Here’s my submission for Segazine! I always wanted to make a cute Sonic, so the Segazine was just the right reason to create him and his buddy Tails :) This song was in my head while making this!
“Way back”
“Extras”
“Sketches”
I was asked by Liza Groeneveld of Invest Utrecht to create a design for a unique handout for her. Liza was looking for something playful and creative, which she aims to express through her work. I decided to use the city-arms of Province Utrecht and its lions as an inspiration. We both liked the the idea of Liza as the main character with a young lion friend playing around high up in the sky without fear. The four little cubes in the Invest Utrecht logo I turned into four statues to represent their playing field.
“Illustration”
“Close-up”
“Sketches”
All artwork © Monobanda 2012
Control Magazine asked me to design an exclusive art piece for their Game Art of the Week feature. In the interview you can read more about it and my art background. Hope you enjoy! :) (And a special thanks to Kitty Calis for initiating this.)
PS The first concepts for the bear creature were inspired by a dream I had about cardboard layered animal sculptures. Hopefully I can use them for something else in the future.
“Polar”
“Bear concepts”
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to submit during the awesome Sworcery A/V Jam from May 11th – 13th initiated by Superbrothers and Capy. However I couldn’t resist making something inspired by their beautiful game.
You can find all the contributions (ranging from illustrations to music to prose) over here.
“Looking Glass”
“Close-up”
This is a concept piece I created a while ago to visualize an idea I had for an exploration game about a mythical lynx creature that is hunting/ being hunted. Hopefully I have time soon to work it out some more.
PS I don’t know why exactly, but suddenly I’m obsessed with reflective surfaces and mirrored objects. First it was isometric cubes, now it’s this :P
“Hunter”
My dear friend Zuraida (zo-ii) asked me to design her a personal logo. I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to use the word “zo-ii” as the fundamental idea for the image. I imagined that all the letters could be fitted into an isometric cube in a sort of Escher-esk way, so I sketched it out on paper to see if it worked. After that I created the first concepts in Illustrator with different colors, fonts and character expressions (because of course there had to be eyes in there!). This took a lot longer, because now it was all about the details and making it just right. In the end Zo-ii and I decided that we wanted to use some variations on the logo, so below you can see the final green version and a striped one. They look so happy together!
“Zo-ii logos”
WALL·E is one of my favorite Pixar movies. The first half hour is so pure and beautiful, I still get goosebumps watching it :) I love the subtle humor and fun interactions, especially between WALL·E and the cleaning robot M-O. I imagined them to be like an old couple with a childish but sweet demented little man (Wally) and his short grumpy bickering ol’ lady (Moe). So I decided to make them real and share them with you!
“Wally & Moe”
Creating the new logo for Monobanda took some time (almost 2 years on and off). With the redesign we wanted to maintain some old elements, like the organic feel and blue-ish color (for examples see the top ones of the ‘organic logos’ sheet). For a while we played around with the idea of a core floating around in a plant-like shape. Eventually that evolved into a fish creature, but we all thought that that looked a bit too swimming pool :P
We’ve always loved the thought of a little character seedbox that could contain all kinds of cool stuff, so that’s when I started designing different boxes and plants. In between I also came up with an Escher-like puzzle box, but that idea didn’t really hit the mark. The difficult part was to define a nice scale for the box and other elements. You can see I also thought about a cardboard box with a scenic environment. Still, looking at all the sketches and ideas that flowed around, the simple plant-in-a-box never left our minds.
After a lot of tweaking, scaling and molding I created a plant shape I liked that fitted the box. I interpreted the plant in different ways so it turned into a little fish and a question mark (see ‘final logos’ sheet).
We already made a Christmas ornament, butter block and pixel version, so I’m happy to say that the logo inspires us to create new things! :)
“Final logos”
“Final concepts”
“Concepts – boxes”
“Concepts – puzzle”
“Concepts – organic”
“Sketches”
“Monopixel”
“Monobutter”
“Monoball”
All artwork © Monobanda 2012
Working on our real-life sandbox game Mimicry was both a treat and a challenge. Creating textures is different from the 2D work I’m used to. For me it’s something of a mystery what textures will do in a 3D environment. Furthermore the game world is projected on real sand, so it was challenging to find the right colors and trying to get a bright world that feels and looks playful. For our first prototype I believe we achieved just that :)
You can see my happy face on the photo. Playing with sand and seeing the terrain change in real-time is awesome!
“Artist impression”
“Concepts”
“Texture concepts”
“Happy photo”
Photography and 3D modeling by Niki Smit.
All artwork © Monobanda 2011
I finally had the chance to do some extensive pixel art for one of our Monobanda projects. I think the last time I pixeled was about eight years ago, so it was really a lot of fun getting back into the zoom-in-mode.
Platform Dropstuff asked us (and other artists) to create a simple mobile app that can be played by logging in to their website and pressing a few buttons while being in a public area in front of a big Urban LED Screen. We created an app in which you can choose an avatar, then write a message (of max 5 letters) and launch yourself into the disco world to dance. The more people log in and launch, the busier and more animated the world gets.
We aimed for a colorful and vibrant design and quirky character animations (created by my colleague Mathijs). Try it out here!
“Logo”
“Characters”
“Backgrounds”
“Some screenshots”
All artwork © Monobanda 2011
