Meanwhile, in Tabletop Gaming

My friend James, a classmate of mine from SCAD, has long been fascinated by tabletop games such as d20Modern and Dungeons and Dragons, and is the person who finally got me truly involved in campaigns and having fun rolling oddly-sided dice. So when he mentioned a new system he and his friend were working on and was offering to GM a game via Skype, of course I made a character.

Here's the result of some drawing during the group's first session.

(She's honey badger-themed.) [Mature language under that link.]

Yes, I still exist

Wow, so, been a while, huh? Got into a slump and then got depressed and had a little bit of a breakdown before recovering from that, and now I'm feeling more inspired and confident. Now if I can just keep Minecraft from burning through all of my time while I'm not at work, I'll be able to get things done.

So it came up some time ago in a conversation with a friend of mine that I really, really dislike designs in the Gears of War series. I decided, I said, that when I got some time I would sit down and put my money where my mouth was, in a manner of speaking, and do some redesigns. I was also spurred to try this out by the excellent redesigns of the Justice League, Batman, and Legion of Doom by Aaron Diaz. You should really take a look at those if you haven't yet, by the way.

While I won't be going so in-depth as to rewrite character histories, I do want to find a better, more distinct look for a few things in Gears, though. And let's get this out of the way, too: I've only played a portion of the second game. And I did have fun with what I played, even if the writing had about as much subtlety as a house on fire. All that said, I've done a little bit of reading on the wiki to get a better grasp on the Gears creatures, characters, and conflict.

So to kick things off, I thought I'd start with the basic Locust Grunt. Apparently, they're supposed to be reptilian. I never knew this until I read it. I never even guessed. I guess the Locust are threatening by... being large and ugly? but then again so are the main characters, and both groups have the same basic stumpy, burly look to them. The Locust really don't look that inhuman, all told. Especially the Queen. Someone please explain that one to me.

Since they're supposedly reptilian, I thought I'd push that angle a little more:

It's all pretty quick, but there are some basic ideas. All in all maybe 30 minutes to an hour, I really need to remember to keep track of time when I'm drawing. Based mostly in lizards and lastly in pit vipers. I want to get a good idea of a face and skull before I get into how the body's going to look, so these are really just the start of the busts for the Locust.

Scanners are awful

So, my grandmother passed away last month, which is part of why there's been a lull in posts again. My family and I were in San Antonio for about a week and a half on short notice, getting there the day before she went, but we were there for her last moments and she was aware of us being there. I understandably didn't really feel like drawing for a week or so there.

I'm fine now, and I have been for some time at this point--the world keeps turning and all that, have to move forward, etc. I did manage to do some sketching on the plane there and in the airport on the way back in my mini-sketchbook, so here are the results that the scanner destroyed which I tried to salvage through some Photoshop adjustments.

People fidget constantly at airports.

I would've loved to have some reference for bat ears. I couldn't quite recall the exact shapes. Pity.

It's the middle of September and I have no title

Oh, right, I was drawing things, wasn't I? Picked up Mass Effect 2 and Resistance 3 recently, and of course Pokemon and Minecraft are huge time sinks as well. With the 1.8 update out I'll probably be messing about on my friend's server.

Anyhow, I forgot to really look at the clock yet again, so no reliable time frame here, but this is probably somewhere in the range of 20 to 30 minutes. Played around with the figure a little before tooling around with costuming. Not sure if I'm satisfied with it yet, there's already a few things I can see that need fixing.

Next Trooper

Starting up a new Seelie Trooper concept. This is about 20 minutes, give or take. The legs needed quite a few corrections to get to this point. Haven't decided if this one's going to be in color or not yet, but it'll probably end up colored. Or maybe I should just work in greyscale this time around and see how it goes.

Oh, I almost forgot the most recent version of the last one. Here we are.

2 Hours Later

Actually, I'm not sure how much more time I've put into this, I haven't been keeping very good track. I think it's about 3 or 3.5 hours total work now.

So hey, here's the Seelie Trooper's progress. Fixed some things.

Applied to a few more companies today. If there's no word by the end of the month, I'll need to get a local job in the meantime. But hey, at least then I'll have more references.

Sept. 7, 2011

Hush, you. I don't always have titles for these.

Started working on something more involved than the pokemon desktops, now that I'm trying to work on a daily schedule.

Probably going to make a few variants of this guy.

Even More Pokemon

I still have a list of these to do, it's not over yet. Enjoy this cute Bulbasaur.

If interested in using these for their intended purpose (a desktop background), let me know in the comments and I'll link some full-size versions in the respective posts.

More Pokemon

I was satisfied enough with my Swampert desktop that I took a few requests from some friends.

Yeah, the Ditto's a little bit of a cop-out, but I couldn't resist just making him the whole screen.

Thickbox!

After a little while of tutorial searching, I have Thickbox working on the blog! I'll be going through and applying it to my previous posts to make everything nice for viewing.

Oh, and I decided it was time for a new desktop today, so I went ahead and sketched this up. I do love me some Pokemon.

So, Team Fortress 2...

I've been playing loads of Team Fortress 2 lately with some friends, and one of them doodled a self-portrait of herself as her most-used class. Which of course spurred me to do something similar. So here's a scribbly little self-portrait of me as a Demo(wo)man.

It's quite the addictive game. I find myself ignoring my other games to just play one round. Or maybe two. Three if they were quick... It's fun, the classes are balanced, and the character design is impeccable. But at this point, everyone with internet access knows all that, so if you'll excuse me, I'm off to demolish some sentries.

Late-night Scribbling

Finally managed to work up the motivation to do some sketching again. I've been out of it, lately. Sorting through old things I no longer want or need, rearranging my things, being sidetracked by Team Fortress 2, that sort of thing.

So here, have a character scribble.

Still haven't gotten around to the lightbox thing yet, but the headaches that stuff gave me on my portfolio site aren't something I'm excited about going back to.

Widget

(I'm working on getting some kind of Lightbox thing working, bear with me)

So, here we are, the first post with an image slapped onto it. This is a particularly quick scribble from a few weeks ago. Not sure why I didn't post it sooner, but that's probably just my over-thinking things like I usually do. This little griffon-beastie is Widget, based on eagle owls. He's a twist on a Pathfinder character's pet. Did I mention this was a quick sketch? It is. It's very quick.

In other news, I'm a little put off by the new Harley Quinn costume. She's been one of my favorite characters since I became a Bat-fan long ago in the 90's watching the Animated Series. While I don't read superhero comics (ironic, since I love a lot of the shows like Justice League and Teen Titans), it just disappoints me where they've taken the character, at least visually. I'm not aware of anything in the DC canon that's been happening, so I can't say anything about plot points or character development--the last time I knew anything about Harley, it was during the Animated Series and the Arkham Asylum game (ah, what a wonderful game). Speaking of which, I'm excited for Arkham City. Everything surrounding it looks fantastic so far. Trying not to get too psyched up about it, though. I don't want to inflate my expectations too much and have the game fall short. I'll be interested to see how Tara Strong fares as Harley's new voice, too. A bit ironic there, too, since she used to voice Batgirl. But she's a great actress, so I've got every confidence for the character in Arkham City. Even if that corset is far too tight to be breathing, much less doing acrobatics.

The First Post

I do wish I had something a bit more impressive to do for the first post to the blog, but alas, I don't. Still getting things set up for the moment. But hopefully, I'll soon have more posts with actual art in them! This is going to be for sketches and things, after all, replacing the site I made for one of my last classes at SCAD. I've graduated, hurray! That's getting to be old news at this point. It still feels odd to say, but there it is.

This should be an interesting experiment. It'll be fun to see where this goes, if anywhere.