Procrastination - I am a bit swamped at the moment, which is usually when I start creating little sketches like this. But now it’s out of my system and maybe I can get back on track. Actually I think taking a few minutes out to do stuff like this once in a while is a good way to clear your mind out a bit, especially if you are on a fairly long term project as I am right now. Or I may just be trying to justify it.

hi everybody -

My book “100 Ways to Create Fantasy Figures” will be out in stores around end of October/beginning of November, and is available for pre-order at your favorite online booksellers. The basic approach for this book was to look at 100 different concepts/skills/things-to-think-about/etc. that you might run into as you’re designing and illustrating fantasy-based characters. The book grew out of some of the articles I had written for ImagineFX magazine, and in fact the publisher approached me after seeing some of them.

Anyway, a lot of the illustrations come from work done for Wizards of the Coast and a couple of other clients, and are used to illustrate the various points in the book. This isn’t a real hardcore art fundamentals book, as I kinda learned what I know by flailing along as best I could. What it does represent are some of the things I learned along the way, and the main issues and problems/solutions that I seemed to encounter most often as I worked.

If you’re at all interested in doing fantasy type illustration work, it might be a good resource to see the sort of things you’ll want to think about when putting together a portfolio. Or, you could also just point and laugh.

Here’s some photos of an advance copy that the publisher d00ds sent me. Please pardon the crapness of the photo quality.

Hey wossop

I thought I would post an example of the preliminary sketches I send in to the editors at Marvel for cover art. Usually I will get a suggestion or two from them regarding themes or action or story or whatever, and then I will send a few sketches like these in response. There might be some back and forth depending on how well one or more of them are working (or not). I usually try to send in another shot at 80% - 90% completion just so there’s no surprises.

I’ll post the finished art here once Marvel releases it.

A quickie digital sketch from last night.

AAAAA I’m swamped! So what do I do, I doodle.

Hi there -

I put together a book of paintings and sketches, a mix of personal work and freelance illustration work (a fair amount of Wizards of the Coast stuff). It’s full color interiors, 159 pages, and is available in hardcover ($48) and paperback ($35). You can order through my storefront page at lulu.com; here is a link:

http://stores.lulu.com/francistsai

The order page at lulu.com has a low resolution preview of several of the pages.

Pardon the forthcoming mental diarrhea.

One of the things I’ve always tried to do with concept design work is to provide as clear a read as possible. To me, this has meant eliminating extra (unnecessary) information, clarifying the intent of the design as much as possible, with the idea that the main purpose is to guide someone else in creating a 3D asset. In that kind of mind set, the concept art is not the end, but simply one step along the way to the end. It’s a documentation of the desired end product, but it is not the product itself.

Illustration is a different kind of thing. As the one holding the pencil (or brush, stylus, whatever your deal is), that thing you’re creating is the end product. That being the case, a clear, efficient read isn’t necessarily always a requirement. Meaning, you’re no longer writing a visual instruction manual for someone else to build something.

Good art seems to be about being different things to different people - depending on what’s going on inside your head, what you get emotionally from a piece of art will be different from what the person next to you gets out of it. I’ve always tried to maximize the “signal to noise” ratio in my concept art. See that stuff about “clear read” above. In illustration, it may be that “noise” can be made into “signal.” By having many layers, textures, noise - there are more opportunities for meaning to arise from the art. Not necessarily “meaning” in terms of what the artist intended, but that might come from the act of a viewer looking at a piece of art and responding emotionally to patterns, lines or forms in ways that only that particular person can.

In the past I’ve made the comparison between concept artists and actors. Some concept artists approach their work similarly to good character actors. They are able to suppress their own voice in order to play a role that best supports the project they are working on, and you are never really conscious of CONCEPT ART. Same way that really good visual effects are not obvious, or how a lot of times it’s difficult to remember the names of those good character actors. These concept artists are able to design appropriately for any time period, genre, mood, etc. Other concept artists are more like blockbuster movie stars. They do a certain thing really well, are well known for it and are hired to do that thing on someone’s project. As in movies, there’s definitely a market for those guys too.

As a concept artist, I’ve always strived for the character actor route, which means I’ve always attempted to eliminate any individual mannerisms or idiosyncracies in my art as much as possible, in pursuit of that “clear read,” and to serve the project. Of course, as much as you try you’ll never completely eliminate those personal artistic twitches. As an illustrator, I want to figure out exactly what those things are, and bring them back and refine them in my illustration work.

So all that verbiage was meant to set up this image, which is a remix of a digitally painted sketch from several months ago. My formative years as an artist (starting from say age two to about age 28) were spent with pencil and paper, and I think that a good portion of my artistic “voice” comes from that pencil, paper and linework equation.

Here is a shot of the Planetary Federation outpost from which the rescue mission to retrieve Vitaly Fentonov originates. I’ve placed a few Galactic Imperium troopers in the shot for scale, but story wise they would not be present here.