Catching Up

Work seems to have been kicking my butt lately.

It's been a while since I've made an update to the blog, so it's time to play a bit of catch-up.

Visited my boyfriend back in July and had a wonderful time, then came back and went right back to work. Between now and then, the newest iteration of the Pokemon franchise has come out, and I have to say I've enjoyed it. X and Y have put some fresh new mechanics into the games, something that they've needed for a long time. On a more subjective note, the designs of the new batch of monsters have been pretty fun for the most part. I'll doubtlessly produce some scribbles documenting my adventures at some point.

But for now, a bit of sketching.

Playing around with old characters.

 Having fun making an alien species. I knew I wanted it to have horns, four arms, and a goat-like aspect to the feet, but beyond that it was experimentation for a direction to go.

 Four eyes made the species appropriately alien, so I set about playing with the skull: the placement of the eyes, shape of the horns, etc.

 Good lord, I have played entirely too much Mass Effect. Just some color scribbles to experiment with the look of the things.

 I wasn't fond of the armor from above, so I did some more playing around with that and a more "conventional" space suit. The podcast Welcome to Night Vale is a great motivator for art.

A monster sketch, incorporating a few animals into one beastly ogre.

A fantasy-themed mount creature. Drawn on the plane.

In other news, I've got an idea for a short-story-comic. Still drafting the script, though, so it may be a while yet. Stay tuned.

Oh man, update, I need to update. Okay, just need to find where I left that last process image... Aha, there we are.

I'd been planning on getting another post up sooner, but things have gotten a little distracting here with a trip planned to happen in a few days, among other things. Excuses, excuses. In any case, here's what progress there was the last time I worked on this guy. Took me a little while to figure out exactly how to progress, but I'm liking where things are going so far. We'll see what happens!

Should have some airport sketches sometime in the future as well, though I can't say when. It may be a month before I have access to a scanner for any work in more traditional medias. Not that I don't have plenty of digital work to catch up on.

Photoshop Crashed

More progress on my monster! Or, there would be more, if Photoshop hadn't frozen up and wasted several hours of my time during which I'd been playing around. OH WELL.

There's at least this, which took somewhere around an hour.

Have to get past my frustration at the program crash. Then I'll have more progress on this guy. Yeah.
Need to get back to that Gears of War redesign, too. Hmm.

Monster Guy

Started scribbling the other night in photoshop after browsing around on conceptart.org looking for new and interesting techniques to try. Let's see how this goes! Hopefully, I'll learn something new, or at least expand my abilities a little.

The first rough sketch. Just getting an idea of the action and taking the monster's previously-established build into consideration.

Much further along, after a few corrections, including several times of re-posing his left leg, and hammering in details. Started to get some linework in, doing so as quickly and tidily as possible.

For anyone interested, this is the tutorial I'm looking at and trying out.

Idle Scribbles

Between wasting time with Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and getting my time wasted being sucked into things around the internet, I've been mulling over creating my own Minecraft texture pack. It seems like a pretty big challenge, from what I've seen, or at the least several hundred hours' worth of work. The toughest bit so far is coming up with a visual direction. I've seen so many different texture packs I'm not sure where to begin with ideas.

So I started by sketching interpretations of Minecraft's most iconic monster, the creeper.

You know, I really need to look into getting a new scanner. A better one.

So far, I'm enamored with the idea of a "window" in the Creeper that would show a pile of gunpowder and a lit fuse. I've always thought of Creepers as these bizarre constructs rather than living things.

After the jump, an unrelated monster!