Draw 'n Pour

Just had the pleasure of drinking beers, eating chips, talking shit, and doing drawings at another 'Draw and Pour' event at a local craft beer bar. Fun times. Among those attending were such brush pen wielding luminaries as Crabstain Pearce, Mean Goreng, Stalwart Thomas, Laura Dangerous, Gina Kewl, and more! Go hassle 'em to get them to show their doodlings! There was some gold on them there beer stained pages. Cheers to Andy for another rad get together!

E L Y S I U M

The trailer for Neill Blomkamp's Elysium has just been released, check it out here, it's fuckin rad. It also shows a lot of the stuff I designed for the film, like the exo-skeletal power frames that Matt and Sharlto are wearing, and some weapons (like the ChemRail and my favourite, the Russian air-burst bullet encoder, seen on the AK-47 above). Can't wait to see the film, and to be able to show all the designs I did, which were some of my best work I think, including lots of things that didn't make it into the final script. Images above copyright Sony Pictures.

CDW 03

Fridays piece from the CDW event. I didn't have any plan for this, and people asked for a vehicle. So they got a skull spider car. Good fun!

CDW #02

Here's Mondays effort from CDW Adelaide. A fun little flat-headed assault robot with an ammo/fuel tank for a body. I've tightened the illustration up a bit from what I managed during the 3 hour demo (although the first hour was an intro, before doing any work).

CDW Adelaide

I recently had the pleasure of teaching at a two week long CDW workshop in Adelaide, Australia, along with many other wonderfully talented artists, including Jamie Jones and Khang Le! I had a fantastic time, and managed to knock out a quick piece of sci fi concept design each day (we each had 3 hours a day, for five days). The talented audience were great and again I found it really rewarding to be able to offer inspiration, advice, and cheap dirty photoshop tricks. Huge thanks to Simon and his team for making my trip so memorable.

The above design was my Wednesday piece I think, and it turned out pretty neat. My little brief to myself was a future genetically engineered body guard, someone that would also be a fashion statement to the rich and powerful gangster or business magnate who'd be in a position to need/afford their services. She's about 7.5 feet tall, with super elongated limbs, and gold plated arms with incredible Strangle Strength™. Bullet proof boobs seal the deal.

I'll post the pieces from the other CDW days over the next little while.

skulldog_redpencil.

I got an awesome book on skulls for christmas (thanks mum!), perfect reference for a future thug's nano engineered fighting dog thing.

I think I might try and paint this up during one of the upcoming CDW workshop days in Adelaide that I'm part of. Although I'd rather see Jamie Jones have a go at painting it, that fantastic artist has the time slot in the morning before me, I'm looking forward to checking that out!

Process Giffs

CDW update

I had the last session on the last day of the CDW workshop, and I spent part of it giving this guy that up-specced laser rifle below. As it was end of the day friday after a long week, things inevitably turned silly. Here's what I mean, it was a collaborative effort with the audience!

CDW issue laser rifle

This is a modification I did to the laser rifle design below, on one of the CDW workshop days. I had been thinking that if a weapon like was to be lethal against targets many kilometers away, then it would need a huge camera sight to resolve anything at those distances. So I beefed it up.

CDW Wellington

Last week I had the pleasure to be a part of a week long Concept Design Workshop here in Wellington, with the talented Greg Broadmore and Ben Mauro (with special guest superstar and rad guy Robh Ruppel doing a special presentation on the Saturday). It was a new experience for me and I had a fantastic time. The too-talented crowd were very friendly and made me feel at home scribbling in front of them on a giant projection screen. So comfortable that I happily blabbered on about all sorts of nerdy shit that will probably be edited out of the instructional dvds that are to be released sometime in the future.

The above piece is a design I did on one of the days (we each had 3 hours a day, for five days), and it turned out pretty good. I wanted to demo my process for creating images based on photos, and it seemed to go down well, I had lots of positive feedback from the people in the crowd.

It's a 6 wheeled post-apocalyptic type survivalist vehicle. I like to imagine a post apocalyptic scenario where the scant remnants of humanity that survive some earth wide future cataclysm are the product of prior widespread genetic engineering, so are super smart and capable. Humanity isn't ready to come together into large communities yet, and instead highly independent solitary types roam the depleted landscape like tigers stalking prey in their territory. Their vehicles, while being cobbled together from scavenged materials, aren't the usual matte black rusty cars with spikes, but instead well engineered and capable things, with crane arms, articulated suspension, armoured v-hulls, and non-pneumatic tires. Makes for an interesting vehicle design anyways!

I'll post more work from the workshop over the next little while...

Robots with Lasers

Laser weapon wielding battle robot!

It's got a couple of tanks of liquid fuel around the torso, which is fed to a bunch of direct chemical to electrical energy fuel cells. The charge is then sent via a super conducting cable to the laser rifle, which has a stabilised emitter array and can laser-tattoo a cock and balls onto the face of an enemy soldier at a range of 15km, or burn a 5cm hole through his head, depending on the settings.

This guy was painted for the newly released book Nuthin but Mech from DSP, go buy a copy! It's filled with rad robots, from shit hot artists like Feng Zhu, Christian Pearce, Elliot Lilly, and nearly 40 others.

The laser weapon itself is a pulse or burn type, so it can be effective against soft and hard targets. The rear leg is servo driven so the gun can be placed on the ground or suitable surface, and controlled with the detachable interface. The high powered camera sight, in coordination with the stabilised beam emitter means that multiple targets can be tracked and targeted, and all destroyed with the push of a button. I wanted to design a 'functional' laser weapon, that uses the unique properties of beam weapons to its advantage, and looks like a laser, ie: a big cylinder.

Here's a quick illustration showing that bounty hunters assault vehicle as it would look travelling over rough terrain. The suspension is raised, the wheels have their tread blocks expanded, the crane arm is extended, and an inflatable storage compartment on the rear has been deployed.

Here's an ancient piece of District 9 design from way back in 2006. I was always kinda happy with this one. I think the brief at the time was for a powerfully built, bovine/herbivore feeling alien.

Lady Pilot

Lady Max

Here's a piece of personal work that I've been thinking about doing for ages, and the chance to put it in an upcoming as-yet-still-secret art book gave me a reason to get 'er done.

She's a bounty hunter or vehicular assault specialist, and her car is a rolling weapons platform with all terrain capabilities. What's that you say? 'Not with those wheels and that ground scraping front end!?' Well, those wheels are special! Apart from being mounted on highly articulated suspension arms, and independently driven with ultra-high-powered superconducting in-hub electric motors, they have a surface that contains spools of carbon nanotube fibers that unwind with centrifugal force to bond with the ground like a gecko's foot. The strands have a special molecular switch that continually sever the setae fibers as the wheel rotates so they generate huge amounts of grip but very little drag. They also have expandable tread blocks for old fashioned mechanical grip on rough off road surfaces. And the whole front end and body is articulated and able to raise right up for maximum ground clearance, and that's before we even get to the front mounted crane arm!

In the Field

AR-4 Huntsman equipped for the battle field.

AR-4 'Huntsman'

Autonomous robotic assault chassis. Liquid hydrocarbon powered with a direct chemical-to-electrical energy fuel cell behind the torso mounted ammunition box. Head mounted 15mm caseless autocannon firing double stacked 15x38mm armour piercing rounds. A lower mounted weapon fires specialty 15mm munitions. Rear mounted drum contains 1500 rounds of 30mm ammunition for the main weapon. The right arm is joined directly to the weapon with a forward sliding attachment point for one handed firing balance. The lower legs are protected by the flexible armour that would cover the whole unit when in the field. The armour has an active electrorheological layer that stiffens immediately under kinetic impact. But is otherwise highly flexible and relatively light. The feet are equipped with sensors to detect the surface and they, along with the environment calculations and movement processing from the CPU, decide whether to deploy either one or a combination of three traction methods. First is surface mechanical grip from the articulated toes and heels, followed by retractable pins that fire from the heels and have an articulated barb to anchor to the surface. There are also setae pads to generate intermolecular force with hard, relatively smooth surfaces. When this grip is combined with lightweight but rigid construction and an unloaded weight of 700kg, along with the prodigious output from the fuel cell, the unit can exert a huge amount of g-force and move with great speed and agility. Max burst speed is 200kmh with a sustained rate of 80kmh fully loaded. Total height of 3.2m

Just a couple of the awesome little guys I photographed on a trip through South East Asia.

Another older image. This guy's got a flaming sword

Here's an old piece from 2006...

friendly monsters

 These little guys were done ages ago, as an idea for vinyl toys of native New Zealand animals...

thomisus stoliczka

Your new desktop! I photographed this little crab spider by a beach in Ko Tao in 2004. If you like this you can check out the exhibition series it was in here, and some jumping spider pics here. Cheers!

Beck Kustoms

hey all!
when i'm not drawing robots, i can be found working on my '73 plymouth barracuda. check out my build blog if you like! BeckKustoms

Castle BrainSkull

Hammer Time

here's a close quarters weapon concept for the Devil Helix Viper. the blade is retractable into the handle, and the front of the weapon and the base of the handle have hardened striking surfaces. ammunition consists of double-stacked, electrically fired, caseless slugs. the attachment at the base of the handle is an articulated arm that connects to the wrist of the viper, steadying recoil, enhancing aim, and allowing the gun to swing out of the way if needed.

wrapped up

here's the clothed Devil-Helix Viper™

linear motor rifles

a.k.a: rail guns. a quick concept for a rail gun system. the upper is an anti-material or sniper type weapon, with two (of the same) batteries and a p90 style projectile magazine, it could also go full auto if the firer was a robot or modified human up for the recoil. the lower one is a cqb assault rifle/smg, with single battery and burst fire capacitor, and a standard style mag.

heavy weaponry

Devil Helix Viper

engineered-dna synthetic organic fighting unit. custom grown from tailored dna and outfitted when fully developed with nano-engineered mechanical augmentation. 20mm caseless cannon in head, with multifeed ammunition system. spider silk protein skin armour...

here's an older bit of concept design / production illustration, one of my first pieces at weta that required drawing an environment. that scared the shit out of me at the time, i hadn't really ever drawn anything with a 'background' and 'lighting' before...

more avatar stuff...

here's a few more old avatar designs

Avatar screen graphics

here's a little bit of the screen graphics i did for avatar. leri greer and i spent what seemed like months working on all the various screens. leri's a genius at this shit, you should see his stuff!

Moar AVATAR gunz

here's a couple more nerdy gun designs for avatar.

Avatar design: Mo'at

here's a radical departure for this blog...
concept art for the headdress Mo'at wears.
and unintentionally this nailed the look of the actual character according to jim.

AVATAR concept art

well, we here at weta have finally been cleared to show some of the design we did for avatar, a quaint little film you may remember, it came out last year and had blue hippy cat people in it. so over the next little while i'll be uploading some of my concept designs here.

this one was my first and really the only design we did for the cannon the amp suit carries. my thinking was that it's based around a 20mm aircraft weapon, that's been modified for use by the robotic humanoid AMP suit. hence the somewhat fabricated appearance and the big welded grab bars. this design was modified, according to jim's needs, to the final thing seen in the film.