This is a page dedicated to Ethan Karnopp's work inspired by Team Fortress 2 by Valve. I am not going to act like I'm not a bit of a fan boy, but it's simply just too dope too resist. If you dig the work, follow me, tell a friend, tell a foe, tell your brother who works at Valve :P Cheers.




Sunday, December 20, 2009

Electrogun

Since the engineer is the only class left without any upgrades I figure I'd give a shot to work on a new primary replacement for them.

Photobucket

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Soldier Propaganda



1. Thumbnails
2. Initial painting/text
3. Gradient Map overlay test


Saturday, December 12, 2009

Theme of Soldier Propaganda

With the upcoming soldier/demo update, Valve decided to hold a fanart contest to come up with a propaganda poster relating to the soldier/demo war. I decided to pick the side of the soldier for a few reasons:

1. The soldier has a pretty sturdy nationality that can be played with thematically as far as propaganda, which the demo really doesn't have.
2. For whatever reason in my mind (probably because I'm an American and even in my generation the US soldier (even an insane one) has more valor and appeal then a beer-swilling demoman.
3. Soldier is my secondary class (next to spy) so I wanted to represent :P
Anyway, I have been sketching out ideas, and I will post some sketches/thumbnails in a bit, but I was jotting down some notes, and I figured instead of jotting them down on some piece of paper that I would throw out I could add them to this to be a bit more well documented, archived, and useful for anyone interested. The notes are in regards to the nature and mechanics of a propaganda poster, and how I am trying to break down the elements.

Themes

There are a few repetitive overlying themes within all propaganda:
1. Valor - Probably the most popular, this theme emphasizes the romantic ideals of whatever is being propagated. A glorious leader will be looking upwards optimistically or a handsome soldier will be saluting, something like that.






















2. Fear/Love - This has a bit of variation, love pertains to creating something that the viewer will relate to emotionally in a positive manner, maybe a beautiful woman, maybe a child, maybe a bible. Fear could be a sharp-toothed humanoid dressed in the uniform of an enemy or virtually any aspect of the enemy that could be scary. The reason I grouped these two together is because they are often grouped together, meaning, take something beautiful and honored, like a woman, and something scary, like a sharp-toothed humanoid of the enemy, and all of a sudden you have a stark contrast of injustice and in turn passionate hatred toward the enemy.






















3.Guilt trip - Usually intentionally belittling, It doesn't necessarily have to machismo, but it often is.






















I still haven't decided on my theme entirely, I'm almost positive I will go with the fear/love theme simply because it allows for some creative ideas. Thumbs coming soon.

Links:

http://www.oddee.com/item_66536.aspx

Thursday, December 10, 2009