Brian Thuringer Art

Netherworld Seeker

2012-02-10T20:12:00.000-08:00

For this character/creature, It was rather a random idea that I developed from start to finish. As I worked on this, It was fun to sort of throw things around and build on it. It could be thought of some otherworldly creature that is skilled at seeking out it's victims, floating between dimensions and not limited by anything that could obstruct it's path. I'm going to work on more ways to create things that appear unconventional/impractical but believable/functional. maybe draw some characters that wear all kinds of clothes the wrong way, haha. This was fun and i'm happy with how it turned out. :)

alien riding a dinosaur, whilst slaying some zombies...badass.

2012-02-09T22:58:00.000-08:00

Honorbound and paint studies.

2011-09-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

The first seven images from the top are for a client's card game called HonorBound, fun project and and cool ideas to illustrate. :)

The last one was a paint study from a movie still snapshot of the film BladeRunner, one of my favorites. This is Deckard, the lone detective in the rain.

hammerhead is finished!

2011-06-27T21:53:00.000-07:00

Here is a final render of the hammerhead model! It's looking good and I'll be starting a new one soon...
here is a screenshot and two angles of a final render. learned a few things about alpha channels and their use in texture rendering. The model has been rendered with normal map, Ambient occlusion, and a light emission texture. In this scene there are 3 light sources, as well as the internal source from the character. At the moment the subsurface scattering wasn't really working for me, so I'll have to explore that another time.
more to come...

making progress with 3D models

2011-06-11T16:44:00.000-07:00

I've just updated Blender 2.5 to the latest 2.57b build, which is huge improvement from the 2.54a build i was using last time, whipping up some shapes has been a breeze. Sometimes I'll start with a cube and begin to extrude parts out of it, adjusting the vertices as I go along. Although for simpler things I'll model them in SketchUP since it can sometimes take less times or certain types of shapes can be better achieved.

So far I've put together the low poly model of my hammerhead character and I've got a magic box with it's tongue sticking out. Finally, there is a cube that I made for the purpose of a trial run with the source engine and I'll see how it works once it's exported/compiled into .smd format. More to follow...

hammerhead

2011-06-02T23:18:00.000-07:00

Here is the start of a new 3D model, Hammerhead. I drew this up as a sketch in my sketchpad and eventually decided to make it the basis for my next model, it's been a while since I did my last one. This one will be much more detailed and hopefully, rendered in Unreal engine or Source engine. :D

update, some self-portraits to start off the summer.

2011-05-31T23:03:00.000-07:00

I've decided to do a series of self-portraits of various facial expressions, one after another from time to time.
some are goofy, some are serious, etc. I'm enjoying this and throughout each portrait I'm experimenting with different methods of painting and styles. Maybe something unique will come of this? we'll see.

dreams...

2011-04-29T11:45:00.000-07:00

Once in a while, I get these strange vivid dreams of otherworldly places. Perhaps it's my mind just running amok when i'm asleep and it presents me whatever it comes up with. I don't know how other people dream and I don't think most people are always eager to share that particular subject. Dreams tend to come in many forms based on our memories and retained knowledge of things. Sometimes you'll have a reoccurring dream of a particular thing, I bet a lot of people have those and they don't really pay much attention to it. I feel like my dreams sometimes mean something...who knows what they could be about specifically, it's totally random. I wake up and think, "huh...what was that about..." and I just go on with my day.

Now I feel like they could be an excellent opportunity for a creative source, possibly for fine art. Although i'm not the first person to decide that, many artist before me have done that with success, such as HR Giger, Salvador Dali, and so on. Maybe even Beksinski did the same, who knows what his objective was...

This painting probably represents my frustrations with art, well...I have my good days and bad days. lol

Monster 3D model

2011-04-11T23:48:00.000-07:00

This is a repost, since the original post for this subject must have been lost or so. Anyways, this model was designed in Blender 2.5 beta, texturing in photoshop, sculpting in blender with it's new sculpt tool. Would have used Zbrush, but I found Blender's approach on sculpting to be simpler. The model was skinned with various textures and mappings, such as the standard color and detail texture, ambient occlusion map and normal map.
What you see here is the final rendering, along with screenshots of how I created this creature from the beginning. Enjoy!

new environment sketches...now onto the final pieces.

2011-04-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

Perspective is absolutely crucial to the depth and scale of any particular environment illustration. for a while now, I've been studying this and it's been a difficult challenge to grasp a solid understanding of what makes a strong environment scene...The objects within, how they are arranged, the color palette and much more. It must show it's own culture that is believable and consistent. drawn in photoshop, used perspective grids and google SketchUP

Some stuff i've been doing for a game.

2011-04-09T21:09:00.000-07:00

This game is a point and click adventure game that has been in development since last spring qaurter and it really took off during the summer. At first we were going to go with a 3D graphic visual element for the games design. The game was being developed for a client of the NTID school at RIT. I began working with the programmers Eric Kenvin (lead designer/programmer) and Devin Strehle (programmer), who started the project and I inquired if they needed an artist to help create the assets for the games graphics. They agreed and I started helping with the game's art direction and it's been a great learning experience ever since. There was changes here and there, new people came into the project such as Ben Rubin and Jillian Felsburg, Both who primarily helped by drawing the backdrops for the games levels throughout most of the year. I painted in those drawings they handed me and then handed them to the programmers.
The art team expanded (recently added two new member, Alicia Soos and Katie Lawter) and the programming team changed a bit, but Eric and Devin remain a crucial part of the team. Arron Borges joined the team and he's been a great help. I have new people joining the art team to help out with the content creation, since I'm also a full-time student and can't push all that work myself. Although, I do the best that time can allow. The art team has to divide up the work and we adopted a workflow that was very much like how comic book artists approach illustrating each page. draw, ink, color.
Everyone in this team has been great to work with, hopefully we can collaborate again in the future.

Here is a 3D model of Guy Shady, he's a sinister character that tries to persuade the main character into making bad choices for his own end. Devin modeled this character, however I handled the texturing.

A book that is being used as the game menu while in-game, it would have a list of choices, such as save, load, exit, resume, etc. illustrated in photoshop.

The elder, he's one of the character for a later level in the game, character idea was contributed by Kelvin Burnett, one of our artists, I painted in his sketch of this.

A model Sheet I designed for Devin to use as a reference for 3D modelling.

I painted this character concept for Mrs.Wealthy, a rich lady from the first level who the main character interacts with.

Library view that the character can maneuver about within, Jill drew this up and I painted this in, were going for a comic book style with this game's illustrated world. same goes for the rest of the backgrounds, however, I had some contribution to drawing the tower.

Clock GUI I designed for the game's HUD

Animated version of the Map GUI, it was a fun idea, unfortunately we opted to keep the HUD remaining still. we felt the it would eventually be distracting to the player if all HUD elements were moving constantly.

Animated in Photoshop.

Another character I painted in, sketched by Kelvin Burnett.

batman...pow!

2011-04-02T22:56:00.000-07:00

The other day I felt like doing some batman paintings, it's been a while since i've done super hero stuff and I might do my own renditions of the DC world of characters. I plan on doing another batman piece that is more complete and refined. but for now, here some quick ventures with the dark knight. enjoy!

monster weekend

2011-03-05T15:39:00.000-08:00

This started out while hanging out at a friends house with a few beers and good times. I used adjustment layers for colors in various areas of the image and for base color. cropped it a little. it was a fun sketch.

old man face

2011-02-18T00:03:00.000-08:00

I whipped up this little paint sketch while watching a movie, paused it for a moment and did a sketch. It's kind of a fun exercise to pause a movie periodically between each speedpaint/sketch and do a piece. This was some wizard/scientist character from scorpion king, it's not the best film ever, but fun.

Environment sketches

2011-02-09T13:17:00.000-08:00

Here are some environment sketches inspired by a dream I had a long time ago, it was pretty vivid and memorable. waking up thinking, man I want to go to that place and explore it some more. The entire place was riddled with stone blocks that constantly shifted and floated around and around me was this vast ocean with islands. The sky however, was not Earth-like. A blue sky with white clouds is what we see here on earth, but this place had a different scheme of natural colors. I'm trying to create a vast and open feeling of this place, hopefully my chosen composition will provide for this well, it all comes down to color theory and light later on.

Bruce campbell portraiture

2011-01-27T01:57:00.000-08:00

Yep, this is Bruce Campbell, known for his lead role in the Evil Dead movie trilogy, made several cameos in recent films directed by Sam Raimi and now he has a role in the currently broadcasting show "Burn Notice". This was painted in Photoshop, I decided to start the whole thing gray-scale and overlay the colors and then a final treatment layer of painted in additions.

new sketches :P

2010-12-31T11:19:00.000-08:00

well, I came around to finding this web app called harmony and it's a really nice simple drawing tool with an experimental approach to how it renders your freehand line-work. It's a simpler program than others like "Al.chemy" or some other stuff out there. I remember there was another one that was on conceptart.org that had collaboration features or worked like a chatroom.

Here are some sketches I did.

just a quick doodle. LOL

2010-12-21T20:53:00.000-08:00

just a random doodle, messing around with some other brushes.

Left Behind

2010-12-13T23:10:00.000-08:00

Well here are the sketches for the "Left Behind" Assignment, it's kind of a progressive approach to an idea, I kinda jumped back and forth between two different things, but eventually settled with a sci-fi scenario of an escape. Possibly an escape from a prison or weird laboratory as test subjects. I'm giving this a future-retro treatment and controlled palette, hopefully that'll work out. It's going to be quite gritty and nicely toned. Looking forward to finishing this!

paint studies

2010-11-24T10:48:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if you'll heard of Phil Hale, but he's got a pretty sweet style and i'm not sure what his techniques are really. Although, I decided to some paint studies of paintings by Phil Hale, Beksinski, and john singer sargent.

So far, I have one for a Phil Hale piece, and I think I've learned a few good things from it. Especially when it comes to color palette. meanwhile i also did a few quick gestural sketches, now back to some honorbound stuff.

new viking characters

2010-11-16T13:59:00.000-08:00

here are some more, thor and hel. completed today, feel free to comment.

triangleman, final painting, finished...

2010-11-15T01:17:00.000-08:00

well here is a side by side comparison, i had to take a photo of my painting (did the best i could to get it clear as possible) and bring it into photoshop for paint-over. at first, prior to painting. I did some color correction using "color variation" feature and an adjustment layer of levels. also did a color overlay layer to give some colors a bit of accent. the final painting turned out well and it was tricky to just paint on top of an oil painting with digital brushes, but i think the texture of the original piece helped it a long way. thanks!

triangleman, final sketch, color comps...

2010-11-06T21:05:00.000-07:00

Onto the final painting, did a final sketch and color comps. taking one of these and putting it to the board. hopefully it'll work out just fine. i'm liking the green and red comp, one of the other ones might be chosen, i'm not sure. all in all, it'll probably turn out completely different or slightly improvised when working with the paint. who knows, I kinda just go along with what i'm doing and it works sometimes.

TriangleMan, Triangle Man, does the thing that a Triangle can.

2010-11-02T13:49:00.000-07:00

Here is a bunch of sketches for another personal focus assignment, and I'm debating whether or not to do this in Oil paint, I probably will. Lately I've just been in the mood to mess around with oil some more, so once I get a more finalized sketch out of these, It'll be done digitally. Then I'll have it printed large at a print shop on some kind of artist paper that will then be mounted on plywood or some kind of hardwood board. I've been very inspired by Ashley wood, Jon foster, and Justin Sweet's artworks, where many of them have a very expressive painting style that capture so much through a very well thought out composition.

Here we hae a few sketches of a subject being persecuted by "trianglemen" I'm giving it a very sci-fi/twilight zone feel to it. As for color pallete, i wish for this to be relatively limited in in color with a few vibrant accents here and there. I'll have to give that more thought in the final sketch.

update on ragnarok characters...

2010-10-16T00:18:00.000-07:00

Here are two WIPs of Sutr and Heimdallr. Two key characters in the final battle on the Vigrid Plain during the Ragnarok. Next up after these two and loki, i'll be painting up Odin.

ragnarok concept paintings start!

2010-10-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

Loki, the trickster and harbinger of doom. He's been described as a thief, liar, sorcerer and exiled to a cavern to suffer for his crimes against the Aesir, even though he was once a member. He broke free and is waging war against the Aesir, bringing about the event of Ragnarok. Unleashing his children and raising an army of fallen soldiers and shadows through the help of Hel, goddess of death and the frost giants. The great serpent, fenriz the wolf, and hel are his magical creations born from hate and despair.

This is a work in progress, notice he has chains and there will be fire from his arms. also his face is slightly disfigured because, while imprisoned he suffered a form of torture where poison or something dripped on his forehead constantly, pale for being hidden from any source of light.

dogfight on glider-boards

2010-10-11T20:53:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I have an idea and then I lost interest and it continues to drift elsewhere. Then I begin to really get some thing going, apparently it started out as a sci-fi thriller scenario of a character creeping through a ships utility tunnels, sound familiar? lol so now it went to this dogfight scenario, piloted ships of sorts are a popular choice. instead it turned into this strange jet gliders they stand on, much like a board. Placed within a post-apocalyptic environment.

I'm a big fan of the whole anarchy look.

bunch of thumbnails here.

Ragnarok n' rolla

2010-10-09T23:35:00.000-07:00

Vikings and metal are fine mix of brutal legends and myth of EPIC proportions. so i decided to play around with ragnarok for personal focus, it's been interesting otherwise I enjoy this type of topic. Anyways, here are some sketches of the Aesir, Vanir and the frost giant, as well as other beasts. So far i've got Odin, Loki, Heimdallr, Freyr, and Thor. I have two sketches of Odin actually and these are just ideas prior to final concept paintings. Also there is a sketch of Sutr, one of the frost giants who wields the flame and burns Asgard (Earth, mortal realm) in the story.

personal focus update

2010-10-05T01:12:00.000-07:00

well, here's what I got so far and feel free to comment. I think the lizard monster came together alright, as well as the warrior. Although, i'll probably do more with the background. it still seems uneven....

Forest encounter

2010-10-04T17:26:00.000-07:00

This is what I have so far for my personal focus class, and of course it isn't finished, but will be soon. what you see here is warrior/ranger nearing a large lizard beast (you could call it a dragon...). Originally, the warrior was below the rock platform and away from the dragon's eye level, but i noticed a conflict of composition with that so i moved him up and I may change the lighting, but the background will most likely stay as is. Keeping the depth and maintaining focus on the characters.

Also, i'll be posting some other worthwhile sketches and paintings later. listening to Ulver while I work, good band. thanks for reading.

wastelander poster pitch

2010-02-11T06:22:00.000-08:00

Here is a poster for one of the coolest metal bands out of Michigan, that's WASTELANDER. they have an awesome mix of old school hardcore punk, with thrash/black metal influences and some features that would make them akin to motorhead, gg allin, and so on. This was done digitally with in PScs3.

2009-09-28T22:04:00.000-07:00

So I decided to try something interesting, this program called Alchemy. Which is a sort of sketch/digital paint program like photoshop or painter. It does either bitmap or vector and allows you to work in a process of abstraction and experimentation with your sketches. Drawing environments, creatures, people, or whatever subjects that appear within the white space.

I did a couple, so give them a look and interpret how you see them. Some say they see things I don't even recognize and it brings a lot of thought on what can be done through simplicity of shape and color.

I recommend this for some casual sketching/ideation. I think it helps to expand the mindset of visual exploration. http://al.chemy.org

2009-09-13T22:14:00.000-07:00

a little doodle in photoshop, this one was just a random thought on a western scenario. i guess, you could say this character is one of those western vagabond dudes who hangs out with indians a lot. Although, not sure if I want to go on with this one. maybe it could use a bit more something around it or else.

2009-08-13T22:54:00.000-07:00

This is was an oil painting project I did a while back, earlier this year. Can't say I haven't learned alot from this one piece...I was working out an exploration on surrealism, inspired by Zdzislaw Beksinski, who was a polish painter of surrealism in a style known as "fantastic realism". I found his art to be incredibly gripping, as if I wanted to personally go there and explore it as if it were reality. The way he paints his images have an interesting mood to them, they don't seem menacing at all, it seems more to express some kind of peace. peace in darkness, rather than light. There is definitely some sort of philosophy within his work, no one really knows, Ii guess we all just interpret it within our perspective.

final illustration of (cancelled) album cover...well it was fun!

2009-08-13T22:29:00.000-07:00

I really wish this was used and earned credit, though unfortunately the band Wastelander had some issues and was unable to continue doing the split album with UDI. I had hopes for this commission, thought the opportunity could get me some good attention for future commissions. Although, despite the cancellation I still continued to work on this, because I enjoy this band's music and these kinds of bands don't come around often.

Wastelander/UDI cover/poster WIP

2009-06-25T12:40:00.001-07:00

This is the poster/album cover i've been working on for the bands Wastelander and UDI, both of them are Michigan bands. UDI is from Detroit and Wastelander is from East Lansing.

Here i have the final sketch and the painting WIP for show, this is really something and i'm enjoying this project quite a bit. This'll be a great start to get me working with more bands in the future, which I really hope to do. I enjoy music too much to ignore the opportunity.

summer 09, new thoughts, new goals

2009-06-19T19:58:00.000-07:00

so i've been commissioned to do an album cover for two band who are doing a split. Wastelander and UDI (Unidentified Drunken Injury) are doing a split album together containing new recordings of songs, which i assume may be some new songs. This should be exciting for fans out there and the usual metal punk crowd. i'll be positng progress of this cover. lol, it's going to be pretty brutal.

It's been too long, so finally here's an update, W00T!

2009-02-07T13:20:00.000-08:00

College is getting interesting and I'm getting deeper into my professional habit as an artist, constantly doing things in and out of class. Here is a massive dump of creations.

new stuff

2008-08-15T15:16:00.000-07:00

Summer has been relaxing and since the workshop I've been busy.

2008-07-20T22:04:00.000-07:00

so...first post, first blog. eh, this has gotta start somewhere. Anyways I'm a student attending RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology), where I am currently majoring in Illustration and I've got years ahead of me to finish. Recently finished the first year, so I'm off to the cool stuff now.
dump of recent works, mostly photoshop.

also a little WIP at the moment.