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Did you work on Borderlands 4?

A few rough sketches in the earliest phase but nothing that went to final. I left before proper pre-production started. So essentially no.

wish the team all the best though!

(and i’m excited to play!)

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Main fella for my cybergrunge side project. His name is Brody. A clone of a clone of a clone of a clone just trying to scrape by on an abandoned planet.

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Fun quickie of her majesty Megan Thee Stallion

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does anyone still use Tumblr? Trying to recover my online footing after some big life changes, moves, layoffs, changing my whole gender, and recovering from a decade of art burnout. I’ve never been good at the internet game, and now it’s a whole different beast with the tiktok’s and reels and whatnot. I miss this site a bit, it always felt more casual on here and like people have permission to be a bit more messy and authentic.

I was among the chunk of devs laid off Riot Games in January and am still seeking work. It’s grim out there these days. Every week brings another round of layoffs and studio closures. But at least I’m having fun drawing again. The one strange silver lining of the game industry imploding and the AI apocalypse potentially annihilating my career path is that I feel a lot more comfortable just experimenting and reconnecting with why I even got started drawing in the first place. Not as worried about having to be professional or have everything look polished. I guess I’ll just see what happens.

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Hey yall, here’s a dump of character work I did for the recently released Borderlands  3 DLC, Bounty of Blood. I was responsible for defining the look of the ally NPCs Juno and Oletta.  

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Social Medias yay

https://www.artstation.com/mandersmash

https://twitter.com/mandersmash

https://www.instagram.com/mandersmash/

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Some very early rough explorations for the guardian aliens for Borderlands 3.  They ended up going in a different direction for these guys, but I’m glad I got to take a pass at their look.

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Follow me elsewhere if you so desire:

https://www.artstation.com/mandersmash

https://twitter.com/mandersmash

https://www.instagram.com/mandersmash/

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I just really wanted to say that I love your work on borderlands and especially Battleborn

Thank you! It makes me happy that people still appreciate Battleborn. 😊

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I don’t get tasked with a ton of prop work at Gearbox, and when I do its usually character specific.  Here are some really cute props I came up with for the player character to go collect for Ava on her backstory quest.  And in case anyone was wondering what the little blue balls were under the bonsai tree in Ava’s room, they are Hermes poops.

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So that means there are elves in the Borderlands universe?

Nope, no elves.  Those were just explorations.  Definitely not canon!

Though at the time my line of thinking was that the beastmaster was actually more of a genetic mutant or alien hybrid, rather than a straight up elf.

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Early rough concept exploration for the Beastmaster class.  I was exploring how fantasy I could push things with it still seeming Borderlands.  (I went too far, haha.) This was suuuuper early, long before the art director, Scott Kester, had the brilliant idea to make Fl4k robotic.  

I adore Fl4k’s final design, by Max Davenport! They turned out super cool.  :)

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Social Medias yay

https://www.artstation.com/mandersmash

https://twitter.com/mandersmash

https://www.instagram.com/mandersmash/

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your art is so pretty!

Thank you so much! 

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Here is the entirety of the work I did on Mr. Handsomepants himself, Zane.  So not a lot!.  My pass was basically like “Sexy Castlevania John Wick.” Leadership thought he was way too edgelordy!  Fair enough!  

On the right is a sketch riffing on Sergi Brosa’s final design, which turned out super awesome.  I love playing Zane when I play in a group, I always use the shield and play support Daddy and drive everyone around in the car.  

As a bonus I tossed in a mean Yakuza gangster idea for Zane that ended up sort of turning into Katagawa Jr-ish.

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Social Media Stuff Yay

https://www.artstation.com/mandersmash

https://twitter.com/mandersmash

https://www.instagram.com/mandersmash/

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Some very early exploration for Moze!  I didn’t do a whole lot of work on this character, just some very rough preliminary explorations.  The first set of color sketches was done before she was supposed to be a mech pilot, and was more of a haggard military vet. I actually inked these by hand!

 The second sheet was something I whipped up while working with the early design team exploring the idea of her having some kind of mech.  She was then passed off to the other artists to explore, while I focused on Amara.

I hope people find these explorations interesting!  

I’m very proud of Max Davenport and Sergi Brosa’s final designs for Moze and the Iron Bear.  She turned out great!

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As usual, you can follow me elsewhere for more art, commentary, and whatnot! :D

https://www.artstation.com/mandersmash

https://twitter.com/mandersmash

https://www.instagram.com/mandersmash/

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would it be ok to use any of your BL art as icons (with credit)?? LOVE your work

yea sure!  and thank you!

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A collection of rough sketches for some of the original Borderlands characters.  I didn’t to a whole lot of work on any of these guys (except Tina) but it was fun getting to throw down some sketch exploration during the early phases of development.  I’m still partial to the heavy bomber jacket on Lilith, personally. 

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If you like, you can follow me elsewhere for more art, commentary, and whatnot! :D

https://www.artstation.com/mandersmash

https://twitter.com/mandersmash

https://www.instagram.com/mandersmash/

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Spoilers for the quest Childhood’s End ahead, scroll on by if you want that quest to be a surprise. 

These are some assets I created while working with Kate Pitstick and the narrative team on the Childhood's End side quest for Borderlands 3. It was probably one of the most interesting (and depressing) things I got to tackle on the project. I actually studied children's drawings and read some articles by art therapists and childhood psychologists in order to try and draw like a traumatized kid at various stages of her life.  I had just finished playing Life is Strange when i got assigned this, so I was super inspired to try my hand at visual storytelling through assets hidden within a level. 

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If you like, you can follow me elsewhere for more art, commentary, and whatnot! :D

https://www.artstation.com/mandersmash

https://twitter.com/mandersmash

https://www.instagram.com/mandersmash/

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Maya is the best space mom and you can’t change my mind