Thank you Kai Lim for dragging me onto this bandwagon - aka "The 3x5 art challenge" wherein you are to post three art pieces, old or new, for the next five days. With each post I have to nominate an artist to do the same, and for this one I volunteer Tony Ferguson as tribute!
I've seen a few people's takes on it already and feel like walking through my art starting back in 2004 to 2009ish. These were the years where I transitioned from elaborate doodling to finding out what "Concept Art" was and securing a vision.
I just did some dumpster diving into the archives and am getting those "old folk feels" of wishing I could have changed my cadence back in early high school, but the past is the past and all of that grin emoticon
Back in 2004 I had purchased a huge purple wacom intuos tablet at great cost, somehow knowing that it's what I needed to pull myself up onto the shore and evolve my art. But with nobody around my beach my progression was glacial. At this time I was really into graphite and marker art and whenever I used the tablet I took so many steps back that I scared myself and never pushed on. I still see this as one of my biggest mistakes in life. It was 3-4 years before I felt comfortable on digital, and that really sucked.
Anyway, I didn't yet know Kai, but I sure as hell followed him on DeviantArt and around that time he started posting work for Project Hull Breach - a Halflife 2 mod. I had worked on a few UT mods but nothing of note and for whatever reason had the mindset to create a "breaching craft" - almost as fan art but with the hidden hope that it would draw his attention. It did, and for some profoundly mysterious reason he shanghi'd me onto the team where I proceeded to provide 4th grade level work in pencil, hurriedly scanned in and uploaded to the computer. I was easily the worst person on the team, but easily made the most important friendships and jumps as well, not only with Kai but with Samuel Aaron Whitehead as well!
Included are some images of the "virii breaching craft" - created as a way to board hostile ships. Im still pretty proud of stealing nature's oldest payload system and making it out of metal. The first image actually used photoshop to color it in, and includes all sorts of crazy crap - like distances and angles?!?!? What was I thinking?... I'm kinda glad I don't know to be honest. (As a side note I did almost all of my concepts in orthographic projection using a ruler and triangle for some god forsaken reason until Kai grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me violently!)
The "Virus" Craft - with some needless and laughable annotations!
BONUS - Extra blog art!