Quarterly rant on conceptships.

This ended up being a decent rant... Please read if you are a conceptships fan:)

I've recently made a plea for you guys to vote for our shop on a possible $250,000 business grant through Chase and Living Social. I am super stoked to tell you that all of you pushed us well beyond the 250 votes needed to be seen by the judges. Thanks Bunches!
There are a few judges on the panel I would really like to be seen by and I hope they don't think that the concept art blogs are completely distracting me from the t-shirt business (which I suppose they are) because I could potentially combine the two into something very unique. I, of course, don't expect to get it.

With all of your support, I'm guessing a possible KICKSTARTER campaign could and probably will be put together in the near future. You guys would probably get some cool conceptships hoodies, beanies and t-shirts... Among other cool swag and perks, while helping me promote concept art from all over our amazing planet and contributing to collaborations and articles. Most definitely something to think about. I would probably move all of the sites from .BLOGSPOT to a dedicated domain. That would be tons of work, from logo design to file transfers. I'm also betting that my ADSENSE advertising revenue as well as page views would drop significantly, since I get tons of visitors from the image search side of GOOGLE. Kickstarter could offset that hit a little bit.

Our new shop space is amazing and Summer business is better than it has been in at least 8 years. This means I 've been crazy busy with airbrushing t-shirts at events and Denver Public Libraries as well as everyday custom t-shirt printing business stuffs. The shop is always slow in the Winter time (obviously) but rather than busting my behind trying to figure out a winter product line, I think I'd like to concentrate on the concept art blog concepts instead.)

Even with all of the crazy Summer business, I've managed to knock out a new piece of concept art work for my STAR WARS animated Flash loop series. Maybe you remember my Gungan? I'll probably end up doing three or four of these concept film loops.

My new Flash graphic depicts Žabbor the Hutt. He is a mutant Hutt constantly keeping at least one eye on everything, distantly related to Jabba. Just like Jabba, he is feared absolutely and because of his grotesque appearance, he is often found to be more intimidating.



This is actually a turtle I shot at the Denver Zoo using my Canon T2i camera with an EF-400 telephoto lens. With its long yellow stripes, I thought this animal would make a good Hutt as animals in nature with bright contrasting markings are often poisonous, warrant a little extra special attention and/or are seen as dangerous. The outer edges of the eyes also seem to have gangsta tear drop tattoos. Every homeboy he has ever lost:) He is missing his Jewelry, long pipe stick and possibly a mustache and more tattoos. The neck flap, mouth and eyes are separate image sequence layers made with Aftereffects and Photoshop, reassembled in FLASH. There are differently valued frame freezes in the eyes to "randomize" them a little bit. I thought he turned out looking like a Boss.

The background image is done by the super skilled David Llewelyn.

There is a larger resolution animated Flash loop of Žabbor on the new Concept Aliens blog! The new template is 1920 wide, which I do eventually want to convert all of the blogs to. I actually think the Alien blog won't benefit much from the widescreen high definition format (along with Concept Robots) but Concept Ships, Vehicles and Guns would, for sure. Especially for artwork submitted in 2.35:1 or 16:9 movie frame format. (Then, I guess all of the blogs would work in the new scope though).

I might change over Concept Vehicles to this wide screen format first, since most people in the vehicle design industry work with large HD monitors.

1080p monitors are starting to appear everywhere and soon will be cheaper then the actual HDMI cable;) Between my wife and I, we have 7? With internet speeds being where they are and the accessibility to 1920 by 1080/1200 resolution monitors, I think this change will happen WAY quicker than the 1024 to 1280 pix web page design (r)evolution did (hopefully).

There are a lot of specialty art sites popping up on the web recently... AND THAT'S FANTASIC! I will write more about that in September's QRant. Thanks for all of your submissions and support. Look for tons of amazing art across the CONCEPT ART NETWORK the rest of the year. You guys are seriously making some of my dreams come true... PEACE!

P.S. Please help me start off the concept alien blog by submitting some high resolution alien art:)