"Weeelcome to your grave!"

So here is a couple of ideas I had about an undead roleplaying game, it involved you playing a group of decrepid soldiers, all mushed up into one army and you fought against the living. As far as your character was concerned he was the winning team. There could be no greater cause (your undead, the necromancer is always right...)

These were as always drawn in Photoshop with the regular brush, but the opacity was fairly low. I think perhaps the second image was a little too dark, and kind of like the style I was heading for in the first one.

Late Late Late

I come ready with an excuse. I have been ill today, and have spent a large portion of the day in bed, only leaving it to go to work. So appologies, as this is late. But, I decided to go with variety again. :)

This is an image of a lovely lady, taken from a figure drawing class. She is chalk and charcoal on sugar paper. I never got the chance to study figure drawing at school, mostly because the school wouldn't have someone stand naked for students to draw. So I had my first experience at college. At first, it was something very awkward, as it is very strange looking at someone and trying to draw them. Even worse, when they looked at your drawing.

But, it is and always will be the best way to draw a person. I can always draw figures better, from life rather than a photograph. You get to see the dimensions properly. Also, when in a drawing class, the teacher will often get the class to preform tasks, such as 5 minute sketches, where speed is the key, as you try to capture proportions. It is something that learnt me a lot, and helped to me get proportions correct, after years of struggling. It is an experience that I think every artist should enjoy.

Some thing New

So this is a really early edit for me but hey why not. Today (Monday) I had a couple of really good ideas during a lecture for motion graphics (and yea I was paying attention to the lecture) so during it I was trying to scribble these ideas down and add more to them. Now your asking what are those ideas? well one is for the motion graphics final hand so I'm not saying anything just now, but the other one is for my portfolio site. and yea its Awesome!

can't really put it in words so I will show you.

Whats THIS!? Glad you asked.

Well this is the overall look to the new portfolio site. The gray hills with the trees in the back will be moving from one side to the other and repeat it self so its a constant moving image. There will be a sign that appears when you click on a menu item that holds the content of that. The next stage after getting those things working will be moving it into Drupal if that works (fingers crossed).

Looking snappy

Last year my friend took a game design module at university, he had to create a small game with a partner and write a massive report. Because of everything he had to do he asked me to do some sprites for his characters, he gave me a rough description and I drew out a few design ideas.

The game started off as a silly idea the main character was in his pajamas, and had a bag that carried all his equipment. It then took a more serious tone, and wanted all the enemies to be in suits with glasses.

I had a lot of fun doing this, I hadn't done any pixel art in a while and have't since I did everything here in Photoshop just picked a one pixel pencil brush and 60x60 per frame canvas. The sprites were test animated before i sent them off you can see a few at the end of the blog entry. The "Shooting" Sprite doesn't repeat so you may have to click the image.

When creating the agent sprites, I used the player sprite as a guide, I've left the sheets overlapping to show what i mean.

First Digital Drawing?

So, a few weeks ago I bought a new graphics tablet, because I really need to get into drawing, through my computer. Not for any reason really, just so that I have that option. It has always been something I really wanted to do. Especially when I am starting to get requests for Lion King/ Balto style original characters, which are EVERYWHERE when you join any community based around American animation.

So have Vitani. She is a character from The Lion King 2: Simba's Pride. She is part of a group of lions called the 'Outsiders', who are banished from the Pride Lands by Simba, because they believe Scar (Simba's uncle) is the rightful king. Scar, was killed at the end of the first movie, and was the ' bad guy'. So he has a band of followers, who are against Simba, for murdering Scar.

If the first Lion King move, was like Shakespeare's Hamlet, then Simba's Pride is more Romeo & Juliet. Vitani is my favourite character in the second movie, and I just wish that she had a bigger part in the movie. Hopefully, as I practice more, I will post some more lion's as a comparison. The aim is to get it better by Christmas, cause I have a lot OC based card ideas.

But, we'll see how it goes.

Drupal

well the 24 hr comic challenge has passed and i will warn you that doing that event does sap my creativiness straight away. It was a fun experanice but still got the images scanned in yet so you won't be seeing them today. Instead here is a little some i drew last week for you.

I have not got roung to adding colour to this one but again it does show the frustration of using drupal at times and how easy it is to go and play video games instead.

24 Hour Comic Day

This weekend past, was 24 hour comic day, I took part in it a few years ago, but didn't make it last year. While I was doing it I recorded both my screen and what my webcam was seeing, I thought it'd be quite funny, but I'm just going to pop my screen up for the moment (It turned into a  rather embarrassing karaoke half way through) and I some how managed to miss half the second and third pages...

I was pleased that this year I managed to write an easily 24 page long story, but frustrated because I got bogged down in detail, and picked the totally wrong style to attempt it in. I decided I'd give this digital painting a go, and I'm actually pretty pleased with the results. There's a list of things I'd go back and sort out though, the people were rushed due to time, and there could have been a better attempt at atmosphere and value balancing.

The pages are below in-case your interested and I'm sure you've seen the video above.

P.S I didn't have any of my comic fonts installed so you'll have to make do with what's there, my bad.