Showpiece

I'm working on a piece to submit to a student art show. Here is a preview!


I think I freaked some of my more prudent classmates out today because I was using an anatomy book for reference and I had the book opened to a page of genitalia for the better part of an hour. I chuckled in my mind.

Today, I wasted a lot of time

...Trying to code the "first post" entry in that character journal thing a couple posts back.


This was the end result. It's exactly what I wanted, but I think it took too long. Oh well, things happen.

Death

Today, I drew a skull with my sharpie.


But my sharpie is almost dead. =< We hardly knew ye.

It's So Still

It's also not finished, but what the hell. It's what I drew today, so that's what you're seeing.

We had to do a still life for Drawing 1. I did one before, but ended up being more of a practice in composition than anything else. But I think I nailed the composition on this one, so hooray! (Spot the Star Wars character and win the smug satisfaction that you can identify rough sketches of Star Wars characters.)

I also finished Napoleon with the changes suggested by my teacher, but they're so minor I figured no one would notice if I posted them. So I didn't.

A Different Kind of Art

Recently about 80% of my free time has been dedicated to running forums. This, in turn, has got me back into Web design. Let me show you!


This is the first forum I skinned, way back in '06. I thought it looked fantastic then, but now the only part I really like are the handmade forum/topic icons.


On the other hand, I don't like the topic icons for this one, but I love the look of it otherwise. XD This was done for a friend in January of '08... so it's pretty old. You can find an interactive version of this skin here!


This was made earlier this month and was the result of me wanting to make a skin that made me feel happy just by looking at it. It's aptly titled "Rainbows and Lollipops." I think I succeeded in my goal. This one also has a full working preview here!


Last but probably best, we have something I coded this morning. See, the forum I'm managing is a Harvest Moon RP, and our characters are encouraged to keep journals recording how they feel about others. I decided to take this a step further and record character interactions thread by thread. We are also encouraged to make it look pretty, so I did just that. This is a milestone for me in that it's the first time I hand-coded both the HTML and the CSS part; I've just toyed with CSS to change pre-coded HTML in the past.

For the record, I can't remember who drew the Plan 9 Ruler icon but it was not me. It was just a convenient placeholder.

Another slow day

Busy with schoolwork all day so I didn't really get to draw.

Have some chibis I drew for other people that I never circulated much.

The Wild Spoon Saga Comes to a Close

Done up to look like a manga cover.

Wild Spoon, Part 3

Now with bright SHINY manga colorzzz!


When you see this next, it will have a background.

TV Tropes Is a Fun Read

Hmmm... okay, so how long did I spend on the site today...? It's 11:00? Holy crap I didn't draw anything I don't have any never-before seen sketches what do I do

...Calm down, calm down... any never-before-seen CG pieces that I have? Hmm...




Yes, there are two.

There Are Two Spoons, in fact

Laid down some flats tonight.


BRIGHT MANGA COLORZZZZZ.

I'd really like to finish this in the near future so expect to see it a few more days.

There Is a Spoon

And it's WILD.

Yesterday, Zombie and I were having a discussion on "why I used to like manga, but I can't stand it anymore." Basically, it comes down to the fact that there are a total of two (2) kinds of manga published in America.

One is the Shonen manga, featuring rather simple-looking characters with arbitrarily crazy designs and really, really bizarre titles (see fig. 1).

_{Fig. 1: Wild Spoon doodle. Take note that Wild Spoon is not an actual manga but very well could be in its overwhelming generic-ness.}

It was rather fun to draw, and I decided to revisit Wild Spoon today and draw up the main character's two best friends while I was at it: the energetic girl with huge breasts and the gruff but kindhearted mentor.


Of course, this picture is missing the androgynous guy who works with the hero but also serves as his rival. I couldn't fit them all.

I'd like to color this but I didn't get the time tonight. Oh well!

Mysterious Handsome Devil

Who could he be? It is a mystery.

It's so mysterious, this entry isn't even getting a tag! Eventually I'll talk more about him.

Another Rushed Post

I was writing a paper all day and thus had no time to draw anything.

And I love you, blog, but I'm almost out of old drawings to buffer the days when I have nothing to show! Dammit. But I still managed to dig up three drawings. Not so dammit!


Masako Yagami of the IDPD.


Mira Delacourt, a top spy working for Mega-Nation Aziil...


...And one of Aziil's cyborg prototypes, C-069.

What does all that mean? With any luck, you'll find out eventually.

Character Re-Design

Sorry for the late post! I underestimated my workload today.

All right, Guardian. I've talked about it before. It's one of the few series I've managed to draw full cast references for; "super" references are here, and their "secret identities" can be found here. If you can't tell who goes with who, they are lined up in the same order in each cast.

Got that? Good. Because now, I tell you I'm going to update all the references. Some of the characters will look different; others just get a bit of a style change. Tonight, I started with the third guy from the right--his name is Michael Faraday.


Michael's character concept can be described in a few words: "thin," "introverted," "old-fashioned," "striking." I wanted him to be attractive, but not in the gorgeous girly way or the jock way. It wasn't an easy task.

In the end, I turned to photographs for inspiration. This particular draft of Michael was modeled after Adrien Brody, who is not "good looking" by conventional terms but is still very striking. I'm not sure how well I got it, but you can see the resemblance in the nose, at least.

Drawing 1 Avalanche

First of all--I finished the background for Napoleon.


I still need to make a few changes to appease my teacher but other than that he's all done.

Second of all--literally no one (not even my teacher) was expecting it, but we had our first live model in class today.

So we did some gestures. And by some, I mean a ton.











Sorry for the low quality of some of these; I had to photograph them to put them on the blog and I didn't want to use flash for its notorious effect on oil paints... and I used oil pastels (which are basically solidified oil paint) on a good chunk of these.

My arm is still a little sore... for the two hours our model was there, we didn't break at all.

Alien

A friend asked me to create some aliens, so I gave it a shot.


I drew the right one first and the bottom one last.
They are abominations of Earth-nature, but no one said aliens had to play by Earth-nature rules.

Conte Crayon "Landscape"

For the time being, I think I'm going to throw up pictures with as little comment as possible.

Landscape in quotes because although this is a drawing of what I saw outside it is such an extreme close-up that it kind of defeats the landscape idea... but then I don't know what to call it. XD

Late Again

Sorry again, guys. This time I don't have a good excuse, so I won't make one.

When I finally sat down to draw, I found I wasn't quite at the top of my game again, so I tried re-drawing Masato...


It's better than last time, but not by much. I think I need to go back to the drawing board on his design... maybe I should scrap him altogether. Only time will tell.

Sorry for being so depressed whenever I post here, I honestly feel bad about that. I don't want you guys worrying about me... this is just a phase and I'll get through it one way or another.

hi guys

sorry this isn't earlier i was physically feeling down today but since it's so late i'm just going to post up as many pictures as i can with no context i hope that's alright.

No Medley Today

I wanted to focus on fleshing out my Drawing 1 portfolio instead.


So here's a shoe. The strange thing about this is that it looks better when it's all small and thumbnail size... most of my sharpie stuff does. XD I really like how the toning on this came out, but I sort of messed up on the scaling... it still looks okay, though.

There will probably be Medley tomorrow.

Working my Way

So maybe I wasn't kidding.


It's just that I've been really stressed lately for one reason or another, and I'm not sure if I'm up to producing several drawings a day again quite yet. Hell, it was hard for me to do more than one drawing in my drawing class yesterday. I just stopped at least ten times and told myself that I couldn't do this and that what I was drawing looked awful.

So updates may be slow for a little while, but I'm going to cover Medley one way or another. Be sure of that.

This is Takehito Wakamoto... he's Ayame's older brother, but I'll talk about him more when I have a spare day. Despite having the most dramatic backstory of any of the Medley cast, he's insanely easy for me to write comedy for.

Also, I'm going back and tagging entries that deal with major characters by their name. Makes things easier to find in the long run.

A hint of listnessness

Hey guys! You know how I said I was going to start covering Medley on this blog?

I was just kidding! Sorry if any of you were excited.


Instead, here's something I did in drawing class today.

And once again

Another half-hearted update. Sorry guys. Haven't been feeling so hot lately.


Ryuusei Matsui... Hideaki's brother. While Hideaki is only a cool Gary Stu in his mind, Ryuusei is a cool Gary Stu in real life. He's good at kendo. He plays the violin. He's top of his class. All the girls love him and all the guys are his best friend, and most people consider him a saint for putting up with Hide.

The only person who doesn't like him is Hide, of course. He has a theory that Ryuusei is a Terminator sent to kill him, but no one listens to Hide and therefore no one cares.

They're fraternal twins, even though they don't look alike... they looked similar until puberty, at which point Hide's hair got black and blue.

And as soon as I started on a roll, the fates conspired against me

So it's almost midnight and no update. I can explain.

For each day as I was introducing characters, I planned to practice my digital art skills by doing a basic picture of the character. Then I'd do a little picture with more action in it in pencil to really hone my drawing skills.

Today, my tablet (which was sort of glitching frequently anyway) completely ceased to function. I can't draw digitally without my tablet.

I started doing the little action-y pictures, but I had sort of already lost my motivation... as the drawings went on and it became apparent that I couldn't draw anything that wasn't completely static, my artwork devolved into horrendously sloppy sketches. I will post up those sloppy sketches for the sake of posting something right now.


I'm pretty sure the plan is "get a new tablet tomorrow..." hopefully I'll have something better to show then. I'm so sorry, everyone.

Prelude, Part 1

This is Hideaki Matsui, but you can call him Hide. He's cool with that. He's cool with everything, really. He's so cool you could keep a side of meat in him for a month. He's too cool for school, and even though he lives in a society where emphasis on academics drives thousands of teens to suicide he's so cool that no one cares he barely manages to pass classes. He has mad electric guitar skills and the voice of an angel, if angels had voices suited to RAWWWWK. All the girls want to have sex with him and all the guys are jealous of his amazing coolness and sex appeal, but if they get to know him they'll become best friends with him in a heartbeat. And then they'll want to have sex with him, because Hide is just that amazing.

_{"STOP, MY ARM DOESN'T BEND THAT WAY"}

Or at least, that's how it is in his fantasy world... in the real world, he falls asleep on the bus to school a lot. His brother, Ryuusei usually twists his arm to get him to wake up.