I did an art test for NCsoft a few years ago; I’ve just added those sketches to my new portfolio pages. The art test required me to match the character designs and art style for a unpublished game that was under development at the time.

I’ve just added a set of spaceship concept sketches to my portfolio. These were done for an MMO space combat game that is currently being developed by a small independent studio.

I am pleased to announce that the ImageEngine Project Page is now live. On there you will find examples, instructions and sample files for installing ImageEngine 4 on your own site.

I’ve made some important enhancements to Image Engine, and bumped the version number to 4.0.2. Significant changes are as follows:

• Introduced improved handling of missing or incomplete HTML elements.

• Made a change to the method used to capture the slide description. Instead of trying to step through the child nodes of the <dd> element, the entire innerHTML string is captured. This enables the use of anchor tags and other formatting within the image descriptions.

• Added support for unordered lists – <ul>, as well as definition lists – <dl>. Using unordered lists means that there will be no image description; only the image title and the slide number will be displayed.

• If no alt attribute is supplied for the slide thumbnails, then an attempt will be made to parse the filename from the image path.

I’ve made a small tweak to the Image Engine Javascript that drives my portfolio browser. In the initial release, the script automatically started pre-caching all the full-sized images as soon as the page had finished loading. Now only the first 5 images are pre-cached; after that, images are loaded on demand as they are selected. This reduces the bandwidth hit that a visitor would suffer when visiting a page with a lot of slides.

This evening I am very pleased to be able to announce the launch of my brand new portfolio pages, featuring more than 100 samples of artwork from the last 15 years that I have been working as a professional artist.

This is made even more exciting for me as I’m using new slide show software that I have designed and written myself. For the last few years I’ve been using an open source solution called Gallery to display my artwork. Despite being an impressive piece of software, some time ago I came to the realisation that it’s not the best fit for my needs. It’s very feature rich, and with that comes a level of complexity that isn’t justified by the number and type of images that I want to display. It also uses a lot of hacks to maintain compatibility with older browsers, and despite my best efforts I haven’t managed to set it up so that it produces standards compliant HTML, something that is very important to me.

Some months ago I had the seed of an idea for creating a very simple, lightweight browser image viewer that can be configured just by editing very clean, simple, standards compliant HTML (or XHTML). This seed has grown to become Image Engine 4.0, and sees me returning to a home grown solution for displaying my images after nearly 5 years using Gallery.

I’m very pleased with the results; I think it looks nice, and it has made adding more than 100 images very simple indeed (it only took me a couple of hours to add all the images, including typing all the descriptions). I’m so pleased that I’ve decided to make the Image Engine available as free to use software. It’s still in the early stages of development, and there are a number of features I’d like to add as time goes by, but at the moment it works, and works well. I will be adding content to the Project Page over the next few weeks, so if you would like to use this software on your own site, please check back soon, or contact me.

I’ve recently started work on a HTML/CSS/Javascript image browser that I think could be very cool if I can get it to work. I have some ideas that I think make it potentially very flexible and useful for any artist who wants a stylish and easy to use way of displaying their images.

However, my Javascript skills are rather out of date, and my understanding of OOP is weak at best. So I could really use some help with the coding side of the project. If you are a web developer with good Javascript/DOM skills who would be willing to help me out, please get in touch. Unfortunately, I can’t offer any financial reward, but you would get ample credit for any and all work, a prominent link to your portfolio, and heaps of praise on this site. I’m also willing to discuss some form of skills exchange if you need any artwork; for example illustration, icons, or design for another project.

I know it’s small beer in terms of recompense, but at the moment it’s all I can offer. Please let me know if you think this is something you’d be interested in.

My wife asked me to do a sketch of Rogue, one of her favourite characters from the X-Men universe. When I looked for some reference material for Rogue, I was struck by the fact that almost all the images of her show her as a dynamic, flying sex symbol (or the awful, shrieking, sulky teenager from the recent films). But to me, despite her great strength and powerful abilities, Rogue is one of most tragic of the X-Men characters; the gift that gives her such great power is also that curse that condemns her to solitude.

I like the mood of this sketch, even if the face isn’t right.

My favourite cartoon series in recent years is Avatar: The Last Airbender (I own all three series on DVD, including the US-only final chapter). Today’s quick sketch is of Aang, the eponymous Avatar. I lost track of how long this took because I kept getting interrupted.

Although I’m not able to publish any of the artwork I created for Jambo! Safari myself, there seems to be plenty of examples of my environment and character concepts, and character artwork scattered around the interwebs. Below are samples and links to a few of my images:

Amy Wildman character artwork on Gamblog.fr

Max Söderström character artwork on Gamblog.fr

• A selection of concept sketches on the German Nintendo Power site.

Luckily I am not responsible for the awful box art or the terrible, lazy logo that Sega chose to use.