Kings & Castles Concepts

I was recently going through the backlog of work I had done for Gas Powered Games recently and found a few images I had done on "Kings & Castles". All of this work ended up on the cutting room floor unfortunately but I think there were some worthy attempts, especially considering the time considerations the art team was working with. These are only a handful of really rough work, but looking back we were truly going into some dark territory. The faction these are from, known as "The Ancients", we perhaps once human but over time had been overtaken by ancient undersea and underground insect like creatures. We proposed the idea that they are either human/insect symbiots or collections of insect like creatures that have voltroned themselves together to make massive killing machines, covered in little, undulating bug legs and eerie human like eyeballs. Very dark and gross. In fact a bit too dark and gross. Anyways, enjoy!

Death Knight

The idea behind the Death Knight is that a once human warrior is covered in an armor made of living insects. A large long armed creature wraps around him from behind and latches around his chest. Meanwhile a hard shelled beetle forms a shield and a long centipede digs into his arm and creates a whip. Whats left of the man underneath would have made a hulking powerful warrior on his own before he even got his bugsuit.


This variation has a type of apparatus with large magnified eyeballs (as his are being clawed out by his bug helmet. He also has nice sholder armor for his whip arm bug to latch his mandibles into.

This one was never human at all.


Necromancer
The name necromancer comes preloaded with plenty of familiar, and often overplayed, imagery. Dark robes, dark magic, Hot Topic stuff. Knowing this we attempted to retain some of that imagery (robes) but go somewhere goulish with it. For example this first Necromancer(s) is held aloft on the tail and hands of two freakish beasts, living in a state of constant torture. Nobody wins!

This variation is supposed to seem human-like, but no one can truly tell whats happening under those robes. I always imagined the robes starkly white with certain parts soaked in bright blood.


Dracolitch

The only thing I can tell from my internet investigations about a Dracolitch is that its supposed to be some sort of skeleton dragon or something. Yea.... not in my house. It had to be something far more foul and sinister. I proposed something that looks more like a creature from space then a fantasy world. Note the living, eyed, tongue.



NightMare
Oh I get it! ....ahem...... the NightMare started out as a pretty typical burning hell horse. Not unlike the many burning hell horses you have seen before x1000. From that starting point somewhere inside this tangle of bug legs, eyes and carapace there is something that was at one time a horse. The idea behind this is that through the ages, pieces of this rotting hell horse would fall off only to be replaced by some new creature. I imagine after a few more millennia there wouldn't be any horse left. The large sea centipede like creature that makes up the head spine and tail, is based off an ancient sea creature called dunkleosteus, which is the most terrifying thing I could ever imagine, made only worse if it could gallop and was on fire.

All hail the Megalodons!!

Just to prove that I haven't forgotten about my art blog (I just "misplaced" it) I am posting a new piece of artwork I have made. Its a logo I made for my girlfriends training "cabin" in this years Rat City Rollergirls "Makin' Bacon" training camp. All hail the Megalodons!

For some reason I decided on a kinda surfin' safari motif complete with funky rounded lettering (From a font named "Dolphin". Cute.) Hopefully this can satisfy my 1,000,000,000,000 fans until I complete something with some more substance. As for whatever metaphor is at work here well , lets see. Many of the skaters come from a practice team called Potential Fresh Meat (Or PFM) and come to train so that they can try out for the Rat City league, thus becoming 1st year "rookies" or, fresh meat (Hence "Makin' Bacon", get it.) So that explains the pig, yet the pig is about to be eaten by the shark, since the cabin is called Megalodon. So i'm not sure if the skaters are the pigs or the sharks, or some of the skaters are pigs and some are sharks. In fact I don't know why it was decided that Fresh Meat equals pigs. Also the other camps are mostly dinosaurs. They also probably eat pigs......

Either there is an "Inception" level of complication going on here or I'm over thinking this.

In other news I am both 1.) unemployed and 2.) have my own studio space! Well, its shared studio space but my hope is, by just having a place to work, I will really start cranking out the artwork. But more on that in my next post!

New Art!

OK! Hey everyone! Im ready to get this party started and get this party started right. Hi I'm Steve Snoey a sort of professional artist. Ive been working in the Video Games Industry for about four years now and rarely have time for my own personal work UNTIL NOW. Day by day, and hour or two at a time I managed to chip together the piece that sits before you. I had a lot of things going through my head when I made this image not limited to:

- Baseball (Of which im only a fan of when I go to the stadium and watch)
- Japanese stuff
- Tron
- Early 60's retro fashion
- Japan
- Racing outfits
- Anime from the 90's
- Rollerderby
- Guns

SO I tried to make a truly rediculous image entailing all of that. I think it kind of worked. I tell ya what though. This sucker is busy. Lots going on. If you're a fan of detail then have fun. Really zoom in there cause this ones for you. If you're more into clean composition weeeeell. I hope you like neon. I really used every trick I have learned in the last 4 years working in games and even made up a few new ones. I wanted to add even more detail and polish but, thankfully, my computer informed me when I was finished. It did this but crawling to such a slowdown I had no choice but to be done. Thanks computer!

Anyways I wanted to make something silly and corny like you would see on an old Japanese video game in say..... 1991. Hologram wing hats, gunbats and baseball launchers, worthless protective gear. All of that. It may be brutally obvious but i've never really been one of those girl drawing kinda guys. Its something I want to get stronger at so but its a start :D

Hopefully I can keep this ball rolling and you will see a lot of new work and what I have been working on over the last four years.

Steve

For a fun easter egg I used my friends names as hologram advertising.