Independent work

Miscellaneous work and passion projects.

Role: Designer, artist, filmmaker
Tools: Digital painting, video, AI image and video tools

The Sword of Powerful

A Halloween short family film I produced with my kids. About 12 minutes.

AI-assisted

Watch on YouTube

MERCS: Ground Zero

AI-assisted

MERCS Ground Zero: the phone app in hand beside the board, room cards and item cards

The phone appMy working prototype. Each action, shoot, sprint, unlock, mutate and deploy, is a quick skill game on the phone that feeds the board game.

Control rooms

Lock a room down and its control point is yours: each one bends the rules in the team's favor.

Gear and supplies

Loot the facility for the tools to survive it.

Hunters and Telepath board with a threat tracker — Enemy board with the threat tracker

The mercs

XP tokens, earned on the board and spent in the app.

A hybrid board game and phone app I'm developing. As a team, players lock down the facility's key control rooms and contain a viral mutant outbreak. The board, cards and dice carry the strategy; the app tracks level-ups and turns big moments, like shooting and picking locks, into quick skill games. The logo, cards, boards and portraits were made with AI image tools under my art direction.

Monster Mercs

No AI used

A second game of my own, in a completely different key: where Ground Zero is grim sci-fi horror, Monster Mercs is a monster comedy built around dice. You play monsters for hire, a vampire, a werewolf, a ghost, taking contracts to stop the monster world from bleeding into the human one. I designed the game and painted every piece of art in it by hand.

The Monster Mercs player board open, loaded with weapon cards, medals and ammo, with dice and a hand of cards

The player board opened like a field pouch, with the unit patch and tactics sheet

The player board with the character ID tag, ammo loops and ability medals

Each player's board opens like a military utility pouch, with webbing and pockets for cards, medals and ammo.

The player board, in 3DClosed, turned over, opened one flap at a time, then loaded with weapon cards. A 3D mockup I built from the print files.

Grab it, use it, toss it

Most weapons are one-shot: pick one up, swing or throw, discard. Each rolls its own colored dice for a different chance to hit.

Custom-painted elite weapons

The big guns have names, paint jobs and personalities.

Crossing Guard, a sniper rifle wrapped in caution tape

Monster snacks

Power-ups no soldier would touch.

Monster abilities

Your monster's powers roll their own special dice.

The mercs

Ghost, a pumpkin-headed merc in a hood — Ghost

Goodboy, a scarred merc with an eyepatch — Goodboy

Daddy, I Think I Saw an Elephant

AI-assisted

The finished picture book standing on a desk

Cover: Daddy and Little Audrey peek out from behind a giant white elephant in the jungle

Spread: Little Audrey peeks out a window at an elephant's shadow

Spread: the back door opens onto a jungle where the yard used to be

Spread: a red parrot offers to help them look

Spread: Audrey, Daddy, the parrot and a baby tiger crawl through a tunnel

Spread: a slithering snake points the way

Spread: the 'elephant' turns out to be a tree in the backyard at sunset

A picture book for a private client, and one of my first paid projects made with AI. It turned out really well, in a soft storybook style I don't usually work in, and the client was very happy. It took far more work than I expected: I art directed every image, turned down anything that wasn't what I was after, and edited much of the art by hand.

Storyboards

Storyboard pages pinned to a board, car and garage sequence

Color keyframes of a farmhouse and attic

Pinboard presentations of pencil and color storyboards.

Sketchbook

Paintings and sketches, from college to now. Turn the pages, and click anything to see it bigger.

Next storyQuest