I just finished this new painting, titled Slither. As usual, you can buy prints at:

http://society6.com/jefflangevin

It’s been a little while but I’ve finally finished a new ….’painting?’ I never know what to call something like this since it’s sort of a mishmash of techniques including drawing, photo-manipulation, and digital painting.

This image is actually one of the most organic I have ever done, by which I mean the end result is really not at all what I set out to make. I kept getting stuck in places where I was unhappy with the direction and ended up leaving it for long periods, trying to come back to it with fresh eyes (and hopefully fresh ideas). It might have been cool for me to save some of the iterative versions to show how it changed over time, but that would have required some forethought. In the end though, I think it ended up in a good place.

Prints are available at http://society6.com/jefflangevin/

I had the opportunity to participate in a small workshop on Japanese sumi-e brush & ink technique, and here are a couple of the results. Generally being overly controlled and perhaps trying to be too precise, I had a hard time letting go and just letting the brush work quickly. I found it a little awkward to hold the brush so perpendicular to the page as well. It’s a very different kind of feeling than my tablet or a standard pencil grip. There is something really beautiful and intriguing about the simplicity of the black ink and the imperfect variations within the strokes.

It’s late but I wanted to share the holiday card that I designed and sent to friends and family this past year. I had fun doing this!

This is a watercolor / digital work I will be submitting to http://uforgegallery.com/ for their upcoming illustration show. It was nice to get off the computer for most of this image; watercolor is something I think I will try again in the future. There is something really nice about the lightness and transparency of it, and there is always a nice unintentional detail to it. I find that there is a lot of unexpected subtlety.

Prints of this work can be purchased here

A couple recent doodles. Nothing special.

Finished. Took a while but the first of the series is done. You can buy the print in various sizes here. Looking forward to tackling the next one!

Almost done with the Princess Peach image I teased last time. In the meantime, here are a couple recent drawings.

The reason I have not posted in a while is because I finally started to work on the project that has been kicking around in my head for several months: A series of renderings of iconic game heroines done a mix of art nouveau and 50′s pinup style! (similar to the Wicked poster I did a while back) I might try and post some smaller sketches and doodly things in the meantime, but for now, here’s a look at my initial sketch for my first in the series: Princess Peach.

Character design is something I have always been passionate about but lately I’ve really been pursuing it with more focus. I am trying to do more refined and relevant concepts rather than let rough sketches just sit in notebooks forever.

This is a concept I did of a female thief archetype, incorporating an icon identifying a guild affiliation into her garb.

A poster I designed based on EA’s sci-fi survival horror series “Dead Space”

Prints can be purchased here!

Another painting I created based on the MTG card called “Fangren Hunter.” As I mentioned in the previous post, I created this without having seen the existing artwork for the card, I just imagined it based on the name and description.

Here is the actual Fangren Hunter art, by Darrell Riche:

I recently gave myself a small personal project that might serve as a motivation and purpose for practicing conceptual thinking and digital painting.

If you are familiar with the collectible card game Magic The Gathering then you are aware that the cards themselves feature incredible artwork by many top caliber artists. I’m not exactly sure how the process works but I expect that the artists are commissioned to do the visuals based on the name of the card, its description, the style or theme of the set, as well as some art direction. I thought it would be a good exercise to find card names for which I’ve never seen the artwork and try to create my own imagining of what it might look like. Having only the name doesn’t give me much to go on but I kind of wanted that ambiguity and freedom, the card title just gave me a nice jumping off point.

The first painting I did was for the card “Ancestral Recall.” My concept for this was to express a solitary / ritualistic communing with the past. Maybe she is drawing on the wisdom of her ancestors through communication, or maybe she is attempting to literally call them back to life.

It’s fun to see how different it is from the actual artwork featured on the card, which looks like this:

**original art by Mark Poole**

A couple of years ago I started a company-wide, internal art show at my workplace. The purpose was to showcase the talent of our designers by displaying only personal work that was done outside of the work context. It was pretty successful and is about to have its 4th show. I was asked to participate in a collaborative piece for the current exhibition organized by one of my team-members. The concept is simple: on a 3 inch my 3 inch square, create a rendering of a tree in black and white. There were no limitations on media or technique; in fact, variety was encouraged.

The end result shows a nice diversity of approaches both in execution and in how each artist depicted a tree. This is the tree I contributed:

Some of the more unusual and interesting trees were made from embroidered floss, plastic forks, rope, and cut paper.