Happy Holidays from Design Studio Press!

And here's a special gift from DSP to you...

40% off our 3 newest titles until January 1st.

Cheers!

BLAST: off to press!

Hey All,

Happy Holidays!

BLAST is now complete and off to press! I'm very happy with the book the guys put together. We expect it to arrive back here for sale in March. It's nice to have it all wrapped up before the holidays. Here are a couple of spreads from Annis Naeem, Danny Gardner and myself from the final book as well as the finished cover just completed this morning. Head on over to the DSP site and reserve a copy! By getting on the list you will be assured to get notified of the even sweeter deals and a special edition we have planned for the release of the book.

Thanks again to all for the the words of encouragement during the development of the book. Always helps as these self generated books can be tough to complete.

Now onto the next one, err...make that 3!

cool anaglyph images by Tim Jester

Jester just emailed me these cool anaglyph images he made of Luca's bot model he showed in the DSP booth at Comic Con last summer from his upcoming book ABAKAN 2288. Which BTW should be here any day now!

You'll need a pair of anaglyph glasses to view the images.

Enjoy.

Special Thanks to You!

Today through Monday I'm offering my books through Design Studio Press at a huge savings to you as my way of saying, "Thanks for the continued support and Happy Holidays."

Just click the orange dot on the DSP home page to access the specials.

Click here.

rendering detail left page

Per Patrick's request on my FB page here is another part of the same rendering. This ship will land on the left page, the previous ship on the right.

BLAST rendering detail

Here's another small detail of a much larger rendering for BLAST.

We're almost done! One more monster rendering for me to tackle and a few touch ups and then it's time for text and printing. DSP book #43.

BLAST ship detail

Here's a detail shot of the BLAST book piece I tried to finish today.

Concept Ships November Header!

I'm stoked with what Igor did with image for the Concept Ships November Header, thanks Igor!

GO check it out in all its animated fun. Concept Ships.

Lucca - DSP booth sketches

Here are a couple of demos I did while sitting in the DSP booth during days 2 and 3 of the show. The dino-bot is a continued work-in-progress of the very early rough sketch I post awhile back. The Alien was done on Halloween as a Photo Booth/Photoshop example.

Luca's next resin kit...

This is a sketch I did for Luca Z. (the author of ABAKAN 2288) while working in the DSP booth today during the Lucca Comics and Games show. It's a paint over of the prototype for his next resin kit. You can see the primer grey model in the FG of the picture I posted to my FB page of him signing his new book. I snapped a shot with my camera and colorized and weathered it up a bit. Still more to do if it's going to be used as a final rendering for anything beyond the blog. Today is also his birthday, so be sure to wish him well on his FB page!

BLAST: orange ship detail

Keeping with the orange and blue theme, here's a detail of piece for BLAST that is almost done.

rock bot with rider - detail shots

As detail shots seem to be my theme of the week here are a couple of more from the "rock bot" sketch I posted awhile back.

more BLAST details

Okay, now I'm just procrastinating by posting more detail shots!

after a little Photoshop work...

The native file is fairly low res and a detail of this scale would not normally be visible. As you can see it's a pretty loose paint over at this point.

sci-fi suit details

On my Facebook page GurcharanJeet asked for a couple of detail shots. Here are two from different suits than below. This is what the base render looks like straight out of modo before refinement pass in Photoshop.

modo replicator suits

Here are a few more modo "replicator" suit experiments. This is what they look like straight out of modo before doing the Photoshop paint overs. Controlled algorithmic chaos rules!

BLAST detail

As I finish up my renderings for BLAST I'll some detail shots here as there will not be enough room in the book to include them. Now that the workshop weekend is over I'm hustling to get all of the renderings done so the book will release on time in March. A little delay in that progress will be my attendance again at the Design Studio Press booth in Lucca, Italy October 28th through November 1st. If you are in that area the end of next week be sure to stop by an say hello!

WALLSCAPES

Here is an example of another way I find inspiration for some of my environments. I call them "wallscapes" because I generate the the first image by pacing my camera on a wall and taking a picture. The wall then becomes the ground plane for my rendering and anything sticking out from the wall becomes the start for my architecture. In this case the raw image is a wallscape of the building on the corner of Younge and Dundas in Toronto. The other two images are stages of the work-in-progress of this piece. You can see I still have quite aways to go. I hope I can get it done before BLAST needs to go to press. If not, it goes into my educational book which is going to be my winter project.

BTW if you want to be keep in the know about when my next workshop will be happening hit me up on Facebook or follow this blog.

workshop thanks

Thanks to all of you who made it to my workshop last weekend. It was exhausting but also fun to share my latest ideas. Here are two pieces from the workshop. The black and white one was done before the workshop and was part of my talk on using value changes to show form changes. The green one was about a 20 minute demo on the ways I arrange layers in Photoshop when doing quick studies like this. Both started as quick snap shots from Photo Booth as we did in the book Alien Race.

workshop promo

Here's a little look at some of the types of things I'll be sharing this weekend at my workshop.

workshop promo

new portfolio archives

I've started to build out a series of portfolios on a cool new resource site for visual creatives. Check it out here: Scott Robertson's Pad

BLAST "work in progress" double page

Here's the latest WIP double page for BLAST. It's pretty close really, just a few decisions to be made about the BG values in relation to the strength of the sky reflection on the canopy.

Neville suggested I add a detail of part of the ship. Here you go Neville.

Eight, 90 minute lectures at Red Engine Studios

The dates and lecture topics are now all set for my 2-day workshop at Red Engine Studios in downtown L.A. on October 8-9.

Collaboration with Industria Mechanika

Industria Mechanika will be offering one of my ships as a resin model kit in the future. Learn more on their blog and vote for what design to build in their forum.

BLAST "work in progress" Spaceport

This one has a long way to go but I thought I would share this in-progress peek. Most of the big values are close and the general lighting I like. I've very roughly placed a few photo textures over the foreground elements. I do this before I go back and make my last detailed design/rendering pass which is what is basically left for this one...one big grinder of a rendering day! The background structures came from a quick model/rendering made in modo.

BLAST "work in progress" Orb ship

Based on what I'm reading on my FB page what about these new options. (the single images)

Any thoughts on which color palette works the best are most welcome.

Cheers.

And a big thanks to those of you who have already signed up for my Red Engine studios weekend workshop in October.

BLAST "work in progress" escorted arrival

This one started by building on a piece I had done for Lift Off. Not much remains from the original now but it was a fun way to get rolling. A few architectural elements were made in modo and then dropped in. The big ship started as a photo collage/mash up of one of my aerospace cars from DRIVE and the little one flying above it came from a little pencil thumbnail. It's sometimes fun to build scenes with various elements created using differing techniques before painting over it all to pull it together.

BLAST "work in progress" BR-75

Here's today's WIP for BLAST.

BLAST "work-in-progress" repairs

Aside from the hyper-drive engine work this one is getting up on the tail section I have a few more hours to spend on it before it makes it into the book.

BLAST "work-in-progress" tide pool

Here is the latest WIP effort for the book. The BG plate came from a trip to Mendocino, CA. The rest is Photoshop. I still need to finesse the vent things the crew have added to the ground where the mist/steam is rising from.

BLAST "work-in-progress"

This one was done mostly in modo. The foreground element was generated with a photo taken in Toronto. I want to include at least one image in the book with some photographic "depth of field" style. This is the latest in that attempt.

BLAST "work in progress"

One more sneak peek at a ship that's almost done. I still want to do and graphics and weathering pass before dropping it into the book.

BLAST single page sneak peek...

Here is another page from BLAST.

Still have few things to finish up before it goes in the book.