Conan the Barbarian

... And A Dragon Arm!

I am going to have to start paying Aidan soon, since he now art directs almost all of my work. Here he was instructing me on everything that a "cool" robot should have when it goes into battle. To be honest, he was a little miffed that I didn't add another cobra.

Project Exonaut - The Battle Begins

(Click HERE and scroll down to get a MEGA version from CN.com!)

 Let me share some cool art with you...

When I started working on the "Project Exonaut" project, I knew that I wanted two distinct styles of art in the game. We had our cool 3D models, but I wanted to develop a 2D style to go along with them. I also knew that I didn't want this "2D look" to be an over-polished, airbrushed, marketing driven, snooze fest.

Ben Caldwell (his awesome blog) is one of my favorite artists working today, and an all around cool guy. His style is very unique, and he is such a talented draftsman that he can pretty much draw anything well. He was my first choice to bring something awesome to the game, and thankfully he agreed to join up. He was able to take my suit designs and turn them into truly spectacular animated characters. (He also ended up designing several suits in the game. Thanks Ben!) Full of style, yet never lacking in form. Fun, yet menacing. I handed him a very tough task, and he blew me out of the water.

When it came time to paint a few of the larger scenes, I had a wish list of studios... and Massive Black was at the top. They do amazing work on so many projects. (check them out here) We ended up signing them to paint two large scenes and they brought the awesome. (Kemp Remillard is the artist from MB who rocked this scene out.)

I am happy to share the above image with you. As you can see, I have a few of the suits blacked out. That is only because we haven't released them into the game yet.

Ben did a lot of art for the game, and I am hopeful that it will all be released over time.

Very good work.