Suarez Art

Inked Venom Final

Well, technically this version of venom isn't inked since it's all digital, but whatever.

It was a lot easier to focus on the details and shape and form without having to worry about the color.


I tried out adding a color layer on top in Photoshop and I think it does the trick of adding a sense of color without taking away too much from the linework.


I'm going to have to experiment and see if this method will work on the other pieces that have this inking style as well.

Venom Tron and color version

I made these for a contest over on Satellite Soda, the theme was Marvel-Tron. I highly recommend visiting their forums, it's a fun community of lots of great artists posting awesome work.

For the contest I chose to do venom since he's one of my favorites and I figured his look might look cool "tronized." Sadly I forgot about the contest until the day of and turned in a horrible rushed venom. The next day I worked on it a little bit longer and made this version, but I still wasn't very happy with it.


Then I decided to try one with out the glow and lighting effects and just try and use simple colors. Something comic-booky.

But I still wasn't that happy with it, I knew I wasn't going to be able to get it to the point I wanted with out committing a lot of time and effort into it. But I wanted this piece to be a fun project for practice, not something I would need to spend hours working on to get it to the point I wanted.

So, I decided to put the color version and work on finishing it off in black and white.

President Xenu and Kif

This started as a doodle just for fun, but now I think I might use him for a bit of a larger project that will incorporate some nice design elements. I just wanted to draw a fun monster or old man or just something that I knew I could spend a good amount time just getting lost in the details. That's my favorite part just zooming in and wandering around, it's relaxing. My own form of meditation.

Half way through this piece, it struck me that this alien looked really familiar...


It hit me that I made a realistic version of Kif from futurama, so I went ahead and added his signature little space suit and saved this version for fun.

Hiccup and Toothless

Finished my take on Hiccup and Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon. I wanted to go with a more Frazetta/fantasy, epic feel. I mean after all it is vikings and dragons, plus I'm not too good with doing cute.

My first idea was actually for a much bigger piece than this, but it ended up being trickier than I expected. So, this piece is more or less practice before I tackle the real thing.

Also I tried to keep the rendering a bit simpler on this one since I knew I wanted to color it from the start.

8 Armed Lady Final

Finally completed this piece. Just like I figured from the start it didn't really end up like what I originally saw in my head. But, that's what happens when you let the piece be in charge.

All in all, it was a good experiment and it ended up being more of a stream of consciousness than anything else.

Current Progress: 8 Armed Lady

Now that most of the main elements are already in the piece, the next step is just refining, fixing and finishing.

The biggest problems I still need to solve are some issues with her breasts and upper torso area. I also still need to see whats going to happen with that background. I like the direction it's heading in, but its still a long way from being finished.


Next post should be the final.

More Progress

This piece is starting to come together a bit, I still have a lot more rendering more rendering to do, but I'm pretty happy with the shapes and forms so far. Also, I need to start figuring out what to do with the background.

The bubble shapes on the right side are supposed to be silver and metallic bubbles, I'm still not sure how I feel about them. I know I want to use some kind of liquid shiny materials in this piece. I still have some ideas I want to try out.

Also another big part of the piece I need to start fleshing out more is making it reversible. I want it to work just as well if you view it upside down.

New Piece Teaser

Been trying to spend the little bit of my free time on a new piece. I'm using these pieces to try out new stuff and figure techniques out.

This is just a small segment of the piece, but the rest is too rough to show just yet. Plus, I'm still figuring out in which direction it's heading. I have some crazy ideas for it and some effects I want to try out, but I don't know what will stick, and what will look good and what won't. The only way to find out is to try them out and then get rid of them if it sucks.

I've found with pieces like these it's best to just go with the flow and see where it takes you.


I'm almost certain that in the end this piece is going to look nothing like what i had planned. Sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad. We'll see in the end.

The Executioner

This is for a contest to draw The executioner from Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil: Afterlife. This is actually the first piece I really started experimenting with digital inking on. But, I didn't get around to finishing it till now.

There's really not much else to say. He's a fat guy with a bloody axe.

Log Topiary Centaur Creature + Process

This started as a simple challenge to create a log monster concept over at ArtOrder. I began with a few simple ideas of monsters that looked like the tree guys from Lord of the Rings, but that wasn't really my thing so I scrapped those designs. I wanted something more intricate and interesting, so i started thinking more along the lines of Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy 2, since Guillermo Del Toro had some awesome concepts.

This was the first sketch, trying to get a general look and feel.


Once I had his look down, I just started building his tree sections and figuring out how i wanted to render him.


His branches just had to keep growing from his back.


Here's where I started thinking about what I was going to do for the lower half of his body. For a while I was considering just cropping him at the arm so the main focus would be his back tree section.


These are Just continuing rendering and small changes.


This is where the bottom half of his body started taking form for me. His pose and posture would never look right on a regular pair of legs.


This was the first shot at fitting him to a horse body, The proportions we're way off with the bottom half being way too large.


This was after making the proportions all fitting together better as a whole. Also various small small changes and rendering.


And here's the final.


I didn't expect to get this complicated with it. Of course. I really didn't plan anything at all and just kept changing it to see what ever looked best, so I didn't know where it was going to end.

Piggy Cop

Still practicing inking in Photoshop and playing around. It's fun to find out that a lot of techniques that would be tricky to pull of traditionally are pretty easy to do digitally.

This first started from a plain 'ol pig monster head I made as reference for a different project. And I just kept thinking of Duke Nukem and how that pig needed a mohawk.


I might find some more Duke Nukem characters to remake, or maybe Doom. Something fun.

Hair Face

Practicing how to ink in Photoshop. I'm finally learning how to get some nice effects in there.

But, its a whole different way of thinking compared to traditional inking.

Powdered Toast Man

As I was looking through some old files I remembered Powdered Toast Man was usually pretty fun to draw when I was in High School or Middle School, I can't really remember. So, I decided to give it a shot again see if it still feels the same, and to practice some rendering in Photoshop.

Even to this day it's still fun.

Something Different

Decided to play around in Photoshop and get comfortable with CS5. I also downloaded something like 200 new brushes, everything from splatters, dirt, watercolor, textures and some crazy effects brushes. So i wanted to play around with those too.

So I just start doodling and throwing colors around, I don't really know what else to say.

Voldemort

So, I watched a Harry Potter marathon on ABC family a few weeks ago, and I've been watching the Deathly Hollows trailer every once in a while too. So, I've had Voldemort stuck in my head for a while.

So I started up Zbrush and got to work. I also managed to save some of the process along the way. This is him pretty early in the sculpting process. You can tell because his teeth are way to pretty.


Here he is after the sculpting was mostly done and I started polypainting him. Thanks to all the screenshots from the movies I accidently made him way too blue. It worked out well in the end though, because it gave him a nice dead, veiny base color.


Here he is with his final more human skin tone.



Also as practice I sculpted the smiling model into a frown.


Comparison shot.

Some Older Exercises

These are some older exercises I found on my hard drive. I wanted to practice making a realistic face, so what better way to do that than to model my own? So I took a few pictures from different angles and kept a small mirror next to my monitor and got to work

It's still a work in progress though. Eventually, I'll add eyebrows, different hairstyles and even color.


After that I decided to have some fun with model and make my self into a super fatty. Or maybe it's me in twenty years? who knows.


I also had a generic head sculpt of a Na'vi I was working on lying around. So, I figured why not use my head sculpt as reference to make myself a Na'vi avatar?

All in all pretty fun practice.

Thesis Main Guy

Here's a bit of the progress of the main character from sketch to model to final colored version. I'm still not too happy with the colored version of the main character, so I might still put some work into those before I post the renders up.

Thesis Villain Part 2

Here is the full body render of my main villain which I've only so far referred to as the fat man, or also as "Bad Fat" as I've named him in my file names. I did come up with quite a bit of a back story for him, but the important part is that he's really fat, evil and immobile, so he uses his mechanical equipment to pilot huge menacing robots. Not the most creative villain, but I never said I was a writer.

Thesis Villain Part 1

This is the final version of the main villain for my thesis, he's gotten a bit fatter and grosser since the earlier version I posted.

For now I'm just posting the head shots. I have full body renders, video turntables and the rest of the characters coming up too.

Megacon 2010 Batman

I was lucky enough to be chosen to represent the Ringling Illustration department at Megacon this year. I wanted to work on some of the stuff I created this year but unfortunately the laptops only had a version of Z brush lower than the one I had used in the labs. So some of the files didn't open.

Luckily, I could open a head I had made and just used it to quickly turn it into a comic character. I chose Batman because I was trying to sell a painting of him and batman is pretty bad ass. Never got around to selling the painting though.

But, anyways this is 2 days worth of modelling not counting the time I spent wandering around taking pictures and looking at swords.

Some Thesis Preview

I haven't posted in long time, I haven't had much finished pieces I haven't put up yet or interesting process work until now.

This is a small preview to a portion of my thesis that will be done in zbrush. I'm still gonna have plenty of other stuff that will be painted and Illustrated.

The head isn't done yet, I still have to add the hair and play with the skin painting a bit more.



I do have some more random stuff that I haven't put up yet that doesn't have anything to do with thesis. So those should be coming soon.