Portfolio 2 - Michael Dashow

Text Menu:
Art

Sketches
Prints
Downloads
Tips
Links
E-mail

All images copyright (c)
Michael Dashow
except where otherwise noted

Page last updated on
Spetember 15th, 2006

This is the second page of my portfolio. That is not to say that these are the lesser works of the two pages. There was merely an arbitrary split made to spare you, dear viewer, from having to wait too long for all of the images to load. So enjoy the shorter download time and my artwork, too.

Brain-Bots
I really enjoy drawing cartoony robots, but up until this point, I hadn't actually finished any of them for the portfolio. But now that hole in my portfolio has been patched. I threw in a bit more texture than I usually do for an illustration. I have a decent pile of metal textures scoured from years of creating weapons at Blizzard, and I used a bunch of them for this picture. Even the grime on the zombies' skin comes from some rusty metal! You can see the details of the image here.

Blackwatch 2042
Ted Greer has been working on this traditional role playing game for at least a decade now, patiently making revisions and adjustments to the science fiction system. For the nw release of its second edition, he comissioned this cover to give a sense of the flavor of the world. You've got your humans along-side other alien races such as the Thenub (the big saurian on the left) and the Re'mand (the cat-like one on the right.) And in the background - not visible here but you can see it if you zoom in - are a bunch of other sentients who have been taken over and turned into zombies... Yes, it's really the RPG with someonething for everyone!
Both he and I were extremely happy with how this came out. I also ended up designing a new Blackwatch logo for the game as well.

The Photobooth
A personal work, showing four friends having fun comparing pictures that they had taken at the photo-booth. You know the kind, where it gives you a column of four pictures. We used to love those things as kids. Anyhow, another excuse to draw a cute woman and some fun aliens in a humorous situation. Pretty similar, all in all, to Mercy in Space and one of my favorite kinds of pictures. Too bad I'll never get to illustrate a Phule's Company book by Robert Asprin!

Farewell Kiss
This piece was done for one of the CGChallenges over at CGTalk. The theme for this particular challenge was "The Journey Begins," and so this piece is about two journeys: The literal of the boy leaving for adventure, and the more metaphorical journey of the boy and girl's relationship just beginning. This is probably the most intricate and detailed backgrounds I've done to date, as I tend to focus more on closer character shots. but I'm glad how it turned out.

You can see the details better here.

Portrait of a
Skenchian General
A watercolor portrait of Olfack Stenculus, a Skenchian General and Captain of Industry. The Skenchians are an interesting race: They converse with a combination of verbal communication and airborne odors emitted from pores all over their skin. In general, while they can be quite pleasant and jovial to be around, the translation process can be difficult and one's clothes end up carrying around less savory parts of the discussion for days afterwards.

I was shooting for something akin to a classical palette, strong warm tones and rich reds, to portray the majesty and opulence of my corpulent benefactor. You can see a larger versio of this image here.

Diablo II
It's rare for me to include images in my portfolio from my day job - I'm an Art Director / Designer / Artist at a game company called Blizzard North - but this was one of the rare occasions at work that I used my digital painting skills to create a cover image and I'm also really happy with the results. It's one of the most striking images I did all year. This is Diablo, Lord of Terror and title character of the PC game Diablo II. I was one of the artists on the project and was asked to do an image from the game as the cover for the October 2000 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Diablo was modeled (and, for the game, animated) in 3D Studio Max. I took my model and posed him in front of one of the background sets of his domicile (modeled by David Glenn.) From there I brought the whole thing into Photoshop to repaint. The scales on his shoulders, for example, didn't look that good in the original model, which is only seen in the game as something just over 100 pixels tall. At that size they look just fine. But for an image of this resolution, I wanted to repaint them to look correct. In repainting them, I used the Diablo action figure to give me a good idea of how they would look in 3D and how the light hit them just so. (Tangential side note: It is just one of the coolest things in the world to have action figures based on characters that you've designed!)

The background was brought into Painter and entirely painted over. I wanted it to look a bit less like a perfectly rendered 3D model. I didn't use a large enough brush: The brush-strokes are less evident and the 3D rendering is more so. The blue rays were created in the 3D application using a process known as volume lighting but I also painted in a lot more of the glowy parts, some of which overlap Diablo himself and really making him fit into the scene well.

Because he was created on company time for Blizzard Entertainment, I cannot sell you prints of him or make available larger versions of this file. I did create a desktop image of him, and you can download it from the Blizzard website. Diablo and his likeness, by the way, are copyrighted by Blizzard Entertainment, all rights reserved.

Olympic Games
This illustration was for a humorous adult fantasy novel by Leslie What titled Olympic Games. The story revolved about Zeus and Hera in modern-day New York, still married and having all of the same marital fidelity issues that they have had throughout time. That's their baby Igor in Hera's arms. He grows up to be one of the novel's more sympathetic characters as well. It was a pretty funny book, and I really felt that I captured the personality of the two gods in this character piece. The Editor thought the piece was pretty humorous too... Perhaps too much so, as the Distributor thought that this image (originally conceived as a full-bleed cover) would attract too young an audience. So there was much redesigning and now it looks more like a serious adult book... One that just happens to have these two goofy characters on it.

Reading the Bones
It's a pleasant coincidence that I got to work on this book for Tachyon Publixcations and IPG... Well, maybe not a coincidence given the large number of covers I've done for Tachyon, but a funny happenstance of doing a second Sheila Finch cover for two different publishers. (The first being the F&SF cover on the other portfolio page.) It's a similar cover in many ways because it's a similar story, humans from the XenoLinguists Guild interacting with ostensibly primitive aliens on a strange world. This novel is based on Sheila's Nebula-winning novella of the same title. I had the luxury of a lot of time for this cover. Not that I spend the whole time working on it: The manuscript was given to me in the beginning of 2002 before the book was a go. I'd done some doodles and some thinking about the cover upon reading it, but due to distibution contracts and other things, the title wasn't green-lighted until December of 2002... for a fall of 2003 release! So it will be quite some time 'til you see this one on the shelves!

I also had the luxury of being able to talk to Sheila about the characters at the 2002 Worldcon in San Jose, and e-mailing her with a question or two subsequently. It's important for me to do a nice looking piece and get the details right. Sheila will attest to the latter, and I'll let you decide for yourself about the former.