Snowy Room Final

I finished the snowy room sketch in order to enter the Gnomon competition. Hope to show off some completely new illustrations soon. Too bad the monitor shows different color everywhere :/ If the room is yellow instead of blue... then uhmz well then you can't see the illustration in it's full glory.

Happy 60th birthday dad!

Cutout Characters

A little experiment with creating easy readable characters. Although the black outline feels a bit cheap it was a good excercise in thinking about lines :) Hmmz come to think of it, it kinda looks like a sticker page :)

Spiderman Spiderman!

Kitchen Sketch

Tree Dynamics

I recently bought the amazing "elemental magic: The Art of Special Effects Animation" book by Joseph Gilland. As he talked about the dynamics of fluids I thought it sounded quite similar to the dynamics of a tree and I got a sudden urge to apply the theory on some tree sketches. And it payed off ( and I'm only on a quarter of the book), can't wait to experiment further. So thanx mister Gilland!

The Balloon Man

QuickSketch of a ..... room

It was a while since I did a speedpainting. Most of my free time goes to my little pet project game. Had a nice 45 minutes of drawing this during rendering times of 3dsMAX :) and a good 15 minutes doing the snowy road thing.

Overlord 2

I sure hope people picked up a copy of Overlord 2 if so they will recognise these decadent grotesque characters I concept. These were my first big story characters I concepted for Overlord 2 and boy were they fun. Somehow I really like to make hideously looking characters, you can put more details in it and mister gravity gets a chance to do his work on all the flesh. The posing of this screenshot is done by Michiel Wouterse. This screenshot was also featured in an article in the newspaper here in good old Holland and with that I got my 15 minutes of fame :).

Médecins Sans Frontières Game

This was a graduation project done about a year and half ago. The game never was released officially. So I think it's okay to post some artwork related to the game. We made it with a team of 5 people. The art below is art I worked on individually. My task was to art direct the game.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

It's been a while since my last post, but after overlord 2 was released I really needed some R&R. Here are some head sketches I did in the train :) I got some more head sketches laying around and i will post them soon.


Daniel Ernst

Snowy Room Sketch

Color Studies Part III

Color Studies II

Finally got some time to do some personal stuff. Spend a day working on my little pet project switching it with these two paintings. The dinosaur drawing was inspired by the book;' If Dinosaurs Came to Town' by Don Mansell. I grew up reading this book and I bought a copy online :) Happy times!

Sweater Lady

VVVVVVEEENNNOOOM sketch!

After drawing a lot of speedie spiderman doodles I started drawing venom doodles ( in my ongoing quest to draw a good spiderman or spidey like character ). This one I liked a lot as it reminded me of an old McFarlane venom issue, who's drawings I still think are my favorite spidey drawings.

The Stickfigure Huntsman

A small doodle made on a sketchblock while waiting. I liked the character so I thought I would do some coloring on it :) Then I put it away and my friend Edwin (http://rhemdoodles.blogspot.com) put down some lines over my sketch and voila the guy came to life!

-Daniel Ernst-

Old Factory Sketch

A quick color sketch I did. Nothing special, just me slapping some colors on the canvas :) I will try and not talk too long, because it should be a blog with drawings instead of me blabbering on and on about drawings!
-Daniël Ernst-

Crunchtime and me 8-)

Pfew. Crunchtime stays tough, stress, deadlines and in the end the big payoff that the people will hopefully enjoy :) And next to my work there is me, the artsy fartsy autonomous I want to make my own stuff guy.

I got two projects that I'm working on next to my fulltime job, an illustration book ( which is coming along nicely) and my graduation project. Which I do for fun because I graduated a year ago :). Also I like to animate as well next to my illustrating and gamedesigning and making a game combines all of these disciplines.

* sidenote: I had a very nice story written with wise words, right in this place where I'm typing this, about my study years that I wanted to share, but blogspot deleted them because they did not liked it when I put in a heart sign with letters in blogspot. Be warned people no smoochie letter symbols!*

People usually don't like a webgame to be anything more then a fun passtime that you can easily click away if somebody walks past your desk at work. So if you want to have a magnum opus deep psychological drama game that teaches you important lessons about life, love and death, most people would go for a fun game in which you can blowup blocks or kill stickfigures...... I know I do.....

here are some character designs I did for the game. I went for the more reserved watergod design of the third from above. But I sure loved the other one as well, but it would be al ot harder to animate.

So enough with the reading letters, bring on the drawings!

Daniël Ernst

DINOSAUR SPACEMARINES YEAH!

After a time of hard work and moving to a new place I found some time to post a new sketch and more is coming when I hook up my scanner again :) BUt now back to business.

A friend of mine is a fanatic dinosaur enthousiast. After collcting just about all the jurassic action figures that are released he started collecting DinoRiders, a show which most of you must have seen!!!! There is not a lot that could go wrong with people riding on weapon laden dinosaurs. Expecially when it is eighties to the bone. So I decided to do some Dinosaur spacemarine sketches in a nice comiccy eighties toy style thingie with nice simple color scheme, neon pink an black. So heres the first badass dinosaur spacemarine to show that not only peanutbutter and jelly mix well!

The Obsidian scary Bird Frustration Painting

Every now and a then I want to do a scary monster drawing with a super dooper pretentious latin name, in this case the creature is called nex superne. Which ofcourse means Death From Above, which you educated people would know! But for other people like me there is a thing like an online translator so that everybody can abuse ancient languages to make cool names for bands, monsters and pet chihuaha.

Making scary drawings works very therepeudic for me, it prevents me from having scary dreams and will cut my use of foul language right in the middle. Also it balances out cute drawings I do.

At work I've been drawing lots of obsidian "things" and I was wondering in the process that it would be pretty cool to make a spikey monster thingy out of it. Remembering the birds the grandma of my girlfriend keeps as pets I decided it would look freakish to have a big bird monster on stitly legs with little beady eyes with lots of spiky shapes in it. Not that I think parakeets are scary stilty monsters, because I think they are my adorable little feathery friends that could do absolutely no harm. But maybe they just want us to believe that!!!!!!!!!

Hmmz makes one wonder how an obsidian bird can even get off the ground....

Color Studies

Dames

For a thunderdome contest at work I started work on a lineup of ladies of pleasure. The subject was;"A master and his pet". Good practice since I did not have a lot of lady drawings. It's fun people recognise people they know in these characters.... which make you wonder what they do in the weekends.....

The professor part III

I was trying out a happier style for the professor character to make the story a little bit more accessible. Also as the story unfolds, changes to the design of the character are made contineously. Also to have a good contrast I tried out a grim style.

I like the characters that visualizes the story, kinda like the Frankenstein monster who visually depicts the essence of what the story is about (this kind of design was executed wonderfully in pushing daisies). This is the part of creating stories and visual design I flirted with during my student times. So this will be the proving grounds for my theories and paper developed during this period.

Making some preliminary sketches gives a lot of reference to work from. The writing of the story is going steady, the base of the story is written and I started on sketching out scenes. The scene sketches I will post here soon.

Happy Newyear Everybody!