A few days ago I happened to think of hoverboards, so I thought I could draw some.

I can’t deny I’ve always had a thing for hoverboards.
Well, I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Let’s say I’m just one of those who have a thing for hoverboards.
They are one of those unkept promises that people from the 80s still begrudge, together with jetpacks and flying cars.

I check daily on Amazon for availability, with no success.
This is the only one I found, which doesn’t really hover, it’s way too pink and disturbingly too 80s.
Plus, the auction starts at 30000 USD.
Oh well.

Not that I’m complaining about the technology available today, of course.
I mean, my grandma used to fetch water from the river with a vase balancing on her head so, well, tap water technology is already pretty cool if you asked her.
Also, I draw things on a screen. And when I touch the screen, things happen. Ok, sometimes they don’t happen at all and I have to download and reinstall the drivers of the bloody screen, but it’s still pretty cool, and nowhere near as upsetting as not having a hoverboard.

How difficult can it be to make one? We have laser guns! They were in everybody’s list of things they expected to see in the future, and here they are. Why not hoverboards?

We should set our priorities straight, people. Lasers are cool, there’s no denying it. But they really look at their best when shot at alien invaders from a real spaceship, so the timing is all wrong here.

So, in case scientists ever happen to read this and were undecided what to focus on next, here’s where I would put our R&D money for the next few years:

- fucking Hoverboards, let’s get them out of the way guys.
- flying cars (you can hoverboard to the office for your work commute, but you do need a flying car if you have kids).
- decent robots (ok we’re getting there)
- warp drive spaceships (just a few years for those)
- ONLY THEN, laser guns

Should THE GOVERNMENT agree with my list, here’s some quick designs. Just in case.

by Paolo Puggioni

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I decided I had to brush off my matte painting skills, so the first thing I thought I could do is your classic post apocalyptic city.
Only, in this case, instead of being a city depicted after a nuclear event, or a big ginormous tsunami caused by asteroid impact, or a zombie invasion, or an earthquake, or an eruption, this city is just frozen solid.

Considering it has been winter for like 8 months now, it’s not difficult to imagine why I came up with this original idea.

Also, I remember once I came across the picture of a block (in Siberia maybe?) which remained without heating because of a power failure or something, in the dead of winter, at around -50 degrees. The buildings were literally filled with ice. Imagine your freezer (well, my freezer actually, as I never clean off the ice build-ups. Maybe you do. In mine you can hardly fit a sausage now). It was like that. Like my freezer.
Damn I can’t find the link, or the images. Oh Well, just trust me.

Anyway, I figure a major natural event cutting the power during the winter could cause some serious trouble. People without heating, all huddled together in their houses to get some warmth from each other’s bodies. Engineers, as well as rescuers, would be impaired by the extreme elements. Eventually no one would go outside to take care of things, stray dogs would roam the streets fighting for their food with looters, all would be made fragile by the cold, glass would shatter, building would crumble, OMG it would be chaos!
Or maybe we have a plan B in such an apocalyptic occurrence, who knows.

In the meantime, that’s how I see it.

I took a lot of shortcuts with this one. First, it’s a shallow perspective. All the major planes are facing the camera, so I didn’t have to distort the textures too much.

Then, well, a frozen post apocalyptic city is easier to paint than, say, the carnival of Rio. Definitely less colours to deal with and no people around to be drawn.

I actually almost considered adding some characters to support the story, but the scale of the composition made it quite difficult to introduce other elements (like, as I said, dogs and people) without them being completely unreadable.

In the end I think the lack of characters actually adds to the sense of desolation a post apocalyptic city would give.

by Paolo Puggioni

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Someone recently pointed out a disturbing absence of spaceships in my portfolio, so there you go, here’s a spaceship.
Now, spaceships are a quite tricky subject.
The thing about them is there’s a LOAD of them on the Internet, so it doesn’t matter what you do, more often than not someone has done something slightly similar to yours, only slightly better.

Well, this applies to pretty much everything you do and post on the internet, so it’s no big deal.
Then there’s the matter of how you approach your spaceship.

Should it be something completely void of any technological coherence? After all, it could be built like a million years into the future, and you can’t possibly fathom what kind of magic our descendants would be capable of. Therefore you can just go nuts, put a bunch of shapes together, chuck it on a starlit background and there you go.
Or should it be something more plausible, which could be set a hundred years in the future? In that case the design could be pretty close to today’s taste, materials would be pretty much the same and all the elements (windows, thrusters, communication arrays) would be just an upgraded version of those we already use.

I knocked out this one in a fairly short time, and to be honest (being as it is my first break from Fantasy in months) I went for the safety of a well-established look. If I were to do it for an actual game (or had I given myself some more time), I would have developed something a bit more imaginative.

For the time being, here’s just a spaceship.

As a matter of fact, I’ve recently been complaining to a friend about some repetitiveness in the designs you see around lately.

In fantasy, as well as in sci-fi, some visual languages have become excessively archetypical, and most artists I see around seem to mix up ideas that are a bit overused at the moment, without giving it too much thought.

Aliens have spikes and fangs, villains wear black, wizards have a beard, elves dress fabulous and so on.

Hell, I’m one of the worst offenders, sometimes you can’t really do whatever you want, especially when you are paid for it, and your audience expects a certain kind of image.

Anyway, my complaining sessions resulted in the outlining of a project that I’ll be working on in the next few months during my spare time.

I’ve got nothing at the moment, so don’t hold your breath.

It will be a sci-fi setting, deliberately designed to avoid well established clichés.

So well, hopefully I’ll be drawing more imaginative spaceships.

In the meantime, remember that spaceships are like pizza, or sex. Even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good.

by Paolo Puggioni

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This is the first spaceship I’ve made in ages. Considering I’ve been working on armour-clad people for the past few years it could have gone worse.

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A frozen city I just made. Considering it has been winter for 8 months now, it wasn’t difficult to find inspiration for this.

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I’ve been waiting for people to invent hoverboards since I watched Back To The Future. Where is my hoverboard?

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I mean, Game of Thrones the HBO series is back, nothing to do with drawing.
As a matter of fact, I haven’t been posting drawings on my blog in ages!
It’s not that I’ve been lazy, in fact I’ve been working like crazy during the past couple of months.
Unfortunately everything I’ve been working on cannot be disclosed yet, so for the next couple of months I’ll be able to publish only the few spare sketches I’ll manage to slip in my schedule.

Too bad, I had some interesting ideas lined up.
Well, wait, it’s not bad actually, I’m working on pretty cool things, you’ll see.

So, as I said, Game of Thrones is Back. Everyone is pretty excited about it, me included.
I can’t wait to see on screen the events I read in the books. A part from a couple that I’m still trying to get over:(

Anyway, it must be because of the hype around the series, but I keep coming across Game of Thrones related things on the Internet.

The first one is of course George R.R. Martin’s new website.
I think it’s pretty cool (someone pointed out on reddit that it doesn’t look early nineties any longer).
It also displays some pretty cool illustrations on its rotator, one of which is by Michael Kormarck, who made the cover art in the same book I made the back cover of.

If you want to refresh your memory with the events of the past Game of Thrones’ seasons, this awesome map has been created exactly for that purpose. Just scroll down and the map will highlight the places where the events took place, with a brief pop-up summary of what happened.
Actually I should have posted it a few weeks ago, but as I said I’ve been busy, and I have a very crappy memory.

So, just two days to go.
If you want to kill time while you wait, just enjoy this gif. I just look at it every now and then when I need to feel better.
You’re welcome.

by Paolo Puggioni

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I’ve never had a good relationship with cars, at least with cars as a design object.
It’s not that I can’t appreciate the elegance of some designs, of their smooth curves, of the solutions found to make something functional also nice to look at.
I get it, I really do, and some cars are just very cool.
I’m just not crazy about it.

This didn’t make me much popular during my adolescence, where all my friends went on ond on about how that specific carburetor was slightly better than the other one, and how those tires were so fucking thick.
Also, my friends (parents) could afford cars. And they had girlfriends who liked people who could afford cars, who in turn attracted other friends who liked to talk about cars all the time, which is one of the many reasons why I eventually ended up hanging out with people with interests that didn’t involved bloody cars.

Long story short, during my career I’ve always tried to avoid drawing vehicles. I couldn’t always help it, but hell, I’ve done my best.
So, the other day, for reasons I won’t go into, I decided to include some vehicles in my portfolio and, to my astonishment, I enjoyed it!
There are some things here and there that I could improved on, but being it the first one in ages I think it’s not that bad at all.

The thing about drawing vehicles, is that they require a completely specific set of skills.
For the past few years I’ve focused my attention on so called soft surfaces: skin, clothes, muscles, bodies and so on. They catch the light in a different way than polished metal, they require a different set of tools to be painted, and they follow different design rules.
Cars, on the other hand, other than looking pretty, need to look functional. Instead of big texture brushes and a loose, sometimes careless brush strokes, you need selections, vectors and gradients. You can’t really improvise when you are trying to draw a car, and every small inaccuracy look immediately WRONG.

Fortunately, some of the endless rants I had to endure during my adolescence stuck somewhere in my brain, and when I have to draw vehicles I’m not completely clueless.
I’m also getting the hang of big soft brushes to paint gentle changes of light (very easy as long as you set flow to less than 10), and vectors to draw big shapes and highlight.
It’s also surprisingly fast to do once you get the idea.
And, of course, if you paste time-consuming things like wheels and mechanic parts from stock images.
So, I never thought it possible, but I enjoyed drawing this, with possibly more to come in the next future.

by Paolo Puggioni

The post Surprisingly, Some Concept Cars appeared first on Paolo Puggioni - Concept Art.

First vehicle concepts in a loooong time.

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Ok, these two guys are the last Game of Thrones Characters left on my hard drive.
Again, I’ve been a bit under the weather recently and I don’t have much new stuff to show.
(Well, I guess these two still qualify as new if you haven’t bought the Game of Thrones Night Watch’s Rulebook or had one copy shoved upon your face when visiting my house).

Anyway, the brief for these two characters was quite laconic.
The first one is called Flown Crow.
From the brief I thought he was the usual, straightforward “I’m going to kill you with my sword” kind of person, which is how I depicted him.

As it turned out after reading his description on the Rulebook, Flown Crows are Men of the Nightwatch who fled from the wall to live either South of it (and risking to be executed by pretty much anyone they meet), or North of it, amongst the Wildlings.
Still pretty risky but with a slightly longer life expectancy.
Hence Flown Crows. Got it? Men of the Night Watch are commonly referred to as Crows, so when one escapes he becomes a Flown Crow.
I didn’t get it back then.
I know, DUH.

The second character-type is called Unlucky Gambler.
These folks usually come from wealthy families, surrounded by shiny stuff and booze.
It being Game of Thrones I guess that “booze and bitches” wouldn’t be too inappropriate.
After a while they start gambling dad’s money (like, all of it), end up in some kind of court and are given the choice between losing their head or joining the Night Watch.

So, this is it for this Game of Thrones assignment.
As for my whining about, uh, lack of inspiration, systemic laziness and whatnot, I certainly don’t want to dilute them into a completely unrelated topic!

These thoughts certainly deserve some space on their own.
So don’t rush to unsubscribe from my feeds! Who doesn’t like reading people moaning about things?

by Paolo Puggioni

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