Nuthin' But Mech 2

I recently completed five new paintings for a book called Nuthin' But Mech 2, which will be published later this year. The book is a collaboration of 35 concept artists who love to paint robots, spacecraft, walkers, and other kinds of mech designs.

Here's one of my pictures called "Intruder." It is set in Dinotopia's dramatic ancient period known as the "Age of Heroes." The image shows a crab-like vehicle known as a sprog patrolling the marketplace of Prosperine, just behind a Triceratops.


The painting uses sepia watercolor and colored pencil to suggest the vérité look of an old photograph. This animated gif captures a few steps in the process. The first step shows a pencil drawing with a light wash over the surface. Then I painted sample area of the foreground and background to establish the range of values and the atmospheric perspective. Then it was a matter of carrying each area to finished effect with brush and colored pencil, fixing goofs where necessary with gouache.

For example, note the man facing us at extreme left. I sketched his head in too big at first, so I had to shrink his head a couple of times until he fit into the perspective. The warm color cast at the end is not a change in the painting but an adjustment in Photoshop.

Brain Children
• The illustration board I used is a Cottonwood Arts cold press watercolor booklet with 16 glue-bound heavyweight pages. It's a nice format for hand painted concept pieces or plein air studies. Cottonwood Arts is the brainchild of John Park, one of the other contributors to NBM2.
• The blog that started it all: Nuthin' but Mech, brainchild of Lorin Wood, another contributer to the book and a senior conceptual designer for Gearbox Software.
• The publisher is Design Studio Press, brainchild of Scott Robertson, yet another contributor to NBM2.

• The first book that came from the blog: Nuthin' But Mech, Vol. 1
• Check out the links of the full list of contributors to NBM2: Alex Jaeger, Annis Naeem, Bradford deCaussin, Calum Alexander Watt, Collie Wertz, Chris Stoski, Danny Gardner, Darren Bacon, Darren Bartley, David Hobbins,  Dylan Cole,  Eddie Del Rio,  Elliot Lilly,  Emmanuel Shui,  Eric Joyner, Fausto De Martini, Gavriil Klimov, George Hull, Ian McQue, Jacob Earl,  me, Jeremy Cook, Josh Nizzi  Kevin Conran, Kurt Kaufman, Lorin Wood, Oliver Scholl, Pascal Blanché,  Phil Saunders, Robh Ruppel,  Sam Brown, Scott Robertson, Steve Burg, Tim Flattery, and Vaughan Ling.