Portfolio

Brenan Canipe

Encounter

Digital illustration

This piece shows the final moments of a once common man turned warrior. For doing the dragon's bidding, in return the man will receive the gift of death. After an agonizing thousand years, the immortal man will be able to rest.I sought to emphasize the personality and unlikely connection between the man and the dragon. Despite the dragon controlling the space, looming over the man, he approaches not only unafraid but at his wits' end.The dragon's bright, glowing eyes bring the viewers' eyes backwards into the space, to the book it is clutching tightly. With the body language of the dragon it would be correct to infer that the contents of the book is what the man is after.

dawn somewhere else

Digital illustration

This piece was an experiment for me, and a gift to my mother. She absolutely loves the beach, so I wanted to make something beachy to celebrate the time we spend there together.Sometimes when I have an idea I have a clear vision of what I want it to be, and this was one of those times. I pictured being out on the orange water, looking at the dark shoreline standing stark against the bright flare of reds behind it. I pictured the rainbow of colors that reach from the sun, and the brightness pulling back to display the cosmos beyond.I tried to depict a fraction of the beauty we can see on our world, and contrast that with the understanding that there are moments like these on other worlds no person may ever get to witness.

A shrimp fried this rice?

Digital Illustration

This character portrait piece started as a piece I did to test my understanding of cloth and clothing folds, after a lot of practice. I started to feel confident with what I had, and began to incorporate other things to test myself like the rule of thirds, complex organic shading and even the golden ratio.The piece came out better than I expected and helped solidify my understanding in what I had practiced. This is an original character I have named Clem, who pretends to be a shrimp. I thought I'd draw her making shrimp fried rice to exemplify her silly personality.

Shellie - character concept

Digital Illustration

Shellie is one of the many original characters I create, and is a design I'm especially happy with. She was created for a storyboard for an animation I created, and is the main character of her short story.Unlike many of my other works her design did not come to me easily, and I had to sit down and approach the design more formally. Using what little ideas about her personality, setting and relations with others, I iterated on multiple silhouettes and designs. She is straightforward, timid, playful and a bit immature. She lives in a small village with close family.I wanted to display that with her simplistic outfit and appearance. Her cool-colored, oversized and slightly frumpy sweater contrasts her small stature and exhibits the culture in her village, as well as her personality.The large snail-shell shaped backpack connects to the story's main plot, as everyone in her village is turning into snails for reasons unknown to her.

Tree trunk penholder

Speckled buff stoneware, various glazes

This is a single-piece ceramic penholder, and one I use on the daily. In a pottery class I took, I was surrounded by other people doing very symmetrical projects often similar in appearance or process. I have a penchant for doing something unique and wanted to do something organic.I often find the most inspiration for my ideas in nature, and this work was no different. I ended up making a hollow cone-like piece on the wheel, then took it off and meticulously carved out the bark and grains of wood to resemble a rotted, hollow tree trunk.I used a lighter color glaze on the inside in hopes that it would shine through the various holes I carved in the bark, and when my dark pen was inserted it would catch my eye.

rocky river cup

Speckled buff stoneware, various glazes

This is a ceramic cup, and my first piece of stoneware. I threw this on the wheel during my first attempt to make anything. After trying to trim it, I clumsily dropped it on the wheel and watched it thump around chaotically as it spun. When I got it off, it had imperfections all over it from the accident.After being dissatisfied with it, my mom's incessant excitement got the best of me and I ultimately kept it, clueless as to where I should go with what was such a boring, asymmetrical form at the time.After mulling it over and trying to hold the rough shape I had in my hand, I realized it needed a grip of sorts. I thought about doing a grid, or maybe a diamond design, but it all felt too impersonal. After much thought I had the idea to carve out a little rocky river in it, with all of the cup's imperfections instead proudly displayed. It took time and effort to fully surround the cup with thirty some unique stones, but it was absolutely worth it for the end product.The shiny, translucent blue glaze between the rocks evokes the idea of a running, deep stream, and it's contrasted by the more matte, textured grass color on the rest of the body. I made sure to round the top and bottom of the mug more than I might normally, to elucidate the feeling of rolling grassy hills that contrast the sharp, irregular edges of the rocks nicely. The rocks and bottom of the clay are without glaze because I expected the raw clay would make a wonderful texture for the rocks to act as the grip I originally wanted.

Axolotl Cathedral - concepts

Digital Illustration

This concept art is for a building I designed to recreate at scale in a voxel based building game called Minecraft. I've used this game as a medium for what is functionally three dimensional pixel art modelling. This is the concept art from the early stages of designing.I've been a huge fan of gothic architecture for a long time and had the idea of this elaborate, oversized and colorful building dedicated to a fictional axolotl deity. I wanted an expansive, open main sanctuary to be the only real room of the building, and function as an axial auditorium for pews and an elevated podium.I wanted it to have barrel vault-like stained glass roof so when the sun shines through the patterns in the glass shine down onto the black and white checkered floor with all kinds of vibrancy. There would be a sort of balcony around the circumference of both the interior and exterior, allowing for visitors to view the building at all angles from inside, and while outside, look out at the surrounding world from high up.

Fairy Witch's house
model

Blender Digital 3D render, Minecraft architectural design - pencil and paper

This building design popped into my mind after coming across some architectural designs by Shirish Beri. They struck me because of their organic nature, and he blended organics and inorganics wonderfully in a lot of his work.This inspired me greatly and I felt inclined to design something a day or so later. I ended up making a pair of buildings that were to complement each other in their designs, with the experimental building depicted here.The story behind this one came to me afterwards. The curved, asymmetric gabled roof leaned backwards atop an already leaning cylindrical base. I decided not to counteract this visual imbalance, but I gave the house some tiny supporting stilts out behind it. It was such an oblong, weird and charming design to me that I had to design it more fully in Minecraft and subsequently model it in Blender.During the coloring process I thought to give it distinct hues in each section, to highlight the idea of the house itself being a sort of messy conglomerate of shapes stacked haphazardly onto one another.The darker, cooler and heavier colors are generally on the bottom to give it additional visual weight. As you move up the house, the interiors and exteriors generally become warmer and lighter to accentuate the tapering vertical axis as it reached towards the sky, albeit leaned back a bit. The second floor has a much shorter ceiling to act as a second instance of compression and release, as you go from the claustrophobic second floor to the highly vertical, spacious top floor.

Axolotl cathedral building model

Blender Digital 3D render, Minecraft architectural design - pencil and paper

This is an animated 3D render of the final Axolotl Cathedral I designed and built. As every cube is here is placed manually, I was given utmost freedom to not only design and shape the building to my intent, but color in every detail I imagined.I explored various typologies of religious and non-religious architecture, and used a blend of multiple building styles in the real world to design this.The brown anterior roof depicts a lot of the hip and gable elements seen in traditional East-Asian architecture, and the color symmetry is continued downwards with the more basic gabled wooden roof below, supported by two relatively smaller columns.The peripteral style pillar placement seen on the first and second floor on the exterior was inspired primarily by classical greek architecture like the Parthenon, but unlike the Parthenon, this building is meant to be seen from straight on. The clear multi-tiered, symmetric layout was inspired by ancient Mayan temples.The sine wave-like roof contours were my original idea, and I decided the barrel vaulted stained glass roof complemented the curves nicely, and accentuates the idea of mixing contrasting organic and inorganic shapes to create something still cohesive. The design at the bottom of the building contrasts the top heavily, going from a strictly rectilinear profile to a much more organic, flowing one.