Art Theif?

I had my own gallery article this week on http://themedes.org/ The mission of the site is to discuss "Social Injustice." So I got to talk about some of my more controversial pieces and what I was thinking going into them. You can use the dots at the bottom of the article to scroll through the pieces and the word balloon icon at the bottom left to view "artist comments." The website has a very minimalist/concept oriented navigation and has recently been redesigned. Here's a screen cap of one of the four pieces I had this week.

I was also informed by an anonymous email user that an "artist" in Australia was re-inking over my inked art and not being up front in saying that it wasn't his drawing. This brings me to the larger issue of gallery sites like deviantart. I want to share my art with the world at large but people will screen cap instead of buy, use the art as their own to get a job or copy large portions of a smaller artist's work to shortcut their own, assuming the artist is not and will never be well enough known to find out, especially someone in Australia. I pursued the matter and it would seem that I was fired up by his brother in some sort of family fued. The part that really set me off was he even mentioned that he would not take pictures of "his" art straight on or post scanned images because of the same process that he is using to steal from me and others like me. Its so meta in the worst way. Anyway, I was very rude and angry and somewhat out of line. I would have been flattered (as Heath -the penciler- was) If he would co-sign the piece, or put my name up front with Heath's but he would only mention it if someone asked and even then only to say that the "free hand drawn" pieces were "not his idea entirely." Some may see it as a gray line but I definitely don't. Some of my friends do similar things and it angers me, I guess it's a function of the "breaking in" of the business. Unless you are huge, chances are you won't ever see if someone is doing it and there isn't really a way to know. I've also been contributing to http://keepitfreshsketchblog.blogspot.com/ recently. Super psyched to of heard the Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire audio drama, after trudging through the Thrawn Trilogy everyone hails so much. Also, excited to hear the Batman: Knightfall and Superman Lives adaptions by BBC radio as well as get the Batman: No man's land adaption by graphic audio sometime in the future. I've recently discovered the podcasts: Science... sort of, the deceptionists, fuzzy typewriter, and Books and Nachos

Lots o art

Souled 2 Preview Pages by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

Decisions 2, preview pages by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

Padme by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

Ang by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

Future Foundation Phoenix by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

Pris by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

Definat 35

Defiant 35 was probably my least favourite cover I've done for pendant. But this time everything, including the script was better. I was even thinking of giving up doing covers from them because I just wasn't inspired anymore. It's hard to make Star Trek exciting and not make it look like a bunch of stuck up sci-fi geeks standing around in spandex, they don't have the muscles to make them look cool like super heroes so they just look like regular people in extra ordinary outfits. This last episode had the crew disguised as the Breen, which despite having a helmet directly swiped from Boush from Star Wars is pretty damn cool. I was looking at this book of fleer star wars trading cards I had lost as a kid and recently was given as a gift - anyway its got lots of pieces by lots of famous artists I now know, but didn't at the time and this one particularly caught my eye. I quickly saw it was Mignolla and was just blown away at how powerful his stuff always is despite being simple and he uses so many techniques that are his trademark.

Anyway, So I scanned it and swiped the colors and was really hooked on the yellows I think I was channeling Dune or something, but eventually I just wasn't sold on the whole "yellow snow"-thing, call me weird, or just a boy. So i eventually but a blue layer over the top and set the layer to hue. I had tried messing with the colors and adding more blue and sucking out the red to make it feel colder but it still didn't sell the idea of "cold" like blues and purples.


Another fun thing was that I knew I would need texture for the snow but it would also need to be coloured white so instead of drawing it out and then having to color the snow white in photoshop I just drew some scratchy textural things seperate in black, inverted them in photoshop and added them as a layer above the line art after i set the layer type to cut out all the black - the same process I used for the Kryton logo and any white on black text I do in comics. So anyway, it worked, it was fun, and it looks frign' sweet.

I did fight with the size of the Defiant cover, as I usually do. With the text on top (unlike comic books) and the title centered at the bottom) and the whole cover being closer to magazine format than comic book, by the time you get done you really are working with a safe area that is more of a horizontal rectangle than a verticle one, so i swiped and clone tooled my way out of it but as always it catches me off guard as I am used to working in comic book format. The composition was inspired by a splash page Tim Sale did of Batman in a riot outfit, in The Long Halloween.

Star Trek: Defiant, Ep. 36 by ~xaqBazit on deviantART

New Fan Film

Also I just got my new Star Wars fan film done as one of my finals. It is supposed to be a sequel to my first (Star Wars, Episode 0: Guardians of the Prophecy) one and is more fx heavy than anything I've done to date. It was a lot of work, luckily I had split up some of the work in my free time over the last 2 1/2 years since we filmed it. A big part of the problem was the incompatibility of .WMV files with Adobe software.
I wasn't able to get some of the cool advanced effects that some people could get like the lightsaber stretching out to tween between frames, or light flashes upon contacts but i was able to change the size when the saber was closer to the camera and create original spark fx animations and play with the lasers receding in space in perspective. it would have been cool as a 3d movie, lol.
Here's the breakdown:
65: sounds – 4 sound hrs editing
2: hrs 3d texturing – and 2 more animating
4: 3d fx shots
1: green screen fx shot
3: title/credit sequences
28: practical camera shots
6: hrs frame-by-frame flash animation

Here's a little behind the scenes action where Luke was his own stuntman and took a paintball to the chest so we could track the wound in the part where his character (the Cyborg-Sith) gets killed.


Here is the original fan film we did.