"Rough" Commissions

Stretching the definition of "sketch" with my cheaper sketch tier paintings lead to me coining the new term "Rough" for them, to better suit the idea of them as rough (obviously), but more developed and fully rendered than mere sketches. Working at this faster pace with more impressionistic and broad strokes has helped me relearn a lot of valuable and slightly dulled instincts for construction, speed and the hierarchy of composition. They are a little underdeveloped though - I would love to take more time to fully refine these concepts into larger paintings, so in that sense they remain "sketches",

These two are respectively -

Sapphire Weapon - From Final Fantasy VII, the ill-fated Sapphire Weapon, one of the "Weapons", the primordial planetary defense organisms who endlessly fascinate me. Sapphire Weapon is infamous for existing solely to job to the fearsome Sister Ray cannon operated by Shinra, maybe one of the only instances in this kind of fiction where the enormous military boondoggle weapon successfully slays the encroaching unknown creature before some kind of more macguffin-centric plan has to be implemented. Fully designed by Nomura nonetheless for the CGI cutscene, it's unorthodox body format doesn't quite map to any one mobile suit (The Weapons are almost all inspired directly by specific mobile suit designs from Gundam) but i'm reminded of the Dra-C, the Nightingale and several others.

Gundam Phenex - Speaking of Gundam - Unicorn's "Gundam Phenex", appropriately named, is reborn out of itself. This was the first instance where a client requesting a biomechanoid/fantastical version of a mobile suit additionally requested that it be directly juxtaposed with/connected to the "canon" suit design, and the challenge was compelling. I don't traditionally paint hard-surface mecha, but the "Discarded" nature of this empty shell gave me leeway to damage it beyond modelsheet accuracy and the massive focal point of the golden resurrected form above helped divert attention from the less impressive parts of the rendering.