DollsArtCats

I made most of Mr. Funny Face here out of Victoria 4 and some built-in morphs, and a cracked skin from DarioFish on Renderosity--and then I ended up painting over most of it and layering on a Filter Forge texture. So much fun..but then it turns out that the border needs to be moved over to accommodate the spine; things need to be rearranged, and I have to turn this guy's head to the right..and of course the current updated version looks better to me than the version you see here :D  The art director is right 90% of the time. And to be honest, I could make aliens all day. It's just gravy I get paid, too.

It's for a upcoming book, The Otherness Factor by Arlene Marks, published by Edge-Tesseract, and the book sounds very good--I need to actually buy the first book in the series so I can catch up.  This is a cover with a 3d undercoat and tons of Photoshop painting on top--this let me get it done and clean in about 5 days, though they were full days. Ixbeth, the scientist on the left, is actually the old V3 model with Akutenshi7 hands. Neither looks like the original.:D That's a variation on Pixeluna's Angelie on the right, too, used with her permission. Pixeluna is as angelic as her namesake! (She sells products at Daz3d now if you want to check out her 3d character sets ). Here is the base file for Lania: (You can still see the embroidery and the collar in the final). Here is the early version/rough for Ixbeth, she wasn't catlike enough at this stage: So I found this guy: (He's got great fur). And here is Akutenshi's hand--I'm going to use th...

I'm struggling a bit with this one, which is why I cut a small section out to look at it--and right away I see a light patch under "Prince Chris's" eye I need to fix--and some places on his hair that need work. I've been constrained on this one by the fact that it needs to look like the previous covers, which were pretty loose in style and done with what looks like actual watercolor (!). It's a lot different than my own style, and for some reason my brain forgot that these guys needed to look "androgynous"..which is much harder than you would think, because guys look like guys unless you radically shift them, and then they look sort of ...uncanny. Now I could paint you a fun drag queen, but it would look like a guy in drag, or I could accidentally get that effect by painting say, Gwen Stephani (it's actually harder to paint women than men, imo). But when you are given Chris Hemsworth, there is really no easy way to make him look gender neutral...

Here is the English cover for Matt Whyman's mini-pig memoire; you can pretty much tell it will be an adorable and heart-warming story about some pet mini pigs. However, the French publisher, deciding there was not enough Amour present on the cover, kicked it up a notch: I want to work for a French publisher. I would get to draw more flowers, and put "The Love Pig" on my CV along with "Help Me, I'm Falling in Love With the Vampire Next Door." (Celine Chatillion, orig issued Liquid Silver Books).