Creature Sketches

Various scary beasts- a humanoid and carnivore with extra limbs, and an herbivore that is capable of causing damage also. If you open the image in a new window or tab the image will open in a much larger size.

Ad During the Oscars Inspired by The Fifth Horsewoman of the Zombie Apocalypse?

While working on an assignment for some creature designs last night, I had the Oscars playing in the background. A funny Samsung ad showed Tim Burton brain-storming for a Zombie Unicorn Apocalypse movie, which totally reminded me of my painting. I hadn't seen those three words put together until I did my painting of the Fifth Horsewoman of the Zombie Unicorn Apocalypse last year (scroll down to July 2012 for that post).

At the beginning of last year when my wife and I were coming up with the idea of the zombie apocalypse rider on an evil unicorn, we looked around online and there was no one making a connection between those three things zombies, unicorns, and the apocalypse. So I wonder if I inadvertantly got Tim Burton to say those are his favorite things.

Here is the ad.

At first I thought it was a remote possibility because if they googled those three words they would have seen my painting. It's shows up about eight rows down on Google image search. But then I saw this image in the ad. It is very much a My Little Pony version of my image. So many elements are similar, a skull that's exposed mixed with a mostly intact body, the teeth showing, the exposed ribs (which where one of Dan Dos Santos' many great suggestions for the painting), the drill bit-like horn, the long hair growing around the hooves, even the angle and the gray sky in the background.

I have to say extra props for the dangling eye ball.

I know as an artist who paints from reference these are the types of details that repeat if you are looking at an image for reference and trying to create a new piece that is equally as effective. Here is one of the first images that comes up on Google search for My Little Pony, their illustration looks very much like a combination of my image and the one I found online. 

I think the ad is hilarious and that would be cool if they were inspired by my work, obviously they came up with something creative and different with the my little pony-cartoonish look. But it does feel uncomfortable discovering a huge publicity campaign might have been working off my ideas without the slightest notice. I am an easy going guy though, but I wouldn't mess with My Little Pony.

Humanoid Creature Design

I'm taking a Gnomon class with the brilliant creature designer and excellent teacher Jerad Marantz. This is one of my first projects, a tribal humanoid, monkey mixed with a bat type creature.

Recently, I had jury duty. I had quite a bit of time while waiting for jury selections. Here's an herbivore drawing I did on the iPad.