Showing posts with label Monday Night Miller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Monday Night Miller. Show all posts

Monday, May 6, 2013

Monday Night Miller 020 ~ Gun Runs & Dragons

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller time! Tonight I'm previewing a character concept for a project I've been kicking around. I'm still hammering out the story ideas but this lil' lass should be one of the main characters. A rough and tumble elven tomboy with a big knack for getting herself into trouble and an bigger knack of pulling at your heart strings. Not to mention that she's a crack shot and will totally put one between your eyes!... cute right? I plan on going with the ginger leading the lineup below but I couldn't help but mess with the colors which resulted in the center drow and right vampire. Check it out.

Reload!



~ Enjoy!

Monday, March 25, 2013

Monday Night Miller 019 ~ Zombies & Me

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller time! Tonight's posting draws inspiration from a genre that I happen to love very much and has been quite plentiful as of late. The genre of which I speak is the Zompocalypse! the Zombiepocalypse? The Zombie Apocalypse. However you say/spell it, its great and its hot right now. Its not about sparkling and brooding vampires anymore. Wait! That was a thing?! Anyways. Reanimated corpses that decided that that awesomely magnificent white light just ain't for them. Thats what I'm here to talk about.

We've seen our fair share of Zombie themed games grace the table at Mik's. Some great venturings into "Zombie Cinema" and "Fear & Faith." The latter of which I still plan to run at some future undefined time... I know Mik, I know. However thats more about getting off my butt to paint some minis. In all fairness though, a good portion of that laziness is spent delving into more zombie based adventures. Be it Dead Rising (1 & 2), Black Ops (1 & 2), Read Dead Redemption (Undead Nightmare), Skyrim (Draugr are zombies, right?) You get the point. Zombies? Awesome. Video Games? Awesome. Zombie Video Games? Time well wasted? F yea!

Throw on that my weekly viewings of "The Walking Dead" while reading the original in comic form and constantly checking my IPod to get my fix for the Zombicide "Season 2" Kickstarter and I'm creaming cheese about these undead bastards. FYI there is a "Walking Dead" marathon all this week up until this next sunday, 3/31 Easter-freaking-Sunday, which happens to be the season finale for Season 3. Also there are, while I type this, 5 days left for the Kickstarter, its worth a look. 

A few years ago I even did a month's worth of postings over at Minions about the Zed nation, check it out. Anyways heres my doodle.

Braaaiiinnnsss!


~ Enjoy!

Monday, March 18, 2013

Monday Night Miller 018 ~ Star Basterds

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller time! Tonight I bring you something from a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away... 

Hopefully the devout readers of Miks Minis remember a play report post of Savage Worlds ala Star Wars meets Inglorious Basterds back in September 2009. Holy cow thats a while ago, yet, I still remember that game like it was yesterday! If not you can check it out hereI can honestly say it is one of the best games to date that I've played with the Minions gaming group. It was so much fun in fact that Andy has agreed to run some more "Star Basterds" goodness later this year. I am so eager to play this great setting again that my gears have been spinning since it was first mentioned a couple of months ago. I took that inspiration and drew up a character concept I had for the first session but never got to explore. This character is so cool, at least to me (opposing opinions and comments welcome below), that it ended up becoming two characters in one. Now originally I had doodled this pair up during the game but have since misplaced the drawing. I'll be sure to post it here when I find it. 

The core half of the background behind the duo's concept is of a lone jawa left behind, barely clinging to life, after an attack by some sand troopers destroyed a convoy of Sand Crawlers believed to be housing rebel forces and conspirators. In the end there were no rebels within the massive Crawlers however all the jawa's loved ones had been massacred and left to be forgotten in the burning wreckage as the sands of Tatooine buried the horrific site from history. The jawa managed to survive the onslaught and harsh desert conditions driven only by its unspoken vow to do whatever it could to make the Empire pay for these heinous acts. A once passive creature turned into a blood hungry soldier in an ongoing war with a great evil.

The other half of the background is that of a B-1 Battle Droid discovered amongst the ruins of a  dilapidated Trade Federation bunker. As the aforementioned Jawa wandered the desert ,barely maintaining it's sanity, it stumbled upon the ruins and took shelter within during a terrible sand storm and found his future companion. The droid was physically just a fraction of its former self. Its lower half blasted away during an exchange of fire as a Tusken attack breached the inner command stations. Unable to resist its nature to scavenge, the Jawa went to work looking around for whatever it could find of value. Imagine its surprise when the droid it was pulling from some rubble startled to life. The droid was a sentient model and its mental capacity had deteriorated substantially as it had been on its own for quite some time. The resulting personalty was that of a quirky individual to say the least. It had a penchant to speak and act before thinking in addition to having a knack of not understanding the seriousness of tense situations. 

Originally the jawa had intended to sell off the droid as that model had become a rare find in recent history. However the droid proved quite useful in its knowledge of tactics and what it could remember of the locations of Federation holdings on Tatooine. A mutual respect developed and in time the jawa had befriended the droid and even managed to tinker with and fine tune its inner wirings making it a better shot, a long standing problem of battle droids and storm troopers alike. Together they become a formidable force to be reckoned with. A jawa who rarely speaks and a droid that does more than enough talking for the both of them. Not long after they joined a group in the business of doin' one thing and one thing only... killin' Storm Troopers.

Aldo & Raine!


Enjoy!


Monday, February 18, 2013

Monday Night Miller 017 ~ Minifigure Musings

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller time! Tonight I've got some minifigures, this time based on some Mik classics. One figure comes to you from this "Tuesday Art Leftovers" post and the other from this "Lego Omniverse" page.

BAMF!


~ Enjoy!

Monday, February 11, 2013

Monday Night Miller 016 ~ Minifigure Musings

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller time! Tonight I've got some more minifigure artwork to show off. Since I've got quite a collection of trolls from Lego's Castle: Fantasy Era theme I thought I'd expand on it a bit more with a Troll Jailiff (complete with reverse sleeping-on-the-job face and turkey leg) and a dual axe-weilding Trollzerker.



BAMF!


~ Enjoy!

Monday, January 28, 2013

Monday Night Miller 015 ~ SDE Mini Bosses Colored

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller time! Tonight I'm bringing back the Hydra!  All colored up and looking' proper.


Continue!



~ Enjoy!

Monday, January 21, 2013

Monday Night Miller 014 ~ Revisits Colored

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller time! Tonight I have a simple offering, a glimpse into how I work. The first image presented shows some color tests (of Doug from last week's post). I'll usually use this process if I'm having difficulty figuring out skin tones and each character's color wheel. When I originally concieved Doug as a character I pictured him more goblinesque with a green pallette as shown by one of the samples. However seeing as he is an imp from Hell I figured I should use warmer tones. In the end I chose a gradient of yellow-to-red (the larger sample) as this one in particular really warmed up to me; pun intended.
This second image is also of Doug showing a transition of the different stages in which I work. I start with a sketch, the clean line drawing, then I'll add the shadows and highlights, and finally I simply block out the colors. Bob's your uncle.

 

Finished!
~ Enjoy

Monday, January 14, 2013

Monday night Miller 013 ~ Revisits

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller returns! Big Thanks! to Mik with his "Tuesday Art Leftovers" postings to fill the gap for the past couple of months. What can I say? Work got busy. Whatcha gonna do? Anyways for today's posting I thought I'd revisit an idea I had way back in my early college days. The idea came about during a course project in which we had to develop some characters and the world they exist in. 
 
My idea was probably the goofier of the bunch but I still think it has some promise. Every now and then I'll pull out some of the old sketch books and add some more work into the mix. The main cast consists of three focal characters. An ambitious trouble-making imp (Doug), his best bud - a hellfire sprite (Flick), and a wannabe grim reaper (T[Hana]toss). The premise behind this world is about the main character, Doug, who aspires to someday be a full fledged demon. He enlists his pal Flick in a venture to help them get noticed with the upper level demons. Unfortunately Doug doesn't get much respect, I mean who is gonna take a name like "Doug the Demon" seriously?, and he is given a "very important" job watching over a secure hell gate disguised as a taco stand. Assuming it to be a simple task to give without giving any actual responsibility, the upper level demons are surprised to find Doug and Flick have somehow managed to crack the seal and let a bunch of spirits, demons, and creatures loose. The duo are then tasked with returning the released monsters back to the seal or else they can never return to Hell. A task to surely get them killed... 

Meanwhile an up-and-coming grim reaper named Thanatoss is looking to get his scythe and robes, however, he is thrown a curve ball when Death gives him one last assignment. In order to become an honorary reaper and a true master of death he must keep a certain duo alive until they fulfill their goal of becoming demons. No easy task indeed. Thanatoss's personal brand of seriousness doesn't blend well with Doug and Flick's complete lack thereof. They change his name to Hana and comedic banter ensues. The now team-of-three run the taco stand during the day and track down the gate escapees at night. Fun right? That's the idea in a nutshell!

Here's my  protagonist, deuteragonist, and tritagonist of "Taco on the Street" (Its also the name of the taco stand - it literally looks like a giant taco sitting on a street corner! ~ patent pending)
Revisit!



~ Enjoy!

Monday, November 5, 2012

Monday Night Miller 012 ~ SDE Mini Bosses

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller time! I've gotten a little bit behind in the art department recently but I figured I'd at least drop something by for the week. This week I offer the sketch I'll be working off of for the summonable creature I asked you, the Miksminis readers, to help me create in my last entry. I decided to meld multiple suggestions (from Jmezz, Spacejacker, & Eli) as they had a similar theme, a multi-headed swarm of snakes. The Hydra will be a summonable mini boss once the cultist has sapped enough blood from the heroes. Once I get the final image rendered I'll also reveal the other nasty surprises the Cultist and its pet Hydra have to offer. Oh and don't worry if I didn't pick your suggestion for this particular creature. I may be using them in future Super Dungeon Explore postings.

Continue!


~ Enjoy!

Monday, October 15, 2012

Monday Night Miller 011 ~ SDE Minions

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller time! This week I've got the first minion of another group of Super Dungeon Explore creatures. This time around I'll be showin' off the Serpentfolk. I definitely used the featured Cultist Snakeman from this post over at MotMM for the concept behind these guys. Now you may be asking yourself "Where is the got-danged artwork?!" Don't worry! This post was intended to be sans-card art because I'm taking this thing interactive! I'm gonna let the readers pick my next SDE Minion posting!!!
This Serpentfolk Cultist will be capable of summoning  another creature into the fray. Kinda like a mini-consul. I will hammer out the details about how I intend this to work but the big plan is to let the Miksminis readers decide what that creature will be. It can be any power level from minion/denizen to big boss. I'll consider* any and all suggestions for character concept and abilities. Let the contest begin!

Continue!
~ Enjoy!

 *Bonus consideration for reasoning and explanations

Monday, September 24, 2012

Monday Night Miller 010 ~ SDE Heroes

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller time! This week I whipped up a Hero to battle all of the Boarmen I've been cranking out lately. I took one of Mik's suggesstions from a recent post for a character concept... the Clockwork Knight. Currently I have just been using a card template I got from the forums over at Boargamegeek but unfortunately it is only good for the monsters. Since I dont have a template for a good guy at the moment I'll just be posting the character art. Maybe we can use the comments section of this posting for possible abilities and ideas? Anyways check him/her/it out!
Continue!


~ Enjoy!


Monday, September 17, 2012

Monday Night Miller 009 ~ SDE Bosses

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller time! This week I offer up the boss of my Boarmen, my "Boarboss" if you will. Hes a whole lot of ham to tackle. He also packs a good punch and a helluva charge ability. I intended for this guy to easily get around the board with some nasty hit and run attacks. Let me know how he handles.
Continue!

~ Enjoy!


Monday, September 10, 2012

Monday Night Miller 008 ~ SDE Minions

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller time! Heres another Super Dungeon Explore character. This guy/gal/hag/hog? still hails from the Boarman family and sports some magical (pork) chops. This one is pretty straight forward if you're familiar with the game. I've even borrowed a couple existing abilities from the Deeproot Druid hero character (from the base game). Again if you try this one out let me know how the character rolls.
Continue!

~ Enjoy!

Monday, September 3, 2012

Monday Night Miller 007 ~ SDE Minions

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller time again! This time with some fan art for Super Dungeon Explore, a game that has graced our gaming table a few times now and I'm sure quite a few more. If you're not familiar with the game its a dungeon crawl minis-based boardgame in which you control a band of intrepid heros as they attempt to battle through and survive a perilous dungeon in order to kill its consul-controlled dungeon boss. Along the way you gain treasure cards to enhance your hero and his/her dice rolls whilst slashing at the dungeon's hapless minions and vicious denizens, and hoping you have enough heart tokens left to take down the uber-consul (Dungeon Master).
This is a fun, though sometimes difficult to beat, game set with chibi characters and a heavy vintage video game theme. The figures are great and what I like most about this game is that there is plenty of room to expand with hopefully a boatload of expansions and boosters(I love expansions) on the way to add to the already sizable base game. At the moment there are already two main expansion releases with the Caverns of Roxor and the Glauerdoom Moor planned to be available before the end of 2012.
With that I still couldn't stop myself from trying my hand at making some of my own characters for the game and so far it has been some great fun. Here is my first idea with more intended to be on the way as I plan to reveal a themed expansion or booster as I go. To begin with I chose a beastman type enemy called the Boarman. I tried to keep my ideas  for rules on the respective card to be playable and sensable though I haven't had a chance to playtest them yet. I have added an ability that is not officially in the rule book called "Charge X". I've intended it to be an uncontrolled burst of movement that could also potentially hurt the user. These are Boarmen after all, they're not the brightest crayons in the box. I have defined Charge as such:
Charge X - A character with this ability is able to move up to X spaces in a straight line, attacking all models in the defined spaces. This ability is considered Dangerous. (Dangerous abilities damage both friendly and enemy models that are hit.) A model that uses Charge may not end his/her action on a space occupied by another model. If this ability is interupted by an impassable space/object (i.e. a wall, pillar, statue, etc.) the user is also damaged by the attack.
If you happen to try him out let me know what you think.
Press Start!
~ Enjoy!

Monday, August 20, 2012

Monday Night Miller 006 ~ More Collaborative Ventures

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller here with another collaborative project from college. This time around it was going to be a stop-motion animation. The story behind this short film was going to be based around a king of the hill monster battle in which every combatant did his best to yell, scream, or roar his opponent off a monumental peak and be the last monster standing. I think the tenative title was "King of the Yell!". I did alot of concept work for this project and helped design a good chunk of the monsters. While I have the sketches of the monsters; I never got any pics of the final models which I sadly regret. Trust me though they were awesome. Anyways...

ROAR!!!






~ Enjoy

Monday, August 13, 2012

Monday Night Miller 005 ~ Spacelings in SPACE

Hey Everybody! Monday Night Miller here with just a small entry. Recently I've had quite the busy schedule and haven't had a chance to get much artwork done but now I have a good looking window to get some stuff out of me before I explode! The other night we had a test run session of some Alpha Wolf Pack and it got my gears turnin' for some creativity. In preparation, I grabbed my little red sharpie and started working it to get the juices flowing. After that I figured I'd get some drawing done...

Kidding!


~ Enjoy!

Monday, July 23, 2012

Monday Night Miller 004 ~ Collaborative Ventures

Hey everybody! Monday Night Miller here with another weekly dose of artwork. This time I've dusted off an old flash drive to show you some character concepts I had worked on with a college buddy. The project had been intended to be pitched as a cartoon show but it never got off the ground. I remember it had a cast of a bunch of zany characters, magical powers, and a heavy good vs evil element. Who knows? Maybe it'll be an actual show someday. Anyways, take a gander at these...

Team Work!









~ Enjoy

Monday, July 9, 2012

Monday Night Miller 003 ~ Minifigure Musings

Hey everybody! Monday Night Miller time again and this week I'll be showing you some  more of my minifigure concept work. Usually when I set to work on a project I will already have an idea in mind but with these guys I like to sit and let the ideas come to me. I'll thumbnail a bunch of characters and then develop the ones I'm really keen on. I like to get the details of existing pieces as close as I possibly can so I'll drag out a good chunk of my minifig collection to have some in-hand references and some impromptu play time... when I'm done there will be random pieces and parts laying about, its a massacre! Its also a ton of fun and after all is said and done; little sessions with these bits of plastic aid in keeping my creativity flowing and I like to think it also helps rationalize my obsession with collecting the mini-brick builders... 

BAMF! 
(build-a-mini-figure, get it?)




~ Enjoy

Monday, July 2, 2012

Monday Night Miller 002 ~ Beginnings

Hey everybody! Welcome back for the next installment of Monday Night Miller. This week I'll be showing you some more early workings from my college years. These particular drawings are from one of my first animation courses. It was a project pitch about a brother's betrayal and corruption. It had story. It had action. It had drama and comedy. And best of all its had animals! I tried to base the story (very) loosely on a character from the story of "The Journey to the West," the Monkey King and his "Ruyi Jingu Bang" rod and combine it with "The Godfather." My concept was of a jungle taken over by a tyrannical and corrupt mafia-like Don Gator and his league of henchman and hit men (gorillas and frogs!). Under this oppressive rule our hero, a small monkey from the vines, and his brother become caught up in the chaos and eventually the hero's brother betrays him. For the gangster lifestyle the brother leaves the hero, his own flesh and blood, for dead. After waking in a long forgotten tomb the hero finds a powerful weapon of legend and with it he rises against the evils of the jungle and frees those he loves from the darkness. It was an ambitious project and I had a lot of fun working on it. Today, I give you the concept drawings. As for the animation, I may leave that for another time... Behold.

Monkey Quest!







~ Enjoy

Monday, June 25, 2012

Monday Night Miller 001 ~ Introductions

Hey Everybody! Chris “Bi3cuit” Miller here to throw some of my artwork at your eyeballs. A few of you may know me from my postings over at MotMM. To the rest of you asking yourselves, “Who the hell is this guy?” Allow me to introduce myself; I’m an awesome aspiring (feel free to think that means awe-inspiring) artist from the Amish enchanted lands of the Northeast United States. I am particularly handy with a Prismacolor Col-Erase, 20044 Blue, Pencil and Wacom tablet. I’ve got degrees in Graphic Design and Animation and a passion for drawing that exceeds my imagination at times. My interests range from the Avengers to Zombies (get it? A-Z word play!) and I draw inspiration from all of them.
Introducted!

Mik has been asking me to drop some art postings here at Mik’s Minis for a while now and, obviously, I finally agreed. I’ll admit though that I had some qualms about what exactly to post. So many options to choose from, where do I begin! What do I want the world to see? Should I post just raw sketches, a web-comic, genre specific artwork, concept work, my own personal pieces, tutorials, stuff from art school??????? *click* Why not all of it?
Challenge accepted!
That little problem out of the way I had to next decide what my first post should be. I knew out of gate I had to show something that hopefully depicted how I work. My favorite thing to check out in anyone's collection of work is their sketches. I love to see the process of creation through trial and error. Raw lines, erased mistakes, and loads of half-finished ideas that eventually evolve into the final piece. To me a sketch displays the most character that concept will ever have. That ideal in mind I set off with the task of scouring through my sketchbooks. I had my still growing, over a decade old collection of sketchbooks and drawings sprawled out all over the living room floor. It was like flipping through old photo albums. Oh the memories... Now one thing I confess and think you should know about me is that I am a very forgetful person. It is horrible how much I forget on a day-to-day basis. There have been knockdown drag-out fights with the wife about what I have forgotten. But combing through those dusty yellowing sketch books I could tell you what song I was listening to or had stuck in my head at the time, which DVD I had playing in the background, which room and piece of furniture I was sitting in, what I was eating and/or drinking, how long it took to complete. Its crazy how it all came back as I flipped through the pages with a smirk on my face and I hadn’t even gotten to the many flash drives and digital back-ups I have stashed away. Two hours later and I still had no clue what I should post first. Then it hit me again. Why not all of it??

So here you go…
SKETCH DUMP!







Okay, I didn't really show you all that I had to offer. What kind of weekly blog feature would this be if I gave you everything in the first post? I’m thinking of the future after all. Sky's the limit! A lot of the artwork featured in this particular post was pulled heavily from my art school sketch books. At the time I had to keep the designs simple as they would of ended up being animation projects that had to be completed within a semester.

I'm eager to show what I've got and everyone can look forward to seeing more sketch dumps (or not, we'll see how this one worked out!) and an array of other artworks ranging from sci-fi to fantasy, concept art to web comics, the possible to the impossible, and probably quite a bit of Lego inspired concept drawings. Much like Mik, I am a big fan of the minifig and brick. I might even take some requests.

Anyface, I look forward to seeing everybody from the Mik’s Minis community in the comments section and here's hoping you want to see more of what I've got to offer.
~ Enjoy