Boiling Point

While working on this print I've always had in mind my comic book hero, "The Jap".
I wanted to make something more with that image and go a bit beyond what one can do in comics.
I've still got some way to go though.
A long way to be sure...

The Stone Lion

Tower

This was one of the first of my series of drypoint prints. It was made in Folegandros island a few years ago - I think that it was made on Christmas of 2005-2006 or something like that.
I used this print a bit later for two paintings based on Georgios Viziinos' literary works for an exhibition in Athens.

Borderlands

Some of the first screenshots that in my opinion proudly show the new art direction for the next project from Gearbox, the coders of "Brothers in Arms", a WWII shooter for the PS3, Xbox360 and pc platforms.
When this game of first announced its graphics showed that it would most likely be your average run-of-the-mill first person shooter and most people didn't really care much about it given the fact that there are many admittedly fabulous games competing for the gamers' attention already: Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, Killzone 2 and many others do come to mind.
This radical and most welcome change in its visual style however is just what the doctor ordered and many favourable comments in various forums reflect that.

The art style chosen for Borderlands looks very similar with the one that was chosen for two games in the past.

One is Crackdown by Realtime Worlds:




The other is the newest Prince of Persia by Ubisoft:





As seems to be my usual mantra I hope that the game plays as well as it looks - and hopefully there's going to be some gameplay videos to satisfy that wish.

Trouble.

I had some trouble with a couple of large-scale works and decided to invite a friend over to my studio in order to get a response whoch might be helpful.

And I was right: our talk and some of Leonidas' thoughts on one of the works helped me to overcome the block. I started painting my first explosion on works other than comics and it worked beautifully.
Why is it that every time I try to paint I get this crippling mental block which prevents me from allowing direct influences from media deemed more popular (and supposedly more vulgar...) like sci-fi movies or comicbooks or most importantly videogames?
Things that I'd be doing without a second thought on my comics such as this:



I have serious trouble when I try to use them while painting a work.
And it's ridiculous because with painting you have no constraints of scale, medium, materials or otherwise.

No constraints except from those which are self-imposed and have not been yet clearly identified in order to be addressed - and hopefully eradicated...