Maciulek

This is the place where I get to showcase the latest of my artworks. Gradual shift in technique over time is a desired effect, so sit back and enjoy.

[maciulek]

Who would have thought that something so ferocious would quickly turn out to be one of the most sympathetic characters ever made? Feel free to rationalize away this piece as an old cautionary poster within WDF quarters. After all, it was heavily inspired by Leslie Illingworth's WW2 era illustration.

A full-sized payoff to all the colour practice pieces - and one of the very few cases where final artwork more or less aligns with what I expected from it on conceptualization stage.

70cm x 50cm paper, watercolor, fineliner sketch. Serial Designation N, landscape of Copper 9 (Murder Drones, by Liam Vickers) © Glitch Productions

[maciulek]

A set of study drawings of Bobette and Teagan - toons from "Dandy's World" videogame by BlushCrunch Studio. Also, sketches of their real-life material counterparts to get a better grasp on how glass baubles and painted porcelain works.

A3 paper, fineliner, Kuretake markers.

[maciulek]

Second practice piece for me to try and learn creating fully coloured Murder Drones artwork. Hopefully this will be just enough to attempt making much larger pieces without worrying too much about irreversible mistakes and workflow mishaps.

42cm x 29,7cm paper, watercolor, fineliner sketch. J, V (Murder Drones, by Liam Vickers) © Glitch Productions

[maciulek]

I'm planning to try and create at least a couple of Murder Drones artworks in full colour. To that effect - as learned from past errors and disappointments that typically come with not doing sufficient study pieces - I first needed a practice run with small (A3) pieces and simple, expendable concepts to get a better grasp of MD's unique lighting and textures.

Turns out that such an expendable study piece can sometimes hold up pretty well on its own, despite the intent of it being a crash course. There is a downside to this, however - study artworks don't really demand serious and ambitious approach to a theme, as can be seen here with me bastardizing one of the heaviest moments of the series and turning it into an old meme. Whoops.

42cm x 29,7cm paper, watercolor, fineliner sketch. V, Sparky (Murder Drones, by Liam Vickers) © Glitch Productions

[maciulek]

Sometimes your best bet is to just cut out that bad influence from your everyday interactions and hope it didn't take hold of your impressionable mind.

Three times a charm, as they say - hopefully by now I've managed to identify all the common errors I've kept making while drawing V. Eyes displayed on a curved surface look somewhat weird when drawn in a more dynamic perspective, so I went for a downgrade and drew them according to the logic from pilot episode where eyes were animated as radiant objects sitting on a flat plane on the inside of drone heads.

*EDIT: updated with an adjusted version. 42cm x 59,4cm paper, Kuretake markers. V, Doll, Lizzy (Murder Drones, by Liam Vickers) © Glitch Productions

[maciulek]

A squad of disassembly drones trying their best to meet their quota, but their pilot seems to have wandered off somewhere. Again. N's part of this setup had been inspired by a charity stream held by TADC's original voice actors on January 21st 2025.

Turns out that markers are a better tool for drawing MDs than fineliners used for previous piece, but without that prior study drawing I would be finding it out the hard way only now. 42cm x 59,4cm paper, Kuretake markers. N, V, J (Murder Drones, by Liam Vickers) © Glitch Productions Gangle, Jax (The Amazing Digital Circus, by Gooseworx) © Glitch Productions

[maciulek]

First time dipping my toes in MD territory - which of course calls for a study drawing to get a hang of characters, as well as to begin getting mistakes out of my system. I have no idea where this rabbit hole might lead me, but I'm eager to find out!

42cm x 59,4cm paper, Kuretake pens. Uzi Doorman, N, V, Alice (Murder Drones, by Liam Vickers) © Glitch Productions

[maciulek]

Even though that's just plain on-model Gangle engaging in plain, canon-compliant Gangle behaviour, this piece was quite tricky to pull off! Turns out that making Digital Circus fanart is more challenging than drawing paper bears - who would have guessed?

Watercolor on 42x56cm paper. Gangle, Jax, Ragatha, Pomni (The Amazing Digital Circus, by Gooseworx) © Glitch Productions Zeruel (Neon Genesis Evangelion) © Khara, inc.

[maciulek]

I never gave myself a chance to play TES I: Arena or TES II: Daggerfall, so I guess that's that for my streak of Teri-fying mainline Elder Scrolls games. Previous piece had a better grip on detail that the first one in this set, but the first one had a much more lively composition than merely just lining up characters in a single row - now I'm trying to bring those perks together within a single artwork.

42cm x 59,4cm paper, Kuretake pens. Teri (The Amazing World of Gumball / The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball) © Ben Bocquelet, Cartoon Network / Warner Bros The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim © Bethesda Game Studios / ZeniMax Media

[maciulek]

I had so much fun with the previous, Morrowind-themed piece that I had to draw another while moving to the subsequent video game. And with an official remaster of Oblivion making the waves for the past week and a half, it was the only appropriate theme I could have gone with.

42cm x 59,4cm paper, Kuretake pens. Teri (The Amazing World of Gumball) © Ben Bocquelet, Cartoon Network / Warner Bros Oblivion © Bethesda Game Studios / ZeniMax Media

[maciulek]

Self-absorbed student has found an alternative use for school time - but her internal graphics engine is prone to reusing just one body model for some reason. Bug… or a feature?

Since I enjoyed Teri's paper-y outfit from her J-pop music video, I've decided to make something in that vein, but in a territory I'm familiar with. As a result, she is daydreaming about The Elder Scrolls' third mainline video game.

42cm x 59,4cm paper, fineliners. Teri, Molly (The Amazing World of Gumball) © Ben Bocquelet, Cartoon Network / Warner Bros Morrowind © Bethesda Game Studios / ZeniMax Media

[maciulek]

POV: It's 2020* and you've been caught sneaking into a public area without a proper cloth mask.

On a technical note, ever since I've got my hands on Shigeru Mizuki's Tono Monogatari before winter holidays, I've been itching to take some cues from it, given how these are easily the best B&W illustrations I've seen so far.

42cm x 59,4cm paper, fineliners. Warhammer 40,000 © Games Workshop Teri (The Amazing World of Gumball) © Ben Bocquelet, Cartoon Network / Warner Bros

*Or whatever year (as of writing) in the near-future when USA's ongoing medical reforms result in a much worse pandemic outbreak than the covid one.

You can find me (along with more Teri drawings) on Bluesky.

[maciulek]

50 x 70cm watercolor born out of desire to see what pixels from a 90's video game could have been in the eyes of mind, the game in question being Lucasart's Afterlife from 1996, a SimCity-esque concept taken to its eschatological lenght - that of a demiurge in place of a mayor, with astral plane to serve as a building site. Structures present within this game can be seen HERE, alongside thorough descriptions accompanying each of them. Artwork itself wasn't free from setbacks, as even a full set of interesting, reimagined structures means nothing as far as a sum of elements is meant to be a final result. Needless to say, this painting isn't the first attempt in a row. Failed concepts can still be used as a direction check, however - and they help keep subsequent artwork free from dirt and damage when put on top of them!

You can also find my works on Facebook and Pinterest.

[maciulek]

An interior of evangelical Holy Trinity church in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Central Poland. Watercolor on 42 x 56cm paper, based on a self-made photo. This picture doesn't fully evoke the likeness of the very interior that I photographed - but it was meant to try and envision the former colour scheme before it was altered by now-past tenants of this temple. Originally the first brick temple in this town, it had been abandoned as evangelical parish, decimated by second World War, sought refuge in a larger lutheran church that was originally built to accomodate a much greater number of people than the old church. Since then the building of Holy Trinity church had been leased to a catholic parish that dissolved later on, but not before decorating columns and wall with copious amount of brown paint in a manner that did little to improve its current state. Nowadays the temple remains in the hands of evangelical parish, but no longer fulfills its original function.

You can also find my works on Facebook and Pinterest.    

[maciulek]

Cenotaph for Newton

50x70cm watercolor paper, inkwell pen and watercolor - - - A hypothetical memorial monument designed by Étienne-Louis Boullée. In the context of this submission, aforementioned marvel of conceptual neoclassical architecture had been put in the center of Warsaw, as per theme of an exhibition that this work couldn't have been a part of due to deadline issues. As exhibition was meant to encompass strictly hypothetical placements of world-class architecture within Warsaw's city limits, it felt like a fitting direction for me to include structures that were never built, their influence more inspirational than material and spatial. Zone of choice wasn't an afterthought either - with Boullée's Cenotaph for Newton standing as new dimension of rational thought and extended antiquity, I did recall how Palaces of Science built throughout the Eastern Bloc aimed for a similar vibe, even if meant for a different set of goals.

You can also find my works on Facebook and Pinterest.    

[maciulek]

I am aware, that my expedient graphic interpretation of images born out of a peculiar sleeping disorder wasn't fully faithful to my memory of them - after all, those phantasms were devoid of the kind of colour impression that regular dreams and nightmares possess. To that end, I've created an edited set of aforementioned images, - the ones that I saw independently from what my eyes had seen while I was circling my apartament, trying to wake the part of the brain that kept conjuring up such ghastly things.

[maciulek]

A set of three images that have been a direct result not of a working imagination or clever skill, but of a peculiar sleep disorder that I have been afflicted with during my childhood - a disorder, where a part of my brain would continue conjuring up a ghastly, alien image despite me waking up and walking all over house in a futile attemp to flush it out of my head. Eventually, each and every such instance could only be halted through me trying to crowd out such cacophony with conscious thoughts and memories, but it would leave a mark in that I recall almost every single image that resulted from it. 

These pictures would be accompanied by disruption of impulses from sensors in my skin, producing a sensation of an unpleasant growth and dispersion of entire body. The most damaging sensation, however, was the feeling of timelessness - as if every second of this ordeal was excruciatingly extended - and of utter helplessness, as if all hope and sense of meaning was taken out of my mind, leaving me against something that seemingly existed beyond all causality. Worst of all, with the exception of those that ended this phenomenon, none of those phantasms were built out of fragments of memories and imagination that my regular dreams have been built.

Some, like the fan of light beams above, had eerie motion to them, moving like pieces of a much larger mechanism with no recognizable parts, complete with lights flickering across their surfaces.

The last image in the set had at least two phases of working - with the first phase consisting of a smooth, ideal surface devoured by rough overgrowth, followed by a second stage - an eruption within one of the light beams, growing chaotically into a collossal lump of mass which seemed to be getting more dense as its volume grew in every direction, until it became too big to be described by thoughts and sensations.