The Download Munkey : Download This, Download That :)

Back in February, I wrote about the cool concept art I found at the official site for Nuclear Dawn, an anime-influenced sci-fi mod for Half-Life 2. I finally found the illustrator for some of those artworks and he happens to be a local artist from Singapore

Known as ukitakumuki on deviantArt, Kai was one of the artists (together with Daniel “Arcipello” Conway) who did the concept art for Nuclear Dawn. Unfortunately the concepts are no longer available on the Nuclear Dawn site, but you can still see some of them in his deviantArt gallery. Below are Twin Moons (top) and Twin Suns (bottom).

© Kai

There’s more concept art done for Nuclear Dawn such as Hell Divers, To Be Free and Wonderful Days among others.

Other than the fantastic Nuclear Dawn pieces, there’s a lot of great artwork in his deviantArt gallery too, of mecha like the amazing 100 Years of Force (top) and Air in Kyoto (bottom), which was done for Half-Life 2 mod Hull Breach …

© Kai

And of warriors both past For My Pride (top) and future Black Trinary (bottom).

© Kai

Some of the other subjects that he illustrates happen to be things that I like a lot, such as the Death Guard Legion of Chaos Space Marines in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. See We Are Legion below …

© Kai

Gundam, like the lone Zaku II in the Zaku Heat of The Night below …

© Kai

Transformers (mainly Starscream) in Like Nothing on Earth (same as the tagline for the RSAF recruitment ad, only that it’s for the Royal Decepticon Air Force this time round …

© Kai

And grim fantasy stuff like Nation of Sol - Urchin Down (below).

© Kai

Check out Kai’s deviantArt Gallery for even more awesome eye candy.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Zaku II Artwork by Tetuya Watanabe
Warren Louw - Illustrator
Keith Thompson - Illustrator
Adrian Smith - Warhammer 40,000 Illustrator
Andrea Uderzo - Warhammer 40,000 Illustrator
StartDrawing.org - Asia’s Drawing Portal

Four official wallpapers from the upcoming animation Appleseed : Ex Machina produced by John Woo and set to be released on 20th Oct 2007 in Japan. First read about Appleseed : Ex Machina over at the SWFToys blog.

© www.exmachina.jp

The first and fourth ones are very cool - I especially like the body armour design for the Olympus ES.W.A.T memebers in the fourth one.

Too bad there’s no 1600×1200 resolution for the wallpapers - only 1025×768 to 1280×1024 sized wallpapers available at the official site @ www.exmachina.jp.

Can’t find the Downloads section for the wallpapers? You need to launch the official Flash site, click Enter and then look for the Downloads button on the bottom left of the picture of Olympus city that pop-ups in a new window. (see below)

halcyon realms also has some scans on Appleseed : Ex Machina from Japanese magazine Animation Note issue 07 which you might also be interested

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Mecha Image of The Day (miotd.com)
Needa Schuetlitch (ニーダ・シュトリッヒ) Wallpaper
Code Guardian Movie
Metal Wolf Chaos Wallpaper
Anime Wallpapers @ Madman.com.au

Mecha Image of The Day was a site I found recently while looking for technical lineart. While I didn’t really find what I was looking for at this site, I did find a lot of illustrations of mecha-related stuff like:

A very detailed Transformers artwork (not too sure about the original source of this artwork)

Battletech Mech technical lineart (Madcat shown above but there’s Loki and Vulture too)

High resolution Macross illustrations. Links are here, here, here, here and here.

Gundam illustrations. (RX-78-2 Gundam (above) here and Rick Dias (below) here).

And this classic Evangelion picture. Must have been drawn at least a decade back before the introduction of the M1 Abrams because the tanks in there are M60s (note externally mounted searchlights).

Major Motoko Kusanagi from the Ghost in The Shell series. (Just saw some Motoko Kusanagi wallpapers at Rendered Beauty quite a while back).

The good thing is that most of these pictures are at nearly 4:3 aspect ratio and so are perfect for the desktop.

In short if you love mecha, you gotta visit Mecha Image of The Day.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Classic Transformers Storybooks
Kinetic Singapore : Robots, Ads and More!
Tetuya Watanabe’s Zaku IIs
MechCommander 2 Encyclopedia
Transformers Comic Wallpapers

Found this wallpaper of the very pretty Needa Schuetlitch (ニーダ・シュトリッヒ) figurine over at Danny Choo’s blog.

© Danny Choo

Don’t really like the usual style of Japanese figurines with the overly-cute oversized eyes. This one is very different IMHO with a pretty yet realistic face and armed with an exceptionally huge rifle - like a FN P90 or FN F2000 chambered for a really large round

Plus the concept illustration (especially the eyes) at the official site reminds me of Shunya Yamashita’s artwork. Not sure if it’s done by Shunya though since I can’t read Japanese

© Good Smile

Browse through other figurines available at Good Smile or look at more photos of Ms Needa over at DannyChoo.com.

Now let me hope for a wallpaper of the concept artwork for the Good Smile’s range of figurines

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Shunya Yamashita & Other Asian Artists @ startdrawing.org
FN Herstal High Resolution Photos
Alessia Zambonin’s Concepts for Paolo Parente’s Dust
Anime Wallpapers @ Madman.com.au
Hellgate London’s Hunter Illustration by Alessandro Baldasseroni

Two wallpapers from the Days of Memories dating sim series featuring the girls/ladies from SNK franchises (King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, etc). Frankly speaking, WTH was SNK Playmore thinking?

© SNK Playmore

Names of characters (second wallpaper) from left to right:
Top row : Hotaru Futaba (Garou: Mark of the Wolves), Saya (Samurai Shodown: Warriors Rage), Shino (original character)
Second row : Mai Shiranui (King of Fighters), Athena Asamiya (King of Fighters), Nakoruru (Samurai Shodown V)
Bottom row : Shizuku Misawa (original character), Iroha (Samurai Shodown VI)

Names extracted from the character pages @ SNK Playmore here, here and here. (character names in English and Japanese with other text in Japanese)

For the truly curious, there’s some screenshots of the cellphone version of Days of Memories over at gamesarefun as well as more information over at Wikipedia.

Download these wallpapers from game.snkplaymore.co.jp.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
KOF XI Wallpapers
KOF and Samurai Shodown Wallpapers
Tenjho Tenge Wallpapers
Ibara Wallpapers