[120103] – [120107]

This update features the continuation of my Love Hina character doodles.

I noted that the order in which I draw these characters is more of less arbitrary. The order in which I’m posting them is also such. With Haruka, the overall drawing quality starts to increase. I didn’t actually think she was going to turn out too well at the lineart stage, but sometimes it’s amazing what a little bit of shading can do for you. Other times, it’s not so impressive.

With Naru I encountered quite a few situations where I just wasn’t sure how I was supposed to draw something, but surprisingly, it also turned out quite well. Here, as well as in the next drawing, I start trying to fill out backgrounds with hybrid shading. The traditional pencils are really good at texturing surfaces, so it’s kind of unfortunate that I ended up contrasting a lot of that shading away in post-processing.

Shinobu’s figure is only okay, but I think the bushes here are great. The bench is actually based off a Google Images hit for nice bench”.

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[111220 - 120102]

The first illustration in today’s update was actually done before the last picture in the last update, but everything in the last update flowed together better, so I didn’t include this.

This is basically a remake of what I consider the crappiest painting as of late, the Akemi Homura 2011 painting. While this colored pencil piece is obviously somewhat less polished than its digital counterpart I think its also a lot closer to what I originally wanted. In part due to the immaturity of my colored pencil process, the lighting here is also fairly ambiguous.

There’s a less-than-interesting process photo I took a little more than halfway through too. A little bit of color testing on the side; for whatever reason it was significantly harder to settle on Akemi’s colors than it was to settle on Inori’s colors. You can also see that there’s actually a lot of “junk” lines that the colored pencil covered up really well. Overall, fairly satisfied, though. Satisfied enough that I wouldn’t attempt another in the near future.

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[111205 - 111220]

So this post features some doodles I did not during Thanksgiving break, but, surprisingly, during the weeks after.

I’ve kind of gotten at this in the past, but I think one of the issues I’ve been having in general is that the more I try to “polish” a drawing, the crappier it gets. To be more specific (in a really vague way), I just feel that things get “stiffer” or just less “fluid” when I actually try to commit to doing a full painting or whatnot. Often enough, I think the sketches leading up to a particular painting are, with respect to lineart mostly, better than the painting itself. The most telling manifestation of this phenomenon is something I’ve written about many times in the past; it’s that the lineart for a painting always turns out worse at the end.

And obviously I’ve tried various things in the past to get around this, the latest being that I’m using pencil linearts straight up with only a little bit of erasing, but even then I still find something just isn’t preserved.

So this colored pencil thing initially didn’t have anything to do with the whole polished = rubbish thing. I was just using the colored pencils to indicate the colors on some thoughts, and I was just messing with how exactly to apply the colors (like as shading or ontop of shading, etc). That’s the top left. Then I had this thought, and I was talking to J about this, about doing like shading and coloring in parallel rather than in series, and that’s kind of what’s going on in the bottom left and right. That didn’t go far, but I got two sketches out of it.

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[111128]

Another month, another update (though it’s more like 1.5 updates a month, given the last three or four). Today’s is admittedly weak, but I basically didn’t do any drawing this quarter and I basically didn’t do any drawing over the break as well.

These first two pages of doodle were done in August. This is a general redesign of Bradly’s yacht from Reflection. I don’t seem to have a drawing of the original posted, but the general gist is that lines became straighter and the ship became less obnoxious. Also present are Charles, Bradly’s pilot (chauffeur? butler? secretary? we’re not really sure at this point), and Bradly donning his traditional Founder suit over a Steve Jobs-esque black turtleneck.

This is a little more recent, but it’s another general redesign, this time of the Wind Charmer Wynn from TIAIIS. Again, I can’t seem to find my original sketches on the site, but again, the lines became straighter (though this one wasn’t particularly obnoxious in the first place). I think the general result here is that the ship is overall more “professional” than it used to be. Meaning, even though it is still built from two ships, it looks like the military did the conversion, rather than John Doe.

… and switching gears now, shortly after the last update, I was effectively able to turn over the x200t for more than 85% (gross) of the price at which I bought it. I’m a little bit surprised that it has held its value so well; I may have only had it for a year and a quarter, but those things are coming up to three years of age. Typically the price drop in the second or third year is still pretty significant; I think my TC4200 lost most of it’s value the year that I bought it. Whatever the case, the hunt was on for a T400 replacement…

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[1110xx]

Well, November’s update a little early as I’m gong to be busy next couple weeks.

We’ve certainly got a lot of mileage out of boats this year. This is probably the fifth or sixth relevant update. I don’t really remember what prompted me to draw this series (obviously the boats did, but I’m referring to the fact that I basically never draw 4koma about “The Adventures of D and J”, regardless of whatever stupidly funny things we do), but here it is in it’s full three-page glory.

J agrees that, for the most part, this accurately depicts all the silliness that went with the first boating outing (except for maybe the “pew” on the propeller thing). I think J also agrees that the drawings relatively accurately depict the physical state of me and him…

Now while I have nominally labelled Nonsense Wars an “artblog”, I think I usually end up writing about computing and computers enough such that I think it could constitute a ghetto tech blog. Today’s update is no different; I last noted what I called my “hardware master plan” back in June, and, as this always go, I arbitrarily decided to “finally” execute on it.

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