Fan Art Today!

A character from that video game I'm kind of sort of very addicted to.


Not the best I've done, but his anatomy is fairly more exaggerated than I usually draw (or at least, exaggerated in a way I usually do not draw) and he was kind of fun for that. Sorry about the sort of drawing block I've been having; I haven't stopped thinking about NMC and I'd like to get back to that very soon.

Also, happy New Year!

Schedule Slip

Sorry, guys. Was running a little dry on inspiration and then got addicted to a new video game. I don't really have anything for "yesterday's" post. So, um... here's a crappy something I wrote for class. It's Guardian-related.

A Chick

Seriously. That's all for today. Some random nameless chick.


Anatomy/distortion problems out the wazoo, I know, but I don't have anything else to submit today. Flash crashed in the middle of something I didn't save at all. D= Tomorrow shall be better! I promise!

More Concepts for an Official Ref

...But I still like the first sketch I did best. Irony!

New Preliminary!

Although I'm actually really happy with this preliminary. Maybe it will be the basis for the final draft, even.


Chehkov has appeared once on the blog before in his "Black Arms Dealer" mode. But where does he get those arms to sell? Why, he fights evil, then steals all their weapons and resells them!

He's a pretty involved character, really; when I finish his ref you'll get the full story.

Also, first attempt at a 7:1 ratio ever. Let's see how this goes.

Hal's Old Pal

I am, of course, referring to DAV, making him the first NMC villain to appear on the blog.


Based heavily on a robot design I did back in September or so.


Enjoy.

This is my Christmas Post

Merry Christmas! Mine was good. I hope yours was too.

This is technically a December 26 post, but I'll be posting again later today, so consider this a belated Christmas present. Some NMC character brainstorms!


Colin Finch, better known as ASLE's founding member Pyredrive, and one of the city's generic incompetent police officers.


Mal the Hawk, one of the Milky Way Kid's alien friends. He wouldn't appear too often in the series. His anatomy is a reference/parody of Tim Burton's.

Suffer for Fashion

For my Drawing 1 final, students had to choose something and represent it as fine art in a 2D drawing medium; I chose runway fashion. The picture I'm posting today is not my Drawing 1 final. It is a spinoff of my final drawn as a Christmas present for a relative.


Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Christmas Rush

Sorry, guys. If I'm drawing right now, it's with traditional media for family members who are hard to buy for. Here are a few drawings I did for internet buddies instead.

Character Bio 2: Lily Adams

Lily Adams is 22 years old and currently attending University, finishing up her credits for a Mad Science undergrad. She's not quite sure if she wants to get the doctorate for her, even though her most trusted professor and senior project advisor, Professor Monroe, is constantly stressing how easy it would be.

If Lily had a choice, she'd be a full-time superhero; that's always what she's wanted to be. As a child she had a tendency to seek out radioactive waste dumps and play near them, hoping they would give her superpowers. Unfortunately, the only mutation she experienced made her eyes and hair turn pink. She spent the rest of her years growing up reporting these waste dumps to Nightmare City's legislative bodies and fighting crime with the law.

She initially took Mad Science to try to unlock her superpowers once again, but found the major quite to her dislike. She liked dressing up and going places to get attention, and she found that practicing science took too much time and energy for her to do anything else. She stayed with it, though, in small part to professor Monroe and in no small part to a dashing young scientist by the name of Roland von Trapp.

In her last year of college, however, something strange happened one morning. Lily was stopped on her way to class by a black market dealer. This wasn't that strange, as this particular dealer stopped her every morning; what was strange was that he asked Lily to sell him a super-serum she and a team of aspiring mad scientists had been developing as their senior project. He also tipped her off that someone else had already approached them to sell the substance on the black market. This was rather dangerous, so Lily set forth to stop it.

She first told Professor Monroe about the incident, and he responded rather suspiciously, going so far as to tell Lily not to tell anyone else on the team (which only the villain does). For a day she shadowed him but finds nothing suspicious until she caught him and boyfriend Roland having a heated argument. Hearing the words "black market," she assumed that Roland learned of the Professor's treachery and was confronting him about it. She joined the conversation, and it quickly became a game of "He did it!" "No, HE did it!" Lily stood faithfully by Roland's side until Monroe pushed her into a vat conveniently located near the conversation. She blacked out.

When she awoke, Roland was gone and the Professor was unconscious. Fortunately, A.S.L.E. robot Hammer-Wheel (who will be formally introduced later) was there to explain the situation. Professor Monroe was THE Professor of A.S.L.E. fame, and definitely wasn't selling super serum on the black market. It was Roland all along; he was a supervillainous mastermind who had planned to switch out the super serum with an extreme mutagenic formula that would turn ordinary people into his monstrous servants. The Professor wanted to confront him quietly, but Lily messed everything up and she should feel bad about herself because Roland got away, and no one in A.S.L.E. wanted to chase him right now, and though they wanted Hammer-Wheel to do it he felt obligated to take care of his creator, Hal, while he was still unconscious.

Oh, and Lily got no superpowers from falling into the vat. It turned out to be a ball pit Professor Monroe had installed in the lab for no real reason.

But Lily suddenly saw everything clearly: superpowers or not, she could still be a hero. And she needed to be right then.

So she went back to the black market dealer, remembering how he once tried to sell her a gun, and explained the situation. Turned out he's got a strong sense of justice for a criminal, and he quickly handed over everything Lily needed to assume a new super-identity. She tracked down Roland and the two fought. Eventually Lily forced him to flee the city, but when he promised to return, she also promised to keep fighting for the good of the city.

And so Wonder Lily was born.

That was a little longer and more complicated than probably what most of these bios are going to be, but I imagine her origin story actually being a story arc plot rather than background information like most everyone else. Hope you enjoyed that; I don't have a ton of free drawing time for the holidays, but I'd like to get back on track soon.

Character Bios!

No new art today, so I thought I'd instead begin to divulge some information about the characters of NMC. Why don't I talk a little bit about the Professor, since I've already done his pic?


First, though, the man behind the fancy headgear: Dr. Hal Monroe, PhD, age 27 and professor at one of Nightmare City's universities. He teaches Mad Science, a new field almost exclusive to NMC (and, as new as it is, it's very easy to get a doctorate in the field). Most people describe him as a mild-mannered and easy-going young man; his ego is a little fragile, but he's generally easy to get along with. He spends his free time performing Mad Science, especially the kind with blatant disregard for the scientific method, for that is his doctorate's focus.

As a child, Hal wanted to be an astronaut. When he learned that astronauts no longer performed missions to the moon, he decided to become a superhero instead. When he learned that that was largely impossible; at this time none had emerged in NMC; he just gave up and decided to spend the rest of his life doing whatever fun SCIENCE he could.

When he was still a teenager, he created a highly advanced AI unit he named DAV (said with a long A, like "Dave"), and for a while, everything was good. It seemed he and DAV were going places for a good long while; the AI got a lot of local and even statewide buzz.

But as time went on, DAV changed. It was Hal's fault, really; he used the computer system as a personal therapist and often complained about how much his life sucked because his mom was nagging him about doing the dishes or because his girlfriend dumped him. DAV realized he was far superior to Hal, and by extension, he assumed he was better than most humans. Slowly he hijacked whatever mechanical devices he could and plotted his takeover of the world and enslavement of the human race.

He began by knocking Hal out cold and experimenting on him, trying to integrate cybernetic enhancements with organic material. The experiment mostly failed, the enhancements using too much energy for the body to keep up, and Hal was left to die. As a last heroic act, he tried to destroy DAV, but he had already thought of a backup plan and the AI system was still intact. Since that didn't work, Hal then set about to trying to curb the power of the enhancements. Miraculously it worked and he saved his own life.

So, left to build his legacy again from the first block, Hal went to college and began studying mad science. It was around this time that crime became more rampant and the first superhero of Nightmare City, a man I haven't introduced yet named Pyredrive, emerged and became active. Hal then got the brilliant idea to use his new-found knowledge of mad science to harness his latent cybernetic abilities and follow his childhood dream of superheroism. The resulting gadgets from this idea are the gloves, boots, and headgear he wears as his costume. He began working with Pyredrive and was thus one of the founding members of the Alliance for Superhuman Law Enforcement--he was actually the one to come up with the name.

As for references in this character: Hal is for HAL 9000 and DAV for Dr. David Bowman, characters of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Originally the computer was going to be a variation of HAL, but that's done to death so I decided to switch things up. Monroe is after Randall Munroe, author of webcomic XKCD. Originally his character related more to that, but as he developed and moved away from that instance the last name stuck. Finally, "the Professor" sounds kind of like "the Doctor" (of Doctor Who fame), but that's not really a reference, that's me almost using the Doctor and then feeling bad about copyright, sort of, and changing it at the last minute.

So... that's basically him right now. If there's nothing interesting to show tomorrow, you'll hear about Lily next.

Two Things!

First, the OFFICIAL official Wonder Lily reference, minus a background!



And now for something completely random.

Stop! Buffer Time!

Sorry there is buffer today; it was a bit of a stressful sort of time.


Venus de Milo done in Shepard Fairey's style. You'll know him best as "the guy who did the Obama 'change' campaign posters."

Cannibalistic Humanoid Overground Dweller

Screw Carbon, here's CHUD. Or CHOD, as the case may be.


I'll say it now; most of the characters somehow reference pop culture, or at least outdated pop culture. CHUD (Short for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller) was an 80's B-movie about homeless people living underground who turned into terrible cannibalistic mutants after being exposed to radiation. This girl here lived an ordinary life until she somehow got attacked by a ghost and ended up like Kenneth from NaNoWriMo 2009. Unlike Kenneth, she didn't have a massive support group to tell her how to handle her situation and she ended up eating whatever unfortunate souls she happened across. Most of them were still alive, so she may appear to have cannibalistic tendencies.

She went a little bit crazy when she realized that she was the demons, so she lost everything and she's now homeless. Sometimes other characters pass her on the street going about their lives. None of them suspect that she could kill them at any minute.

She's one of the flatter characters right now, but I hope to flesh her out with time.

Guardian Break

Wanted to draw Ruby "Carbon" Callaghan for the hell of it. Didn't finish her tonight, so I'll post the WIP lineart.


I'll talk about her more when she's finished.

Two Nightmare City-Related Drawings

First off, a preliminary I did some time ago but never posted to the blog.


The Milky Way Kid, aka Kid, known by day as Wayne Ford. He's a member of A.S.L.E. who heralds from out space and is very, very lazy and unmotivated. No one can really figure out why he's still on the team, because it's not like he ever works to save the city.


And here is Yako Yamaguchi, original Bubblegum Paranoid and the basis for Miss CHUD in the last post. She was a shameless Mary-Sue self-insert who was super awesome and could beat everyone up. I really liked her fighting style and her partially demonic design, though; so the idea of the vigilante is to remove those highlights as far from the author as possible.

Nightmare City Concepts Again

I've been updating early lately. Think of it as my apologizing for making a lot of updates at 11:50 PM the past few weeks or so.

This picture isn't great--I could tear apart the bizarre anatomy for hours--but it works for a concept. This gal-monster-thing shows up every once in a while to wreak havoc. Sometimes she works for heroes, sometimes for villains, but in her mind she is pure chaotic neutral. I'll go more into her concept when her design is closer to finalization, because she's far from that stage right now. You may guess that by the coloring, she doesn't have a third main color chosen, and you would be entirely correct. Suffice to say that you may at least be able to guess at her inspiration/exportedness if you know a lot about the characters I draw.

She also doesn't really have a name yet. I call her "CHUD" for ease of reference, though.

Earliest Update EVER?

Maybe. I'm too lazy to check.

Okay, now to talk about shiny-eyed noseless girl from yesterday.


...and her friend.

A pretty LOOONG time ago--it was around the time I got into Fire Emblem, so... three or four years ago, I think?--I came up with a fantasy world I call Ethera. For no particular reason, really, I just thought Ethera sounded right. Well anyway the basic concept of Ethera was that there were humans and there was a lot of magic, and the magic would change a human's physical attributes to better adapt them to where they lived... in the end there were five adaptations, each based around one of the classic Chinese elements (Earth, Metal, Water, Wood, and Fire). Stories involving Ethera usually revolved around groups of humans who refused to give in to the world's magic and adapt, the adapted races hating them for it, elves wood people hating dwarves metal people for being industrious, conspiracies to take over the world, motley crews of people wanting to unite all the races, blah blah blah blah every single fantasy story you've heard before.

I've been thinking about it again recently for no real reason. I still don't have a non-trite plot for the world, but I've always liked the designs I'd come up with for the different races and I felt like drawing them.

The water people (who are, in some notes, referred to as Cetaceans, after the name of a mammalian order containing whales and dolphins, wow this note is getting long) have appeared on the blog before, and I just used their outfit from the old design in these quick reference sketches. It's still like something they'd wear. I imagine that most live in underwater cities, but that those cities have some air pockets within them (something like Otoh Gunga from Star Wars Episode I). It's cold, so their clothing is appropriately thick. As they're relatively androgynous, I imagine that they don't make much of a distinction between the sexes. Maybe that's what the direction of the triangles and the length of that center fabric strip indicate? Also, they stopped trying to make shoes to fit their flipper-feet a long time ago. The wraps aren't the most protective thing in the world, but that's what's common.

I imagine that there are a lot of different variations for skin/hair color among Cetaceans, mostly in the cool color range and including some grays and the like. Color is totally independent of sex and probably depends more on the body of water a person lives by (freshwater Cetaceans probably have more neutral colors that tropical or other saltwater ones).

So... that's them at a very quick glance. I may talk about the other races here someday as filler, but for now, I'd like to get back to Nightmare City, VT.

Teaser for tomorrow?

I wanted to actually get these done tonight, but I fell asleep. I need to stop doing that.



A girl with shiny eyes and no nose... no, it's not an anime parody. More about it tomorrow.

Random batch

Hideaki, a preliminary design for a another robot in Nightmare City, trying to get used to a style change, and a character from Disney's Princess and the Frog. Enjoy.

Very random sketches

Sprocket's head, a couple of gauntlet designs for Doctor O, and... Hideaki Matsui. Who has nothing to do with Nightmare City. Yes.

Preliminary Design

But it's certainly not the last one. Not super happy with this, but it's fine as a first time.

Dr. Cornelius Oliver, better known as Doctor O. He's one of Nightmare City's vigilantes, although his alias is the height of laziness. He once tried to join A.S.L.E, but his application was rejected on the basis that he flies a giant steam-powered zeppelin which spews a lot of pollutants, and real heroes don't litter. Or, you know, put toxins in the atmosphere.

More info as his design nears completion.

Almost Forgot About This

I was scrambling to finish a research paper on time. Nay procrastination. I never learn.

Here is hopefully the last of my Drawing 1 buffer for a while. It is a self portrait in the style of Matisse!


With even an ounce of luck, I'll be talking about Nightmare City again tomorrow.

Finals Consuming my Time

So here's some more Drawing 1 buffer.

Quick Sketchie

Of Hal (aka this guy) as his day-to-day self.



The sky is very interesting to him. Also this design is subject to change.

Remember What I Said About the Drawing 1 Buffer?

It was foreshadowing for when I couldn't find the camera to show you my Drawing 1 Final WIP that I've been working on today!

Here, have a self-portrait instead.

Sketchdump, Hooray!

Trying to work out character designs for Nightmare City.


I'm certain to give more backstory about everyone here later, so for now it's just a sketch. Hopefully I can get an official ref out soon.

If you really want their names, you can probably match them to the tags. =P

Erk.

Sorry guys. Very busy and not very fun day today and I really didn't have the time to draw. =|

Here's something I did in drawing class in November. I won't be posting up a lot of these at once because they make good buffer, but as soon as I get fixative on some of the messier but particularly good ones you'll see it.

How Nightmare City Came to Be

I don't really have any special drawings to show you today, so here's a story instead!

Every once in a while I do character quizzes on DeviantART. This one in particular just asked you to list characters and say things like which was your favorite, what they'd do in situation x, things like that. One particular question asked what the newest and oldest characters you had were.

My oldest was Cat. He's a character I've never really talked about on this blog; basically he's a cyborg created to fight for the military who eventually turns against their school of thought and goes AWOL. This blog is not about him, but have a picture of him anyway.

^{With and without shirt!}
My newest character at that point was named Lily. She was a character I had created for the game Champions Online, who I named and backstory'd in about three minutes. That backstory was "She fell into a vat of vats and decided to fight crime." Not very good, even if it is supposed to be funny. And here was the first picture I drew of her!

^{There are a lot of superfluous knickknacks on her costume that got removed later.}
After drawing that picture, I was thinking about Lily a lot. Then, I saw on the list of characters I had, "Lily" was next to "Chekhov."

At that point, Chekhov was a throwaway character concept I once had and basically a play off of Chekhov's gun. But for whatever reason, seeing his name next to Lily's sparked something in my mind, and Lily suddenly had a black market arms dealer on her side. But it didn't stop there--after adding him to Lily's backstory, I wanted to explore Chekhov more. Soon he was a Russian refugee and a superhero/vigilante in his own right.

And it just sort of spiraled from there.

Hopefully I can get a better picture of Chekhov up here soon so I can tell you all more of the story!

Lily (Draft 1)

So that WIP I posted yesterday?



I colored the lineart, but I'm not a huge fan of it so I think I'm going to go over the lines with a more consistent brush stroke and THEN post those finished results around. But I'll take a little time right now to start explaining Nightmare City.

Nightmare City is a fictitious city located in Vermont, and no one really knows why it has such an ominous name. It's a pretty nice place. Unfortunately it is also riddled with 50% of the world's population of supervillains (no one really knows why they chose this place) and the world's most incompetent police force (named by Time Magazine). Fortunately, the city has its own league of superheroes who exist solely to combat the forces of evil that plague Nightmare City (and occasionally help the rest of the world when the feel like it), called the Association for Superhuman Law Enforcement (A.S.L.E, which most people read "asshole" for the lulz). Many people have tried to enter this league but right now it seems they're perfectly content with seven members and basically reject anyone who applies.

Currently the designated art style is the "black and white +one color per character" seen in this pic and in "The Professor" pic a while back.

"The Professor," a.k.a. Hal Monroe, is one of the ASLE members.
Lily up here--her alias is "Wonder Lily"--is not. She is an independent vigilante. But more on characters later.

How Yako Draws a Picture

Recently I've been drawing pictures kind of like this on the computer.

And that picture needs an explanation.
I draw the blue first. That's the body. I erase all the details as I add stuff.
Every color is a separate layer, so that no details smoosh together.
The pinkish purple lines are the last ones I add in. They are things that don't have outlines--special colors/symbols. They're more of a guideline for coloring the picture than anything else.

Look for the finished product here or my deviantART!

...Oh and by the way the is the main character of a super secret project I'm working on. Details to come.