio Website is Live!

I haven't posted much this week because I've been swamped with work for senior presentations and commencement. But I'm happy to say my portfolio site is now live!

SamGauss.Com

It's a little bare while I try to get all my work organized, but all the concept art is now up :)

Hopefully soon I'll be able to revise this blog to look a little nicer!

Ciel Character Designs!

Sorry I've been gone, I didn't want to fill up the blog with WIPs - while I like the habit of posting 3 times a week, I think I'd rather post something fresh or skip a day than post something that's in progress. It also saves me the trouble of uploading it to flickr when I'm just going to want to delete it later.

So here we have something - this is Ciel for Advanced Concept Art, finally we're moving to character designs, where I'm more comfortable as opposed to landscapes. These are 20 assorted 'villagers,' based loosely off of Mongolian attire and styles. Expect 20 more within the week, and I have to take at least 3 of these to a more finished look. But they were really fun to do and I'm happy with how cohesive they look.

Okamiden Fanart

Just a little something for fun. Don't actually have the game (yet?), but still excited for it.

Hope everyone's having a good spring break!

Orochimaru / 'Zine Submission

I've never seen Naruto, but the illustration seniors were organizing a 'zine for Naruto fanart. A few years ago I might have gotten all uppity about the idea, but at the moment I was grateful for a) an excuse to reignite my love affair with sumi, and b) a break from thesis!

Also, in researching the characters to decide which one to do, I was like, I'll watch one scene with Orochu-whoever and see what he's like! It turned out to be the scene where he and Sasuke fight. In trying to describe exactly what this first impression was like, I've told people that it's like wanting to see some hot lesbian sex, so going to see this movie you heard someone talking about called "Black Swan."