The Art of Nathan McCoic: Sketchbook and Process

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Compiled exploratory sketches for the Behemoth, a mining vehicle for my 1910-based project, Shadow Children. It needed to be BIG, large enough to function as a miniature level with adversaries boarding from a number of entry points. It needed to be industrial and stylish, since only two were made as functional vanity projects. And it needed a pilot, i.e. cow catcher. Couldn't not have one.

Process work for a thought experiment in painting a boss battle concept for a pre-existing game (in this case, Bioware's Mass Effect 3). A cat-like design direction was chosen for its mobility and ferocity potential, but also familiar shape and potential for player empathy. It's mostly armor plated to blend into its cracked desert and mountainous native environment.

Its current abode is a hidden Prothean (precursor civilization) science facility; I did a rough paint of the room to understand how the player may fulfill objectives (restore power, trap the creature in stasis) and provide a basis for the painting's environment.

Compiled process sketches for Taes Blackhand. The goal was to make a goblin elder who handles fantastic arachnids in a subterranean society for whom spiders are an integrated fact of life, but not take the obvious option and make him spider-like. The initial direction was... pretty bland. I restarted with thumbnails, and ended up liking the spidery design (1) most anyway.

To differentiate him from inevitable Gollum/Sméagol comparisons, and have an interesting reason for moving on all fours, I decided he long ago lost his lower legs after stepping into a venomous spider nest, getting his arms bitten and blackened as he crawled to safety, earning the Blackhand monicker.

After exploring poses (2) and finding an overall face design that fit (3), I worked through how he would move (4) and decided to bulk him up a bit to account for how physically demanding his form of locomotion and occupation are, plus remove the sense of visual frailty.

Studies of the Inca Empire's extensive road system, and sketches for modular Incan buildings.

Sketchbook study of an East European man. I came across the original photo while looking up reference for a keen Ukrainian detective character who is also a down-to-earth family man; he fit the bill wholesale.

Sketches of most of the main cast of the Shadow Children project, plus one of the "monster" types.