Monsters in the Artwork: The Great Wave off Kanagawa vs The Rancor by Mike McMahon

I pretty much rushed this, but you'll get the idea, but as soon as I saw "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" by Hokusai, I immediately saw the idea of a Rancor going up against it

Darth Vader by Josh Purple

I'm late! Sorry!  Since last night I've been trying to post on AF, and I just could not get the Blogger 'new post' page to load... excuses, excuses, :) .  But, I decided to use FireFox 6, and YAAA it works! 

Feel free to call this a total CHEAT :D !  But, I couldn't resist.  At first I was thinking of doing a cartoony fun Vader, until I let myself get sucked into a 3D version (and that went from doing a Lego Vader to this photoreal render of Vader).  Spent waaaaay more time on this that I planned on, but hope it looks good. 

I used 3ds Max 2012 64bit, hdri set-up, iray renderer, based my model & modeling work on Shatgan's 3D model (from The 3D Studio.com.  His 'read me' file shows his name as Wilson.  My Thanks to Wilson!).

I found an image from the hallway of the Death Star, put that in for all of the reflections, used an hdri image in the environment to add to the lighting & shadows, went with a gamma correct workflow,etc. Set-up shot;

Added a photometric light, casting slightly blue light (and a reflecting whiteboard), in front of Vader, used some Depth of Field, used Arch & Design materials, realistic scale, etc. Another Set-up shot;

Then I let the scene render in iray.   BUT, again, this is not a 3D blog, so I completely failed :D .  Forgive me!  I was wanting to pay tribute to the 'original' Darth Vader. 

Darth Vader by Mark Hurst

So I can't really explain where this idea came from. All I know is it popped into my head and well it made me laugh out loud so I had to go with it. I have never drawn Vader, so this was fun for me seeing the costume from different behind the scene photos and movie photos to get an idea of how it looked. I like to think I've put a little bit of my own twist on the helmet/mask.

Darth Vader by Mike McMahon

With a theme like this, I couldn't do just one piece and thought it'd be fun to draw an 8 page mini-comic. I penciled about 90% of it when I realized I wasn't gonna get it done in time so I decided to just complete the double-splash page for Armagetto which you see above. But if you want to see the other pages to get an idea of how the story played out, you can go here.

Let's RASSLE!: RIP Macho by Josh Lynch

I don't know much about professional wrestling. But this I do know; if you don't like Macho Man you probably have a small brain.