As some of you who are very close to me know, I'm fairly obsessed with my continued study into painting, drawing, and my ability to design. You can say that I'm kind of a late starter in the serious study of art and design having begun this path around the age of 26. The past 14 years have been jammed with the study and creation of art in various forms. At this point in my development I'm really focused on pulling all the pieces together and I've got my mind set on becoming a conceptual artist for the movie and video game industry. I'll hopefully be applying to FZD school of design this year and attending their one year certificate program. That's one year of drawing 12-16 hours a day just focused on learning. This is the type of experience I want for my development. If I get into the school I could be starting in Oct 2012, however I'm not waiting till then to begin my education. I'm using numerous video tutorials from the Gnomon Workshop and the FZD school's free tutorials (Created graciously by Feng Zhu) to pursue this education now. I'm explaining all this because I want to be clear of where my inspiration is coming from and give proper credit to the people and resources that are helping me…
Here are two images that I created recently.

> The first is a painting of a knight that I did to study using value and color to complete an image without the use of line or drawing. This is painted from a photo reference that I found online but I've changed it up a bit having to add the lower part of the body. I found this very helpful to paint. I learned a lot and that's the point..

Knight Study..

> The second image is based on a tutorial on FZD where Feng created two zombie knights. I wanted to try creating my own character but some of the things that I gravitate towards like natural materials. I envisioned this warrior to be roaming the arctic terrain. This would be the gear that's used in warmer weather made of local materials and adorned with animal skulls and trinkets that speak of a shamanistic nature. I just realized that a good exercise for me to do would be to design the winter combat gear. I'll work on that soon…

Arctic Warrior..