Bloodsport 14 Update

The results for Bloodsport 14 judging were recently announced on the Crimson Daggers livestream and my pieces were selected as a runner up! Dave Rapoza, Dan Warren and guest judge Anthony Jones talked about the pieces created by each runner-up and 3rd, 2nd and 1st place winners. I got some really great feedback and advice and I wanted to push my pieces a little further. Here are the new versions, I hope you like the changes!

Bloodsport 14: Beast Master

Last night (more like early this morning) I finished up my 2 illustrations for the Crimson Daggers Bloodsport 14 Beast Master Challenge! It was due way back on April 5th, but between having some freelance work and my part-time job I decided from the start I was going to go at my own pace and just focus on making 2 solid portfolio pieces.

In short, the challenge required you to create 2 illustrations the first depicting a human donned in armor that reflects it's more powerful monster form, which is the base for the second illustration.

Here are the final illustrations:

BeastMaster form 1

BeastMaster form 2

I based my character design on an African tribesman, specifically looking at the Zande Warriors. I learned about the Zande and their weaponry from watching a neat TV show called Deadliest Warrior. A typical episode takes a look at 2 different groups of fighters throughout history from all over the planet and compares their weaponry and fighting tactics. It's glamed up a bit for TV but it's pretty interesting and it's a fun watch. If you like weapons you'll really enjoy it. Anyways, I based my costume designs on various Zande dress and armor, and I tried to make their weapons feel more authentic by applying what I learned from the TV show.

Part of the Bloodsport Challenges requires that you do studies to work up toward your final piece, in order to familiarize yourself with your material so you can better execute the final illustrations. Below are some of my studies:

Here are some progress shots:

I'm pretty happy with what I came up with. I didn't look at any of the other entries until I finished my pieces so not to influence my decision making. There are some really impressive pieces that you can see for yourself in the Bloodsport 14 WIP thread HERE. It was fun participating and I hope to eventually participate for real and meet the deadline at some point on a future Bloodsport Challenge.

3rd week of studies

I'm really happy with a lot of the stuff in this batch, particularly 15, 16, and 17. These studies are turning out to be a lot of fun and I feel like my work is already improving from them. I'm going to give a warning ahead of time, the start of the next batch was a little rough due to the holidays and some traveling, and some aren't so much studies as much as me staying productive. I'm still making the effort though so that's the most important thing to me. Anyways, enjoy the new batch!

2nd week of studies

Here's my 2nd week of studies for the Crimson Daggers Deathline Challenge!

William O Connor dragon

Todd Lockwood dragon

First batch of studies for the Crimson Daggers Deathline Challenge!

As I said last week, I'm partaking in the Crimson Daggers Deathline Challenge and to get myself started off I'm just trying to make sure that I take some time to do some sort of study every single day. Some may take more time than others, some are inevitably going to better / worse than others, but as long as I'm doing some sort of study everyday then I'm good, at least for the first month. Next month I'm going to kick it up to the next gear...not sure how yet. I've got a bunch of stuff to deal with right now so I'm going to finish up all that stuff and then focus more on studies and stuff. Without out further delay, my studies...

Inspiration Spotlight #10: Dave Rapoza, Dan Warren, & Crimson Daggers

Lately I've been listening to / watching illustrator Dave Rapoza's livestream. You've probably seen his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, but in case you didn't here's a mash-up Dave made of all the finished portraits.

Dave's been really influencing me for a while now. The above series is one of the big reasons I decided to do the couple Power Rangers pieces I did. But now that I'm been watching his livestream I'm getting some really great advice, I can ask him questions and from time to time he'll give feedback on people's work along with his also illustrator friend Dan Warren. Dan's been doing a 2 hour study everyday in order to better his skills for when he goes to do new portfolio pieces. An example of one of his studies can be seen below...

Dave and Dan run a study group called Crimson Daggers. There are no real rules or anything, a basic outline is in place that everyone can work from in order to become better artists, and every month on Dan's livestream they host the Golden Boy awards, where they name one of the participants the Golden Boy for really improving their work through studies. Dan also hosts his study sessions on his livestream and encourages others to work alongside him.

 The Crimson Daggers just announced a challenge called the Crimson Daggers Deathline Challenge. Basically you set up a couple big seemingly unachievable goals to accomplish over the course of the next year to better yourself and your artwork by setting miniature goals to achieve every month and you have to do something every single day to work towards your goal. Every month they are going to have up meet-up on the livestream to talk about everyone's progress. If you wanna learn more click the link and join in yourself! I'm partaking, and I've already started the process. I'm starting off by making sure I do some sort of study every single day no matter what. I'll post the studies up on the blog next week, I've already done a bunch. I think I forgot to link to Dave's website...BAM Dave Rapoza!