Hi folks, this is a comic project that is a collaboration between a talented writer -Vaclev Urbanek, and a guy trying to stop talking about it and get a comics project completed!   I have a couple of comic ideas of my own in the works, but while I'm working out the details of  the writing of those, I wanted to get off the dime and go through the process of creating a comic alongside someone who had some idea what they are doing!  While I searched for an example of a completed comic script to emulate, I came across this 4 year old post on Reddit from Vaclev.  He had thrown 4 of his stories out to whatever artist might come across them as an opportunity to carry these stories to completion as Comics!   All he wanted was Writers' credit on the finished piece.  This was really exactly the kind of situation I needed to get a project going that I could complete.  One of the stories caught my eye.  This short story-Garden Party-I thought is a widely relateable slice of life.  I was looking for a project that would allow me to do a range of facial expressions and a good amount of subtle visual story telling.  I took a course in Visual Storytelling at New Master's Academy a few years back and I had been dying to utilize that bag of tricks!  In addition, I had been working out of Mark Simon's 'Facial Expressions' book that I know a lot of comic artist have.  I committed to drawing every single expression on every single face featured in the book.  I  think I got about 30% of them!   At least a few major expressions from each model.  Anyway, this is not a project that relies a lot on huge,  dynamic poses, explosions and colorful skin tight costumes (I love all of that stuff!) but really is about human connection.  When we peel away all of the explosions, awesome costumes and machinery I think this is really what we're all looking for.  Answers.  For example: Why do we feel so out of place some or most of the time?  How do we change that, and find our connection to other people?  Those are a couple of questions this story tries to illuminate a little.  This has definitely been an art project for me, but art is more than mark making, color theory, anatomy, shape and volume.  It's a method of communicating things that are difficult to express in words alone.  Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading Garden Party!  Thank you for stopping to check it out!

Regards,

Ryan

Global warming caused by over-use of fossil fuels has caused warming of the ocean that has driven creatures that once lived in shallow waters to the cooler depths of the ocean.  Without predators, they lived longer, and grew much larger.  In a relatively short time they evolved to become enormous predators themselves!  Now they return to their home shallows to seek revenge on mankind!

Meanwhile, as governments seek answers, scientists studying the effects of man-made environmental contaminants, are nearing a solution that will begin reversing the damage .  One of the scientists, Ephraim Who-grandson of the maniacal Doctor Who- has discovered his grandfather’s secret research.  Research that could hold the key to the fate of mankind!  In addition to this earth shaking discovery,  a weak distress beacon leads him to the resting place of the remains of his grandfather's greatest achievement: the Mecha-Kong, thought destroyed so many years ago.

Although Mecha-Kong had sustained massive damage following his battle with King Kong, The mechanical leviathan was not beyond repair.  A mighty subminiature power source- invented by Ephraim Who- would easily supply the power necessary to return Mecha-Kong to full operation!

Now fully refurbished, Mecha Kong carries out deep sea experiments for the undersea research facility via Artificial Intelligence that makes the robot Kaiju the ideal lab assistant and loyal guard to the scientists! ‘Bluto’ as he has been affectionately named, responds particularly well to Dr. Angela Croft, the pre-eminent marine biologist in the world.  The crew jokes that Bluto is ‘in love’ with Doctor Croft as ‘he’ reacts oddly protectively  to any perceived danger that Angela might encounter( including the affections of other scientists!)

In this scene: 

One of the awakened ( an Octopus-like creature of Colossal size!) has happened across the scientific research facility and Mecha-Kong!  Dr. Croft looks on in horror as the two mighty beasts battle beneath the waves! (one created deliberately by a madman, the other through mankind’s carelessness)

This piece was my entry in the G-fest (Godzilla fest) 2022 art contest.  The piece was awarded 1st place in the adult category !  Very exciting!  The piece has now been donated to the G-fan magazine sponsored convention and will be auctioned at next years' G-fest 2023!   

I’ve found an anatomy teacher who made figure drawing finally start to come together for me.  This is what I’ve been seeking over the last four years or so of spending hours every day scratching away at my iPad in Procreate.

In the end we’re just rendering basic shapes right?  Spheres, Cylinders, ovoids, etc.  We’re doing it forcefully at times, and exceedingly subtly at others.  Drawing young female faces is a very subtle art because so many of the features are SO subtly apparent, BUT THEY ARE APPARENT nonetheless!  If they are missing entirely, the illusion cannot be achieved, and I am looking at a very cartoonish image. 

The solution for me as it turns out, is a more rigorous study of anatomy with a REALLY good teacher.  There’s a guy by the name of Ray Bustos at NMA.art (New Masters Academy).  Mr. Rey studied under Burne Hogarth ( who’s books on anatomy I have read, but gave up trying to grasp).  This guy broke anatomy down to maybe 40-50 muscles (Remember the body is symmetrical), the bones under those muscles, and the tendons we see evidence of when we draw the skin.  No need to know all of the hidden muscles that we will never see evidence of on the surface! 

Less work!  Getting right to the point!  I love that!  I NEED that!

I spent 8 weeks drawing muscles and bones and tendons on top of masters drawings-Looking for the evidence of those features on the skin’s surface and then drawing in the complete muscles.

I’m learning from a teacher who has spent a lifetime digesting this material, using it to create art,  and figuring out the most understandable way to teach it. 

The bottom line for me is that I can’t draw it if I don’t know it’s there, or if I don’t understand how it relates to other parts of the system.  Perfect example:  Did you know that the Serratus Anterior is connected by tendon to the bottom tip of the Scapula?  Did you know that the Deltoid is connected by tendon material to the entire top of the Scapula?  And then connects on the other end to the tuberosity (just a bump on the bone)  of the Humerus?   With the Acromion process right in the middle of the Deltoid?  Moving that scapula affects the orientation and flexure of all of those muscles!  Yet It can only turn about 30 degrees.

Understanding the subject I’m drawing- as it turns out- is vitally important.  That should be obvious I suppose, but I often take odd paths to enlightenment.  My mind doesn’t seem to work in quite the same way as many others! 

I’ve taken the path of breaking down the immediately obvious into manageable shapes and rendering those, but the results while much better than before were unsatisfactory.   Tubes and Spheres are great to get going, but to reach that next level, I really needed to learn what is hiding beneath the surface of the skin. 

Under the skin is a basket weave of bone, muscle and tendon.  Objects never just butt up against each other, they intertwine like a basket weave.  Now as I draw, I’m asking myself “What is the relationship between them muscle I’m drawing and the other muscles, bones and tendons connected to it and surrounding it?”

I work on a 12.9” iPad pro mainly in Procreate.  To help me understand the size, shape and connection points of the essential muscles, bones and tendons I’ve downloaded an app called “Anatomy 3D atlas” as well as another app called L’ecorche’.  Between the two apps, I have been able to gain an excellent visualization of each muscle and where it connects.  Anatomy 3D Atlas provides the ability to isolate or even hide muscles that are obscuring muscles that I want to study!  Between all of these tools, I now have a very powerful method of understanding exactly how the movement of one will affect the others! 

When I attended Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in the late 90s, they had us all read and write essays about ‘seeing’.  While I scoffed at the class at the time, it is one of the most memorable lessons I learned there.   

We as artist see. 

Then we create.

We can’t skip the seeing part if we’re going to be good at what we do.  In this case, correctly seeing requires concentrated study using these wonderful and relatively inexpensive tools to build that necessary awareness.

As always, I find myself again at the beginning of a journey of discovery and improvement.  Now I’m armed with a sharper set of eyes!

Until next time…

I spend a fair amount of time looking back over work that I’ve put up on my Artstation portfolio.  It’s the best work I’m capable of today.  As I re-examine work that I created months or even years ago, it’s clear that I’ve picked up some real knowledge of my craft.   I can’t really blame my past self for the flaws I see in my past work.  It was truly representative of the best I could do at the time.  Today, I’m seeing more. 

Over the past 3 years I’ve been using every tool at my disposal to improve my ability to capture a likeness in the form of digital painting the way that some of the pros on Artstation like Angel Ganev can.  I’ve watched a LOT of tutorial videos from a LOT of artists. After I get done with my day job, I‘m putting in a solid 3+ hours nightly on average of astoundingly focused practice!  

I’ve finally found my stride in learning at age 49.  Where was this 30 years ago??

I’ve always loved to draw from the time I was able to hold a pencil.  I used to draw constantly, not stopping to pay attention in Math or English class.  I’ve always been one of the better artists in my peer group but it was during my freshman year in high school that I saw what can be done with real knowledge of the subject.  I came across another kid in my freshman year in high school who was a true student of the craft of drawing.  He had focus and discipline, and took joy in learning about things like the science of shadows, line quality, contour sketching, anatomy, color, etc.   I had strong interest and the desire to know, but my focus was always somewhere else.  I always envied his love of learning. 

I attended art school after a 4-year stint in a Mechanical Engineering program.  Again, the aptitude was very apparent, but the love of learning for the sake of learning was not there.  It has always been a ‘means to an end’.    I did ‘well’.  I graduated with my degree in Industrial Design, and  I went on to a pretty successful career in that.  I’ve always had the visual knack, but as one gets older, there comes a point that one’s truth can no longer be denied.  I would become intensely jealous as I looked at the work of professional Artists on platforms like Artstation.  That Jealousy revealed my soul’s desire.  I want to be a master artist, I can settle for nothing less.  It is very important to me to do work that I think is remarkable.  Equipped with that conviction, I am finally willing to spend the hours and years doing the study and practice necessary to manifest that vision. (as corny as that may sound!)

The headwind is strong.  Because of my age I have legitimate doubts that I can 1) achieve even a marketable level of mastery, and 2) Find a way to market it sufficiently to pay the bills.  What’s pushing me forward today is pure joy in the learning, the growing, and the work itself.  I finally feel as though if NOTHING comes of all of the hours and the effort, finally for me today, the reward is in the effort itself. Today, I find joy in the effort! I put this out there for any other folks who find themselves in a spot similar to mine.   

It looks like a couple of weeks back, I spoke a little too soon regarding moving on to the next stage of my portrait learning process!  I am learning that this is to be expected on any path of learning and discovery!  As they say, ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’.   Further, it’s really impossible for me to truly ‘see’ how far I am from a goal in art until I actually do the work necessary to get there.

I’ve needed to spend the last couple of weeks continuing to work on those Reilly method rhythm lines rather than moving on to the planes.  Two specific issues were pointed out to me in my critiques that have been holding my work back from really improving a lot over the last year or so.  My proportions need work, and my linework also demonstrates a need for a lot more practice.

I cannot stress enough how beneficial subjecting oneself to cold, honest, dispassionate critique can be. I’ve been of the opinion lately, that I can only really rely on myself for thoughtful critique.  I absolutely must critique myself as objectively as I possibly can.  But the inescapable truth is that even if I can somehow remain perfectly objective about my work, there is no substitute for the critical eye of someone who has already been down the road I travel.  God bless those who have been generous enough to be honest with me about where I’m at.    

Critique that isn’t specific enough is less helpful, but nonetheless useful in its own way.  It can alert me at least to the presence of a problem, even if I must then seek specific guidance elsewhere.

If at all possible, I highly recommend to anyone who is serious about improvement, to find a community of artists who know what you are tying to accomplish and who have already accomplished it.  Seek others who are willing to help you by being honest with you about what they see in your work.  Particularly in an online environment, ultimately each artist must make their own judgments about which criticisms are most valid.  I have found though that amongst artists, those of us who know how difficult this can be, it isn’t always comfortable to stick one’s neck out to point out a weakness in someone else’ work.  When someone does that for me, I really have to pause and take it seriously.

My focus since my last blog has been on being as accurate as possible, and creating clean, consistent linework.  Below are a couple of before and after images. The effect is maybe kind of subtle, but that’s really what portraits, and achieving likeness are all about!  

This will be the basis of my overall process.  I will do many more of these as a basis for constructing the planes of heads.   I’ll check back soon with more progress!

Well….as promised, I am back to report my progress.  As I’ve feared..it looks like my new mentor has ‘tipped’ and now he’s got a sort of a web based quasi-art-school! I can’t fault the guy for trying to make a buck, (God bless him!) and I still want to learn!  (Inner hipster...you shut the hell up!)  At any rate, at this point I’m taking any opportunity to finally figure this shit out.  

So, about 3 weeks ago I was spending a couple of hours per day drawing these simplified heads from various angles and applying the Reilly method rhythm lines.  Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been taking really nicely lit photo references of male models ( because of their chisled, easy to identify features),  I’ve been laying the rhythm lines on top of the reference directly, then I’ve been re-drawing my rhythm line sketch free-hand next to the original reference like so….

In the process, I’m doing a couple of things.  One, I’m building my powers of observation in that overlay process.  I’m getting clear in my mind as to what I’m actually seeing,  Next, as I build that freehand version of the sketch, I’m working the mental muscle that allows me to measure more accurately visually.  I know that there are purists who feel that something like this could be a waste of time.  I’ve read William Maughan’s ‘Drawing the head’ and Andrew Loomis’ ‘Figure drawing for all it’s worth’, I’ve taken a few figure drawing classes, hell, I’ve been to art school!  Maughan as of the writing of his book back in 2004 felt that only drawing from life is valuable. All I can say is that after doing all of that, doing this is teaching me something more still.  This is taking some of the mystical randomness out of the process for me, and I think it’s going to improve my ability to draw from life. 

Last week I felt that maybe I was ready to move on from this stage in the process, as I had already done maybe 20 of these.  Apparently not quite good enough!  During online critique it became clear that I should keep at it.  My sense of three dimensions is pretty solid (I’m a sculptor at heart)  but my ability to translate that to 2D by hand, using the illusion of perspective drawing while maintaining proper proportions still needed work-so I knocked out maybe 20 more.  I’m feeling pretty confident about what I’ve gained as a result of that additional work. As a bonus, I’m seeing some nice improvement in my line work.

For Father’s day my wonderful family purchase for me an Asaro head.  If you’re not familiar with what that is, it’s a simplified model of a human head broken down into its most basic planes on one side, and a slightly more complex representation on the other side. 

Now I can look at the essential planes of a human head and I can be aware of what they are, and where to look for them.  It’s a lot to take in at one or two sittings, but I spend a little time just picking this thing apart mentally every day. I’m starting to memorize it.

Although some of the planes are a little exaggerated, what this model does for me is that it allows me to see how specific planes of the head will be affected by specific lighting conditions.  

Loomis starts with an egg shape and starts to break it down from there with a few simple lines.  That’s all well and good (for me anyway) until I have to actually render it.  There are a few planes-especially around the cheekbone and jaw that have confounded me.  As always, as it turns out,  there’s somebody who has had this very problem and has done the work.  My thanks to John Asaro  for taking the time!  

Did you know that if three spheres of different sizes are all lit in exactly the same way, that the largest one will be the brightest???  I didn’t either!!  John Asaro explained that along with I’m sure some other fun facts in the DVD that came with the head.  That one blew my mind so I needed to just shut it off and process that. Incredible!    

Now armed with Asaro head, I am working from those basic rhythm lines, using those as landmarks to lay in the planes of the specific head from my photo reference like so:

Between the planes and the rhythm lines that I used to create them, I’ve already got a really good sense of the form that I’m going to be painting later. Already in the sketch of the planes I’m starting to see a likeness to the subject and even a lot of the emotion that is held in the particular orientation of the head and features. This strikes me as a highly logical and analytical approach that I’m going to find highly repeatable.  All of this adds up to what I’m really working toward...the ability to paint a solid, reliable, likeness on demand.

So much for this week!  I think creating these ‘planes’ sketches is going to occupy the next couple of weeks.  I’ll report back with what I’ve learned!  After that I will be spending some time on line-weight.  See you then!

Hi folks,

It’s been a while since my last blog post….and since my last addition to my Artstation portfolio.  I’ve been doing a lot of portraits and concept art over the last year.  It’s been a lot of fun, and I feel that I’ve been growing in my art, but as I look around at some of the work that I really admire, there seems to be this kind of chasm between where my work is, and where I want it to be.  Shocker, right?

A couple of things I’ve noticed in the artwork that really inspires me:  Really nice, confident, gestural lines.  Yes, there’s a lot of energy and life in those lines, but also, there is a brilliantly refined deliberateness.  Together, the two create an astonishingly sexy effect.  The second thing I see when it comes to portraits, is an accuracy and fidelity of likeness that I have yet to achieve.

I’ve spent a good amount of time focusing on the anatomy of the head, and anatomy of the body in general.  I learned about perspective and shading in art school- how to draw heads in perspective boxes, etc.  I’ve done a few online courses, going back again and again to the very basics of drawing and color in an effort to find that illusive something. 

Then my wife suggested I try a mentorship of some kind.  That got me thinking.  I know that there are a number of artists that I admire who offer some form of art mentorship via Patreon.   So, I’ve decided to become a Patron of one of these artists.    Apparently, a lot of people want to be learn how to make portraits like this guy (Angel Ganev).  This is NOT appealing to my inner hipster!  He’s tipping.  I sense a sell-out on the horizon!  He’s got a pretty nice actual course laid out though that doesn’t assume a lot.   That’s good for me! Even though I’ve been at this (drawing/painting/sculpting/pixel pushing) for more years than I care to admit, I’ve found that my best bet is to maintain ‘a beginner’s mind’.   I am clay in your hands, master!  Teach me!!

What has happened so far…

In the early going so far I’ve learned some photoshop basics.  I know that a LOT of digital artists use Photoshop, but I’ve been pretty exclusively a Procreate guy, mostly because it is so freaking awesome on my ipad, and I take that everywhere.  I do however have a tablet monitor on my PC and a Creative Cloud license ( I know… I’m an over-privileged piece of shit!) .  So now I’m learning how to actually use some of the brush settings and all of the incredible advantages of Photoshop like being able to lock layers so that I don’t accidentally start drawing only to discover after 15 minutes that I’ve been working on the WRONG LAYER!

I’m also learning a little bit about how far I’ve drifted from some of my basic art skills and how to get back ‘in line’ (see what I did there?).  One of the first exercises has been to ‘build up’ lines.  In order to do that, I have to draw over the same line over and over again.  Well, that isn’t going to happen drawing with my wrist the way I have been for the last couple of years (Ok, most of my life) . I am rediscovering the power of drawing with my shoulder (that I learned in art school, where the guy literally stood over me with a stick!). With this fundamental tweak, it is now possible for me to do, what was impossible only a week ago.  My Shoulder is a MUCH more capable drawing device than my wrist.  I must somehow learn to keep the ‘wrist weasel’ at bay!

I have been told this by no less than a dozen art teachers.  What’s the saying?  When the student is FINALLY ready, the teacher appears?  As hungry as I have been for knowledge, I have been resistant to certain pieces of advice for some reason.  I won’t spend 15 minutes doing it the RIGHT way, but I’ll spend countess hours correcting my jacked-up painting!  DON’T be like me.  I’m 52 years old and learning how to draw finally.

As they say however,  If nothing changes, nothing changes… I am committing here today publicly before God and anyone reading this, while I can still draw breath, I am going to draw with my flipping shoulder!!

Along with my mechanical fixes I am now beginning to look at the form of the head even more analytically.  I’m taking a geometrically uber simplified version of a head, I am looking at it from various angles and working to draw what I’m seeing exactly.  I’m doing this in a simple line sketch using what’s called the Reilly method.  

The Reilly method breaks the head down into a few basic landmarks and connecting ‘Rhythm lines’.  Tying this new knowledge back to drawing heads in boxes is starting to give me a better framework for finding the landmarks of the head.  It’s allowing me to approach the process in a more orderly way.

In addition, drawing this basic head 30-40 times from different angles has really begun to cement in my mind the basic geometry of the head.  I literally now SEE something different than I used to when I look at somebody’s face! This very basic form study also allows me to train my eye with the fewest possible distracting minor forms.  After all, we always want to work from the most general of forms, to the most specific.  A drawing should look good throughout the process as the good teachers say.  This has been a good indication to me that my process has needed some adjustment!  My anatomical sketches have looked pretty decent throughout, but my portraits, not as much.

My goal over the last few weeks has been to secure a very confident generality to build on.

My journey continues!  Next I’m moving on to finding these rhythm lines in photographic reference.  I’ll report back soon!

Hey folks,

It’s been about a week since I’ve posted anything.  I went into a little bit of a funk.  I seem to have these every now and again.  I’ll have a really nice and productive week.  I’ll have created and posted some new work maybe every other day for a few weeks in a row, and then suddenly the wind vanishes from my sails, and I’m adrift.   I don’t even want to LOOK at any artwork or even watch a tutorial.  I’m done with Art during that time, and I have to spend my free time sitting in a recliner watching old seasons of Survivor or worse yet, ‘Fear the Walking Dead’.  

Being a middle-aged artist and encountering some of the new challenges that come along with that, I’ve sought some counsel.   I’ve started reading this book titled “Hidden Blessings” by Jett Psaris.  It’s a really interesting exploration of some of the mental and spiritual changes that occur as we all start to hit this milestone in the journey of our lives.   One of the areas in which reading this book has built some increased awareness for me is in the realm of dreams, and ‘dream-work’. 

My dreams generally tend to be of the un-remarkable variety.  Dreams in which I show up to a college course for the first time on the last day having missed the entire course…on exam day. Stuff like that.   About a week ago however, I had maybe the first dream I can recall ever having that actually had a completely new ‘creature’ in it. 

In this dream, I’m in the basement of the house I grew up in.  It’s completely dark, and I can sense that there is something moving in between the floor joists, the gas pipes, plumbing, etc.   I happened to have a flashlight in my hand that I now switched on and pointed up.  This extremely creepy, pitch black creature with a humanoid head, but no mouth, no ears, and no nose… only eyes, is revealed, slithering and floating between the pipes as I am desperately trying to track it with the light so that I can see if it turns toward me.  That was essentially the whole thing.   I woke from this nightmare and was inspired to create a digital painting of what I saw. 

The author of Hidden Blessings contends that dreams are one of many ways in which our souls speak to us.  According to the author, dreams are a bluntly honest language of visuals and feelings that are meant to help us to grow spiritually-or to get unstuck from a rut we may find ourselves inhabiting.  The gift of this particular dream was perhaps to provide me a glimpse into a paranoia that perhaps proceeds from my childhood roots.  There has to be definite significance to the fact that the creature had only eyes.  The resulting painting was a truly haunting image that seriously creeps me out each time I look at it.   In the short term, the dream offered me some needed inspiration to get back to what I really love doing! Maybe that’s at least part of the point?  The subject matter that I connect with on the most personal level (even if it’s a deep personal fear) can somehow provide the fuel to get me moving forward again.  I hope you enjoy the image!

Hey folks, so it’s Saturday morning, I woke up early and watched Mortal Kombat on HBO Max.  I’ll start off by saying that I’ve been a fan of the Mortal Kombat video games since the first time I dropped a quarter in one of the original arcade cabinets way back in 1992.  The game was cool.  What was interesting about it back then was that you had these roughly photographically realistic fighters that you could make fight each other.  Then what was really cool was that somebody on this new thing called the internet discovered that if you were playing as Sub-zero (the blue ninja with a cool freeze power) and you won, at the end of the fight if you hit the right combination of buttons, Sub Zero would rip the guy’s (or gal’s) head off.  Awesome.

Mortal Kombat 2 was innovative in that they began to create a history and mythology-a story- behind each of the fighters and how they related to each other.  Super cool!   Of course, the main story line that I think captured most people was the bitter hatred between Scorpion and Sub-Zero.   This is brilliant on so many levels.  First and foremost, it’s lazy ingenuity at its finest….Hey guys we need seven fighters and we’ve only got six.  Well, just make the blue ninja yellow and call it a day!  Awesome!  We’re done!  Adding the elemental feud between the two really ratcheted up the drama!

They touched on this in the first film in 1997 (which I also loved by the way!) I’m embarrassed to admit it, but when I saw that MK dragon intro for the first time, and then watched the letters M-O-R-T-A-L-K-O-M-B-A-T whiz past my head like Shuriken with accompanying flying steel sound to form the title of my favorite game…I got a little choked up.  Mortal Kombat to me has always represented time wasted with my buddies mailing in an entire Saturday afternoon hanging out playing MK2 on my Sega Genesis.  The needling when one of us would get a 3-4 match winning streak going would sometimes come to actual, albeit short-lived bitterness, but the laughs were priceless! A number of my art school sculpture projects involved the MK dragon in one way or another. (I’ll post and link to one of those)  Hell, I even painted a mural of the MKII box cover art in my room during my college days…super cool!

Anyway, this film-that I had very LOW expectations for really struck nearly all of those notes again.  There will be no spoilers here, I will say only that my curiosity about the bitter relationship between ‘the laziness ninjas’-Sub Zero and Scorpion, was satisfied.  For a video game film, I found the performances to feel very right for the material.  The casting choices and the script, along with nearly all of the dialogue were spot on.   One thing I would beg of makers of action films going forward…for God’s sake…never again include the line, ‘…a little help?’   From a visuals and effects standpoint, I thought that the visuals did their story-telling job exceptionally well.  The art of some of the incredibly talented folks who display their work here on Artstation, undoubtedly under incredibly demanding timelines, brought this world that has meant so much to me in my 20s, to beautiful, believable life.

If you have ever been a fan of Mortal Kombat, I highly recommend this film. It is a LOT of fun!  Take your buddies!