I hit the Renderosity Top 20 this week!

I received a really big honor this week. I was selected as one of the Top 20 Favorite Artists of the Week by Renderosity.com. If your not active in the digital art world, here's a little info about them (taken from their website) to bring you up to speed.

The Renderosity community is made up of members who have a passion for helping others learn, share and grow in digital art... The Renderosity membership is a very interactive community with forums, chats, free content and a marketplace for digital products and 3D models. Membership is always FREE.

What they don't say is that Renderosity is one of the largest online 3D art communities online. Right now there are almost 78,000 members (as of 9/25/2013, the day I wrote this, there were exactly 77,956 members). I'm not sure exactly how many images are uploaded each week (back in a 2005 press release they mentioned that they passed the one million images mark and had more than 1,000 images uploaded each week), but I recall reading in the forums that an administrator said they get about 3,500 uploads in an average week. And based on the image ID tags, it looks like we're about to hit 2.5 million images.

I've been a member of this online community since 2001, and during that time I've posted about 125 images. My work ranges from material I've created to promote my game, Gutshot, to work I've created for clients (like book cover designs and sci-fi illustrations) to some fabric snapshots I took in a store one afternoon while shopping with my wife. I like to have a mix of my professional work and things I see around me that I think are visually interesting. I'm not overly prolific, but I follow some great young artists and help others by commenting on their work and making suggestions on ways to improve composition and layout.

This past week I posted two new images to my gallery, and apparently the Renderosity site ran some behind-the-scenes voodoo calculations and selected me as their #16 Favorite Artist of the Week! Considering the sheer volume of people I was selected from, this is a really big honor.

Here's what the site says about their selection process:

Renderosity's Favorite Artists are displayed here after careful calculation of the statistics artists have accumulated in the last week. The base statistic being the number of members who have added a particular artist to their favorites in the last week, also taken into account are the number of images each artist has uploaded in the last week and the number of comments that have been posted on those images, to distinguish the more visited of two artists with the same number of favorites. 

The Artwork Itself
So, with that being said, here are the two images I uploaded this past week (by the way, I suggest clicking on both of them so you can see a larger version that will reveal a lot of detail):

Deadwood - Cowboy Mike

This first image is a simple character study for my upcoming game, Gutshot: Night of the Living Deadwood. It's just a cowboy sitting that I set up in Daz Studio 4.6. I was mainly testing how quickly my digital inking techniques could transform a simple 3D image into acceptable line art, and add a suitable background. (If you're interested in more details about the 3D models and software I used, you can check out the image at the Renderosity website. For this image, I'm using a combination of techniques to get an old-fashioned wood block look. I plan to use this method to create a few dozen images for the game book.

Like the above image, this next one is in black & white. Even though I do work in color, I focus on b&w because this is professional work for print in game books that are printed in b&w.

Galaxy Prime - The Loser Goes 'Boom'

This second image is for the game Galaxy Prime, published by my friend James Shade at Epic Age Media. This was rendered in Strata 3D CX7 and, again, I used a variety of techniques to convert it into b&w line art. I was really going for a retro look with this piece. This image may be used in a future Galaxy Prime product.

If you'd like to take a look at the rest of my gallery, you can mosey on over to the Renderosity Website. However, I don't think you'll be able to view all of my images unless you register for a free account:
 http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=32900 


Closing Thoughts
There was no 'prize' attached to this, but it is a very cool honor to be recognized as doing work worth following. Especially from such a large group of talented people.