New Tag... Taking It To Another Level. Hopefully This Will Be On A Wall Someday :)

Museum. This is one of my top favorites... I love how the balance and composition turned out!

Black and Chrome

ID. id.

Two other bot sketches...

Blue: Bot_tle Rocket. As you can see by the busted light bulb on his head, his ideas are not the brightest... like strapping a rocket to his back.

Orange: Beat_bot. He'll dance on, even if the music stops.

Moonblade.

Yrden.

Seeing as this one is sorta time-sensitive, I figured I'd go ahead and post up today's design as a bonus. 10/31

The first of many... But really though.

-N7 Day 2022-

As mentioned yesterday, here’s my new minimalist Mass Effect title card!

I’m a big fan of title sequences (and main menus in games) as the choice of art and music really sets the tone for the whole experience from that initial moment. This is one of the many things Mass Effect does so successfully, and I love playing with these moments as it allows me to do fanart of a favorite series, while still hanging out in my typography/graphic design happy place.

For this year, I wanted to explore a more alien design, maybe a strange new world we could visit in a new Mass Effect. I love doing minimal, restricted color palettes with different textures providing the details and variations. This idea was born from the classic N7 red for the text, which then spread to the planetary surface in the background.

And then these mysterious obsidian orbs hovering over these impact craters. Or maybe scorch marks... One of my favorite things in ME1 was discovering those weird ruins on random worlds, often with the single chrome sphere hovering over the surface. I wanted these orbs to hearken back to those moments, but also be different.

That’s all I’ve got. Thanks as always to Bioware for creating these games, and I look forward to new adventures in the future!

For now, though, I should go.

Experience Junkie

                I fell in love with an experience junkie.

You know the expression, “Those who burn twice as bright, burn half as long”?  Well, that was her.  She got off on always doing something a little better, a little crazier, a little more dangerous than what she did the day before.  Immediately, I knew I was in over my head; if I didn’t keep up the pace, she would get bored and move on to the next guy, hoping he could fulfill her insatiable thirst for experience.

And yet, I’m not the kind of guy who just throws in the towel when the going gets tough.  Especially not with a girl like her.  She might have been wild, but to me, that was a good thing.  There was something exceedingly special about her, an untamed quality that had long been extinct in the human race.  She intrigued me.

So keep up the pace I did.  For almost eight months I kept up the pace, working tirelessly to find something new and exciting for us to explore.  I never would have admitted aloud how worn down I was from keeping such a frantic, unpredictable lifestyle, but the fatigue was definitely beginning to creep in.  I was certain it would only be a matter of time before it all caught up with me… or before she noticed my inability to keep up any longer and drifted away.

Then, and only then, did I make the jump from normal thrill-seeking to something new—crime.

Doubtless, our actions had always skirted the edge of the law.  Driving much too fast, skipping through skylane levels like they were green-lighted intersections, polluting the regulated-atmosphere by smoking cannabis down in the bowels of the Dive, brightening up the dour metal walls with colorful, if not entirely appropriate, graffiti… we’d even gone so far as to get some unlicensed body modifications.

But never once had we actually committed a crime of force, an aggravated assault per se.

“You wanna rob a bank tonight?”

She rolled over lazily until she was on top of me, heart beating achingly against mine.  Her skin was warm, slightly sticky with sweat, just like the walls of the dingy flophouse room, and her movement was tired.  Despite the languid motion, however, I could see the fire that had suddenly sparked behind her eyes.  Taking the hand-rolled joint from between her lips, she let a thin streamer of blue smoke trail out of her lungs.

Silence, other than the slow whisper of her breath.  It was something we had come up with, something just between the two of us.  Silence was often the best answer, when you couldn’t trust words to express how you felt.  I suppose it also could have been the worst sort of answer, when anger or hatred was too strong to speak… but I knew that wasn’t the case here.

So, without a word, I knew she’d said yes.

Then, voice hazy with smoke and the thought of a smile, she raised the stakes a little higher.  “An oxygen bank.”