More Concept Art for Thesis project

Here are 2 concept illustrations for my thesis project.  I haven't illustrated in photoshop in a long time, so it took me a while to get reacquainted with the brushes - these could be a lot better, but they are just sketches.

The plan at the moment is to create something kind of painterly, something with a little bit of noise to give it a hand-drawn touch, much like what is featured in these great The Giants animations.  But I also like the simplicity of solid shapes with painted backgrounds such as those in the highly underrated cartoon Samurai Jack (or this wonderful homage to it).  It would be nice to actually do some hand-drawn Flash animation for this project with gouache paintings, rather than all After Effects manipulations, I guess I will have to do some animation tests in the mean time to see how to marry the two styles.