Some color-exercises: copying screenshots of the movie Gladiator, just for the sheer cinematographic joy of it. Hopefully I will learn something about color and composition in the process.

Different hilts.

Originally, the idea was to create a cutting edge using a strand of plasma arcs along the edge of the sword scroll. However, that seemed sort of overkill as fencing is more about pure finesse, finding the cracks in your opponent's armor and striking them precisely, rather than slicing someone in half with a viking broadsword.

The finished concept instead used a coil of metal similar to nichrome, the stuff that toasts your bread in the morning, glowing hot enough (about 1400 degrees Celcius) to cause serious cauterized scars, or even death.

And there we are: the rapier in action.

Couple of hours' worth of  sketching. Not in any way related to the London 2150AD project. I think...

So how do these groups settle their differences? Car-jousting? Fast-paced games of chess? Well, first of all, to gain satisfaction and restore/defend one's honor one needs to be willing to risk something, something serious, like bodily harm, or even death. Some form of violence seems to be the only real way to go.

Drawing on the rich history of dueling with rapiers, full of finesse and finely tuned badassery, I figured there had to be some way to compress the otherwise bulky sword into a more compact and elegant object. A rolled-up sheet of memory material would be able to elongate at will into a thin needle, and its internal circuitry would be able to form super-heated plasma to provide an edge to the coiled cone. Bulletproof body armor wont help you here - lose this duel and, if you're lucky, you'll be left with your life, and some cauterized scars.

Quick visualization sketch of the early rapier concept in action.

These are some of the different corporate families, decked out in full protective streetgear.

This is more like it! 

If our teacher is to be trusted, we will finally be given freer reign over our normally so very constricting projects. A space - a user - a product. In my case: future London - roaming gangs of corporate families - a way for them to achieve satisfaction through dueling on the streets.

Starting off with the space: London 2150ish AD. I tried to give the architecture the feel of ages past while still looking futuristic. The gorgeous Thames flood barrier was a great source of inspiration.

Aerial view of London 2150 AD,

two dense crescents of towering corporate buildings coiled around the old city heart, like a slumbering dragon hoarding its mound of gold. Green solar scales cover most surfaces, further aiding the dragon analogy.

 This is a likely field of battle: a multi-storied shopping street, where the logo-sporting corporate employees might run into each other and pick a fight. 

Maybe there are rumors circulating as concerns a botched hacking attempt directed at corporation A's mainframe, maybe Corporation B feels this an unfounded assault on their honorable trademarked name, tempers rise, words fail, and they resort to a more drastic solution to their argument - dueling.

More to come.

Ice cave.
Started out completely blank on this one, mainly experimenting with different textures and with repeated elements, like in the half-buried icicle giant's beard/face/teeth. Time for sleep.

New Owl City, streetview.
Another quick and silly piece, adding to the retro scifi madness that is new owl city. It's brutally rough I know, but at least my fingers and brain got their daily workout. The floating wisps of aurora-like bandwidths - having entered into the visible spectrum for the city's inhabitants - appearing so vibrant during the night, now float placidly through the bustle and commerce, like feathery down caught on the breeze.

New Owl City.
Quick and silly piece of practice - inspired by the tranquil image of an owl, and perverted into some futuristic neon fever dream. I simply need to churn out paintings on a more frequent basis, regardless of school work or whatever, else i fear my fingers will wither alongside my imagination. Dear oh dear.

A couple of very quick and dirty photomashes to visualize some possible screens of the game.

As school was suddenly back in session, a couple of us got the idea to try and develop a delightfully indie sidescroller set in the early computer age of an alternative victorian London - a variant of steampunk labelled playfully by us as sparkpunk. 

At the centre of this would be the Grand Computer, beset by everything from skittering analog computer viruses to frayed copper wiring snagged in whirring cogs. It is up to you, playing the role of the Assistant, to enter this the technological wonder of our time and Debug it. Quite literally.

That's the main idea, and here's the first character sheet for said Assistant.

After deciding upon a gentleman/mechanic sort of character (merging the 3,10,11,12 initial explorations), these next twelve iterations followed. All sporting some variant of the wearable Faraday cage protecting its wearer from the ravages of the high-voltage inner workings of the Grand Computer.

Spent the last several days wrestling with my computer over a 64-bit operating system, wading through a buggy bog of bootcamp and busted disk drives. Looking back, I guess it was all worth it in the end... Photoshop does seem to run a tad bit smoother with the extra ram :)

Aloe bridge.
There it is, the last one in my seven-day desert paintscapade. Don't know why it took me so long, but I reckon this ended up at 7+ hrs. Oh well, it's good enough.

Now what do I paint?

Forgotten oasis.
So the main idea was that the prickly flora, when left starved of sunlight, would become all twisted and gnarled. Their reddish/purplish hue could be attributed to a darkening of their chlorophyll in an attempt to absorb as much light as possible.
Sort of overstepped my 4-hour limit with this one (ended up taking more than double that), mainly because of the myriad of layers to wrangle, but it was well worth it. Really pleased with the end result :)

Needle spires, a.k.a. desert suburbia.
Wrestled a lot with this one as regards to color and composition, but I feel it finally came together rather well. Time spent? Let's say about 5 hrs.

Into the Carapace.
A vast wasteland of black dunes as far as a man can see, the sea of glass-like shards taking on a deep blood-red in the bleak sunlight. The half-buried plates of obsidian are in constant shifting motion, presumably formed during some cataclysmic volcanic eruption. Named the Carapace by the superstitious natives who believe it to be the mass graveyard of some giant beetle beings long gone from this world.

About 4 hrs.

Drilling wells.
So here's number three, though I'm not quite sure how long this one took. It went through several iterations, none of which really worked for me, but I powered through it and ended up with this one, and a headache. Hoping for a better flow tomorrow.

Cacti forest.
So yeah, technically it's the 16th already... But ignore that, I'd say it was still made today. The 15th. Still on schedule! Anyway, this landed on about 4 hours as well.

Aloe dunes.

I got it in my head to try and use the remaining free time of summer vacations to do something actually useful.

So, for the next week or so I will do my best to finish a painting a day, doing my utmost to limit the time spent. I decided on a desert theme, and the cacti followed shortly after. This first one ended up taking about 4 hours.

My latest addition to the godmachine universe, the city of Igquma (Zulu for termite mound), rises above the immeasurable sprawl of its urban offspring, the streets and alleys separating the randomly constructed housing projects giving it the appearance of a dried-up and cracked riverbed. Rooftops are turned into parks and bazaars for the inhabitants, with walkways and bridges over the street canals for cars below. A container city, many of its kind are strewn across the continent, a reminder of the past Africa rising from poverty and facing the challenges of an increased BNP and booming population.

It's summer and I can't stop thinking of snowy wastelands, sparkling under the veils of the aurora borealis. Not that the summer months up til now could be called sweltering by any stretch of the word, let's face it, I live in Sweden, but nevertheless... Introducing the frozen wastes of Aurorea.

If there was anything I wanted to achieve with this world, and there might be yet more glimpses to come, it was to get rid of the stigma normally associated with polar regions, namely that they are nothing but icy deserts - nothing going on but endless stretches of ice and snow. After researching a bit I came across some amazing microscopical photos of ice crystals and snowflakes. Perfect. And so I started to experiment with scale and scope to reinvigorate this frozen desert with giant shale-like glaciers of hexagonal crystalline formations, ice flora like frostblossoms and some oriental mystical twists as well.

Corporate

Youth

High fashion

Back alley

My attempts at designing realistic, cohesive styles of clothing for the fashion scene of 2158 AD. Moderately inspired by renaissance fashion, but not to the point of costumy awkwardness, I hope.

Presidency military. Elite infantry called 'mirror men' because of their reflective body armor. The idea being that this would act as camouflage in combat situations, refracting the form of the soldier into prismatic shards of his/her environment. Not as high-tech as possible video and/or light bending solutions, but drastically tougher and less energy dependent.

Below, a standard issue handgun, the Wyvern W9. Fired through electrical impulses, the bullets lie stacked in line of one another ready to be fired. This introduces the possibility of individual bullets being fired, as well as a solid hexagon of seven bullets for more stopping power, or even the entire mag at once, creating a virtual lance of metal able to punch through thick armor plating.

Concept for a buried saucer model meant to be incorporated into Janaka's movie somewhen during these last throws of summer.

Godmachine ahoy!

Topmost, a vertigo-inducing view of the company house spires of the Presidency, where enterprise has turned into a family matter and the stock market... well, now it's personal. Businessmen dueling on the streets over affronts to the honor of their company/their house/their family, is no rare sight.

Africa, having finally climbed out of the pit of poverty, corruption and dictatorship haunting its past, now stands a last free haven of democracy and peace in between the two super powers of the Commonwealth(East) and the Presidency(West). The Capital of New Carthage blossoms, even replicating the fabled hanging gardens of Babylon in their euphoria, albeit with a modern twist.

Yet in the sprawling back alleys of the rising nation dwells a population of refugees, many of whom are buddhist monks driven away by prosecution and violence, into free Africa. But without the social structure to sustain them, the pious monks are unable to keep their position at the top of the social ladder. They must instead live in shacks on the street, homeless but for their friends and fellow monks. Soon enough, large enough concentrations have gathered, and shanty monasteries are erected as if on their own accord from the massive hives of corrugated steel, chanting resonating throughout the cramped alleyways of the metropolis.

Janaka had the splendid idea of engaging some of us in the class in a sort of competition. He's a massive Halo nerd, I don't think he'd deny it, and  as he had recently read the book Halo Cryptum, he set us up the task of translating some of the excerpts into an illustration. They might be rather long, but if you fancy reading them to make up your own mind about this monstrosity, you're welcome to do so.

Excerpt 1: "We stood before a broad cylinder capped with a shattered dome, blown up and out like a ragged crown. Part of the wall had collapsed, and we were able to enter the interior of the cylinder through that breach.
We picked through the rubble -what seemed to be both human and Precursor walls and thick containment structurs- until we came to a staircase rising to a circular walkway five meters wide, the far side about fifty meters away. This had appaently once served as a gallery designed to look down upon something contained below, within the core of the cylinder. The inner parapet consisted of angeled panes of transparent material, hazed and starred by impacts from some long-ago explosion. Little more than the walkway and the inner cylinder below were intact.
 Overhead, the shattered crown of the dome allowed the last blue daylight and a few unwinking stars to light our path. The Didact approched the inner parapet, his armour actually glowing at his inner turmoil -as if preparing to deflect major damage. This was what he must have looked like going into battle. . . .
 Below, half-hidden in the shadows, an inticately shaped mold filled most of the pit. The mold had once snugly encapsulated something about fifteen meters tall, ten or eleven meters broad and almost as thick -far too large to be any veriaty of human or any rate of Forerunner.
 The armour's ancilla made no comment, supplied no information.
 I thought I discerned what might have been cushions or braces for a number of long, multiply joined arms, ending in shackles or gloves designed to grip hands bigger than my own body. Hands with three thick digits and central clasping thumb . . . or claw.
 Two pairs. Four arms, four hand claws.
 Pushed up and asside, three meters wide, like a huge hat tossed on a table, was a restraining headpiece. A ridged conduit flowed down one side, presumably the back. Apperently, the head confined by that helmet had once trailed a thick sinuous, articulated tail. 
 A cage. A prison.
 Empty."

Excerpt 2: "The Didact's actual memories -parts of them- finally blossomed within me.

The arena was equiped with walkways- I saw vividly, from his point of view, the Didact exploring the walkway around the intact, sealed cylinder below. 
Ten thousand years ago.
The Didact walked alone around the dome-shaped cap, contemplating whether or not he should activate a human device . . . something small, designed for a human hand and fitting like a toy in his own palm: a way of communicating directly with the creature within the cell.
Something manufactured by humans . . . pushing through Precursor technology. How was that possible . . . ?
Many questions flashed through the Didact's mind, and with difficulty I separated them from my own. Was this actually a Precursor, as the humans had first believed? Or was it something manufactured by the Precursors -possibly a strange, distorted sibling to both Forerunner and (the Didact was reluctant to consider this) humans?
Precursor, sibling, or ancestor to . . . what?
The Didact manipulated the device. The cap over the cylinder became transparent to his eyes, and he saw what lay within.
The cell contained, in temporal suspension, a genuine monster: a large creature with an overall anatomy like a grossly misshapen human, though possessed of four upper limbs, two degenerate legs, and an almost indescribably ugly head -a head shaped remarcably like that of an ancient arthropod seeded long ago on a number of planets, presumably by the Precursors, and known to some as a europterid. A sea scorpion.
Oval, faceted, slanted eyes bumped up from the front of its low, flat "face". And from the rear of the head, a long, segmented tail descended the spine, ending in a wicked barb two meters in length."

At the top, some ideas for a Mayan/Conquistador/Cowboy hybrid in the guise of a Rain Herder, corralling storm clouds on the back of his giant stormbird, armed with a longgun of featherstone, light and electrically conductive, it is highly precious to these proud mountainfolk.

Below, a weaver revisit in the form of a loom master and his Woven golem protector, battling it out on the decrepid city streets.