Hey all.. Gene here. I have the priviledge of kicking off the Robot ArtBlog's Theme... Monsters!... hope you enjoy...

I read the Wheel of Time Series of Fantasy novels by Robert Jordan during my college years. Ok... I made it to Book 5 or 6 of the series... I luv’d the characters, the world, the intricate detail, etc that Robert created but the books are just soooo looong winded. I eventually threw in the towel BUT... I found the world, characters, creatures, and the lore very artistically inspiring and interesting. One of the main creatures that always stuck in my noggin were the Shadowspawn's Trollocs. These creatures made up the bulk of the Shadowspawn's mainline infantry type units. Animal DNA magically fused with human... Trollocs were very cool creatures to read about and inspired me to create my own versions while in college and here today.

This Trolloc would be Man fused with Ram. A lower level mix version... more Beast than Man... this creature cares little (or even fathoms) rank adornment, vanity items, braids, etc etc... his armor is picked up from the victims it slays... and even then a higher ranking\ higher intelligence Trolloc has to put it on for him.

All this creature knows is torment creating a furiosity to kill.

Hope you enjoy the Lineart and Color versions! The color version was inspired by the art style of the game Borderlands. This style naturally matches my own graphic style.  Once I started playing the game I immediately was fired up to put some color, with heavy black outline, on my entry into this Robot ArtBlog’s Theme.

Btw... my son is an aspiring video game artist. His feedback on this Trolloc was a great help... his best recommendation being the flies you see buzzing around this Trolloc.  This is the perfect touch in implying that this guy has a nasty animal~like stench about him. Thanks Jake!

I know, I know, we already wrapped up the Saturday Morning Cartoon theme. But just like Freakazoid, I'm unpredictable!

Freakazoid was a short lived cartoon around that came on between Earthworm Jim and Road Rovers! Now that was an awesome cartoon lineup! He couldn't fly so he would just raise his arms in the air and make swooshing sounds. This drawing isn't as goonish as the cartoon, but I tried to draw it from memory.

Hope you enjoy!!

Another showing of amazing participation from the art staff for this theme, I’m still blown away… a 9 part theme, with first posts from Gene and Bimbo Soup! And Pyxlwyz got a Forza 3 Painting post up since I was last online for the GI Joe theme, he’s our Special Effects artist extraordinaire.  There is only one artist is left to post, and 2010 is his year!

It’s been a while since I’ve been online here, and I wish that I could say that I’ve been spending every waking moment on my theme project for S. M. Cartoons, but with the holidays and Modern Warfare 2 (a lot of Modern Warfare 2,) things kind of got in the ways of my progress. I still got enough done to share with you guys, so here it goes.

I wanted to pick a bit of a different theme, my favorites would have been He-man or Thundercats, but since both of those already had some people working on them, I thought I would go with something different.

I went with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (Which I don’t even think started out on Saturdays since I remember watching them after school, but oh well.) I wanted to do something a little different so I went with more of a realistic take on the turtle design, I hope you guys like it.
I started with a group of thumbnails one night while Rice and Eggs and I were here working. I had him pick the one he liked the most and I polished it up into a drawing.

From there, I just started working in black & white and layering in some light and shadow, and here is where I ended up.

Saturday Morning Cartoons is done, and I just wanted to say that this was an awesome effort from the art department. Such a great end to 2009!

But looking ahead, our next theme is:

MONSTERS!

Look forward to some posts on MONSTERS sometime in February.
 
 
I also wanted to address some of the previous comments from Art Bot Central:
giacomo: Every month that goes by giacomo, is a month closer to us announcing some news about what we’re working on… I can at least say that much (which isn’t much… I know, sorry.)

Grand Poobah: One of the big reasons we have these blogs is to talk to you guys and show our appreciation for your continued support. It’s great seeing so many familiar names on here as well as hearing what you guys have to say about stuff (which I’m sure will be a lot more when we have more stuff to talk about : )
As for the theme, we will at least be doing an Age of Mythology inspired theme sometime next year, there is a lot of support from that theme with the artists. And I’m sure one of these days, Ancient Empires will bubble up to the top of the list of themes.
spango: AoE is a Microsoft Games Intellectual Property, therefore we have no control over whether they continue to grow the franchise or not.

Sean: You guys have spoken about wanting to see more blogs, and since the G.I Joe post on ABC(Art Bot Central), we’ve had a couple additional blogs pop up as well as some posts from some new people to the Robot Blog.
As for the ROBOT swag, we don’t have any of that stuff available at this time.

Graver: We love the idea of having a big active web community at Robot, and we’re looking forward to the challenge of keeping up when we have more fans, cause we’ll have MORE FANS! Who wouldn’t want that? : )

Aedryan, JohnnyPhoenix, Dswal: We appreciate you stopping by. We thank you, and everyone else, for stopping by and giving support and comments to the artists that post on the site.

mYTH_2k4: Thanks for your comments on the Baroness image, it was a lot of fun to create. The idea of this blog was something we thought of in the beginning of the company’s arrival, but the participation, content, and excitement from the artists has blown me away. All of the artists who have posted, has done the work in their free time, and has made sacrifices of some sort to do so. We couldn’t be happier that you the fans continue to come back to see what’s been going on.
As for the fan sites, they look really well done. It seems as though you know firsthand about making the time to post about things that you’re passionate about.

Misterdot: Everyone at the studio really appreciate you guys participating in our blog posts, and thanks for the well wishes on what we’re working on.

Darkbelg: An oil platform from 2 point perspective for a theme… I ran it by the artists and it looks like you’re on your own to finish up that homework of yours : ) Sorry, but I hope you got a good grade on it.

Dave Campbell: Thanks for the comments about Skeletor, I think Gene did a great job on that one… and it was his first post!
As for suggestions for the blog, fire away. We would love to hear your thoughts.

Sean: Thanks for all the comments about various pieces in the Saturday Morning Cartoon theme. We have a variety of different topics and go with the ones that will get the most participation and excitement from the art staff, and everyone here has a soft spot in their heart for Saturday morning cartoons!
There have been more posts on other blogs from a variety of people since the G.I. Joe theme, and more are planned over the next couple of months. Right now, almost half of the company has already participated on the Robot blogs!

Mr. Gee: Thanks for your comments, and the next theme is Monsters!

james1984: Thanks for your comments james. We really appreciate your consistent attendance on the site.

Kartoffel, Donovan H., neilboso, Yoshi: Thanks for stopping by, and checking out the latest theme.

james1984, Kartoffel, misterdot: As for the message and banner on the front page, with the robot popping out of the present, that was the artwork that we did for our Company Holiday card. And any announcement is more than a couple days out. : )

james1984, Sean: I hope once there is an announcement, you are all very happy as well.

Thanks again for stopping by everyone. I hope you all enjoy the holidays, and we’ll talk more in 2010!

-kube-

Hello!

Like several of the other artists here, ThunderCats was one of my favorite cartoons as a child.  I especially liked Cheetara, she was Hot!  My work is unfinished, although it was still a lot of fun and quite a learning experience.  I've not spent much time with Zbrush, and this was the first time to REALLY use the program.  It’s impressive and I plan to keep learning more about the software.  Anyhow, my plan was to infuse more feline qualities into the Cheetara design, like large cat eyes, a cat nose and cat hind legs.  I hope to eventually finish this model, and get her posed, I think the ankles and feet would be more successful if shown carrying her weight more naturally.  The ankle and legs are the part of her physique which isn’t’ working for me, and could have benefitted from blending more “Cat” into her thighs and torso.  Several parts of her costume arn't there yet, but I hope you like what I've got so far. 

This first image is the model along with an early paint over exploring what large cat eyes could look like.

The second image was a rough paint of the model in Zbrush.

Thanks for checking out our blogs and congrats to everyone who posted work here!

Later,

Crowbot

What's happening. This is my first art blog post so be gentle. I decided my subject was going to be Pirates of Dark Water from the start. I have always thought this was an awesome cartoon with it's crazy prog rock album cover inspired art. So to help me along the way in creating this I listened to Rush's 2112 album a million times over. Yes Rush rocks!! This process was a combination of 3DMax, Photoshop and a little World Machine thrown in. Hope you enjoy it.

My version of Transformers from the 80's cartoon.  Autobots roll out!!!

hope you guys dig it!

-b

Hello and thanks for checking out my post. As a kid I couldn’t wait for saturday mornings so I could wake up and watch the latest episodes of my favorite cartoons. With our latest theme I decided to try to do a zbrush sculpt of a character from one of my favorite shows. I decided to try my hand at zbrush.  I chose to try to model He-man because he was a simple character without a lot of complicated gear(so I thought anyways). Although there was a huge learning curve I enjoyed the challenge.

When I was a kid, I remember waking up every Saturday morning while my parents were still asleep, getting a giant bowl of Cookie Crisp and watching cartoons until lunch. I loved shows like Thundarr the Barbarian, Dungeons and Dragons, He-Man, The Mighty Orbots and my favorite, Thundercats. I really liked all the characters but my favorite was always Panthro. He seemed like the toughest Thundercat out of all of them and had, what I thought to be, the coolest weapon. The NUMCHUCKS! ..or nunchaku if you want to be all technical. Here’s some images of Panthro from the original show.

I thought it would be fun to make a Panthro model but it would be too time consuming to do another full character like the Baroness so I decided to go with a bust. I started with a torso I had already created from another character and reshaped him into Panthro, adding his gear and spikes from basic primitive shapes in zbrush. I didn’t want to redesign him but there were certain things I didn’t like about the original that I wanted to adjust like the spikes on his gear. They were really thin and flimsy looking in the cartoon so I bulked them up and shortened them. The other thing was his nose. In the cartoon they have very human-looking noses but I thought it would be cooler to make his nose more cat-like. Once I was happy with everything, I gave him a slight snarl, found a Thundercats font, modeled his name for the base and I was done!

After looking at the bust for a while, I thought it would be fun to pose him in a fighting stance. Since his numchucks have a very long chain, I thought it would be cool to have him holding one end and then have the other end going back under his opposite arm as if he had just caught it there. After some final touch ups in photoshop, Panthro was done!

I hope you guys dig it and check back next week for more Saturday morning cartoon art!

Chris

This was an easy one me, I watched everything Spiderman along with reading the three comic series they had out at the time.  Like my previous post in the GIJOE theme, I'm taking advantage of these art blog posts to learn more ZBrush and I'm really liking the program.

Here is the base mesh I worked up from a low poly model.  I'd have to say the painting of all his webs in his costume almost drove me crazy.  I couldn't tell you how many times I almost switched him to his all black suit :)

After the model was done I had to figure out his pose.  Spiderman has always had very acrobatic type poses, so I hit the Internet looking for some classic poses.  I had never nocticed before but most of the time he has his legs shooting out in front of him, so I had my starting point.  After twisting my model up for the pose I had to go back in and rework much of my sculpting due to the severe amounts of pinching and stretching i had from the pose. 

Anyway, here is what I ended up with, hope you enjoy:

Laters,

sPankyAce

I always wanted to work on my version of Thundercats character and I thought this was a great opportunity to do that.  I wasn’t sure which character I wanted to do so I just went with main dude Lion-O.  I’m hoping to work on other characters as well especially cheetara when I have time.  Anyway, thanks for the support and hope you guys enjoy our Saturday morning carton art work.  Thanks.