My second Tales of Graces painting features Cheria, who did not make it into the last one, primarily due to space constraints. The background is a hand-traced portion of the ToG logo. I don’t really believe there is anything particularly noteworthy about this painting except that the lineart is inked.

This painting has looked a little weird to me ever since I finished it, but I can’t really put my finger on why that is. It’s probably not the inked lineart, and some combination of colors, blending, background, etc, but it just doesn’t look like what I think my normal painting should look like. And then J asked me what [i]was[/i] normal these days.

Now that thought kind of piqued my curiosity because even disregarding the recent uptick in presumably significantly different test paintings and methodologies, the standard deviation of my paint quality has traditionally been much higher than that of my “regular” drawing quality. In comics, my methodology and quality really leveled out starting in 2010 (according to d266), but painting and “finished drawing” methodology and quality have been anything but consistent.

The main issue is that I obviously just haven’t found a “good” way to paint, or more fundamentally, color a drawing. In general, I’ve been just kind of throwing stuff out there to see what works and what doesn’t work. This accounts for some of the variance in paint quality, but certainly only some; there are a couple development “branches” going in parallel, and even within the branches the variance is high.

For example, the last really long running branch was “thin-lined digital lineart”, which effectively terminated in 2010:

I started using this “inking” method way back in 2007; in d160 I talk about experimenting with different drawing and paint methods as well, but development generally ran in series back then. Considering the number of times I switched method(s) back then, thin-lined digital lineart lasted for a really long time, during which it looks like I primarily worked on the actual painting part of each piece; I talk about reducing “splotchiness” in d346.

When I decided that lineart was more important to a painting than the actual painting itself, I gave up on digital inking because it was adding that extra layer of noise to each lineart. Conceivably there will be a revival sometime.

And so I went to “polished, pencil lineart”, which failed spectacularly after just a few paintings, the first of which was the very good Misaka 2010 and the last of which was the very not good Akemi 2011. Recently, the Tales of Graces PS3 2012 painting continues this development branch, though the lineart is nowhere near as “cleaned up” as its predecessors’.

And so development switched to what is effectively “clean sketch as lineart”, a lineart method in name, but which actually tried to affect painting by defining shaded areas at drawing time. This method actually produced a fair number of moderate and strong successes, some of which aren’t formal paintings and some of which aren’t posted yet. This method is technically what I would call “normal” for now as it has been going on until just recently and with some regularity:

One of the branches occurring in parallel in limited capacity is the “minimal lineart landscape” branch:

This is self explanatory, but just very difficult for me to do, hence the limited progress.

There is also the colored pencil branch, and the now resurfacing ink-lineart branch, but more on ink linearts in the next update.

For the most part, after putting together these little sequences, my conclusion is that, when it comes to painting, actual drawing quality (like at draw time, not necessarily ink or polish time) seems to vary much more than drawing quality in sketch or comic. Why this happens I am still unsure. This variance adds up when I have more layers of abstraction between the original drawing and the finished work (digital ink being further away than sketch as lineart), and I think this is why the hit rate for the sketch-as-lineart method was fairly high.

But that’s it for now.

Officially, Tales of Graces is the first US “mothership” Tales release in almost four years. I would consider it the first in six years if only because Vesperia on the 360 was not really complete. I slogged through about 70 hours of gameplay in about 9 days, which is actually pretty ridiculous in retrospect. Since I was going to class and stuff for half that time, I must have more time on my hands than I think. Or maybe the game time is wrong…

Today’s update is thus the first of (most likely) a few obligatory Graces paintings.

This is basically the contemporary equivalent of ToV on PS3, and generally an uneventful painting. Pretty standard quality and methodology, though it took a while due to the number of characters and the number of colors per character. Background is just me being not creative and or lazy. Next painting will probably go back to emphasizing quality lineart.

So today’s update is the entirety of my six-pager. I thought about splitting it into two updates, but there’s really no point, so instead I split it with a “more” function.

Dream took about a month to do, and I think it is a rare series in which the art quality goes up slightly toward the end. I actually drew a lot of panels first and then shaded them on a second pass so if I got into a “rush to finish” mood, I would only be screwing with shading. One benefit of the darn thing being so sort is that I didn’t really need a storyboard – I could basically keep everything in my mind. There is also effectively only one reference sheet.

The freighter and crew are a cameo! The modular container ship Mage of Black Chaos is named after a Yugioh card and appears before and in Starcrossed; her captain, Albert H., also appears before and in Starcrossed (he just really can’t catch a break, either). According to Starcrossed – and I didn’t know this either – Albert was formerly the captain of the Comet. Why he switched to the private sector is beyond me.

[120312]

Some time ago I was having hard time falling asleep last time, and I had some thoughts.

The entire BKS/CL universe doesn’t actually have that much purely original content. From the very beginning when Bradly and Marsha came out a Calvin and Hobbes strip, it’s been a lot of Rule 24 spun together in a me and J way. Not that this is necessarily good or bad.

The ships in the last painting are primarily “classic” BKS ships. The aluminum foil and electrical tape ships that J and I made in elementary school gave birth to three of them. In retrospect, the foil and tape construction doesn’t really make much sense. I seem to recall that there was an even earlier paper and masking tape ship too.

In some strange way, the Comet is actually the oldest “character” in the BKS universe, given that it still shows up relatively frequently, and that the original drawing predates Episode 1. Vehicle classes like Crusades or Slick Wheels don’t count.

Kind of like how Professor Marril and White Fang made it out of the legacy era, I think a surprising amount of original BKS content “survived” the numerous re-spins of the universe. I don’t think anything from my 2D days ever made it into BKS, though.

Now the somewhat relevant part: I’ve written about drawing paradigms time and time again, but I’ve never really considered story paradigms until recently. In the beginning, during the early BKS days, there wasn’t really much of either. When I switched to “new style” in 2003, most everything comic related was still drawing driven, without too much concern for the story (I thought that was the easy part).

Starcrossed is basically the first corny, cliched story that came to my mind. Reflection is J’s idea. Even the Directorate story (arc), while revised innumerable times, was largely “see where it goes”, as was TIAIIS.

In retrospect, I think the first story driven thing I planned was the unfinished Back to Square One, which probably didn’t satisfy me due to the egregious lack of planning that went on in those days. The difference between “story driven” and “drawing driven” really comes down to wanting a “story like so and so” rather than “drawings like so and so”.

I will at some point probably elaborate on the BtSO setting. It’s eventually going to be relevant to the BKS/CL universe.

Only with Pieces, many years later, did I actually finish a story driven something. Whereas I tend to think of art paradigms as “by author”, I tend to think of story paradigms, well, “by story”; in much the same way that I feel Akamatsu was a strong influence on my early art, I think Ga-Rei Zero was a strong influence on Pieces. Interestingly enough, when I was in the middle of doing Pieces I watched the one-episode BRS OVA, which I consider a very good example of a compelling story in a compact package.

Even though it’s been a while now since then, I do consider the BRS OVA a primary influence in my drive to trim fat and cut down on story length. I was just telling J that if I could attempt to draw a compelling story in one page, I would do it, but I haven’t been able to be that clever yet. I do feel that there is still conceivably clutter in the 6-pager.

I’ve also been trying to tap my dreams for original content. This thing started out as a dream, turned into a painting, and then turned into this one-shot. I was mentioning to J that I thought that we were a lot more creative when we were younger because logic didn’t get in the way so much and in some way dreams share that same characteristic. The difficulty here is that dreams are either rare or just very difficult to remember, or, as things always go, a combination of both.

I didn’t actually intend to write a post between the last one and the next one, but I drew stuff when I should have been studying so here it is. It’s written kind of funny in that all my rambling comes before the pics, so I’m putting the break here.

When I finally finished Dream – that’s been my internal name for the one-shot as it was partially inspired by one; I haven’t thought of anything better, so that’s that – on Friday, I had the spontaneous urge to re-read what I am now referring to as “legacy comics”. These are comics pages one through 192, although after having re-read, I think a more appropriate nominal end may be earlier.

A long time ago, legacy content made up the bulk of my drawing experience both in “percentage of life spent” and physical drawing done. I’m pretty sure I failed to update my internal schema of things a long time after this stopped being the case, hence my comment in d348 about “new style” and “old style”. For almost as long, I think I viewed legacy stuff – particularly comics – in a fairly negative, “what a waste of time”, sort of way and largely put it out of view and thought.

As such, this is the first time in recent memory I’ve spent time actually reading some of the legacy comics, and as these things go, I noticed some trends that I had not noticed (or noted) before.

I’m not sure if J or I actually would have started drawing comics back in July of 98 had it not been a summer school exercise. I remember being very fond of comics, but concerned about how difficult it was to consistently draw not just something, but someone repeatedly over the course of many panels. Subsequently, I remember being impressed that we pulled it off passably on the first try – I mean, in Episode 1, you can actually tell Bradly and Keno apart in every panel.

So maybe J remembers differently, but from what I remember, we just kind of found ourselves doing comics. Thus, at least for me, the comics were for a long time not really about telling a story or anything of the sort, but more of a log of my elementary-school steam-of-conscious, sequences of random events fairly heavily influenced by whatever I was interested in at the time (there’s a lot of Roller Coaster Tycoon stuff, and some Starcraft stuff). Hence, these comics are more or less just like the regular drawings I was doing at the time.

Nonetheless, just like the random interaction of countless hydrogen atoms floating around eventually made up stuff like stars, and planets, and us, the random interactions of the various legacy characters over the course of several years do ultimately come up with something of a temporally dependent sequence of events. That is to say, while the direction of the legacy story is random, events do build on each other (and there is actually a lot of this event-building-on-event going on at some points), and I think the characters do develop slightly in their own subtle ways.

In the back half of the legacy era there are also increasingly often occasions where two or three comic page form a mini story arc. There is even a six page “story” later on. My 193 division between the legacy and contemporary periods is strictly based on art, but comics 185 to 192 actually start the continuous “story” that kicks off new style comics. So conceivably the end of the legacy era actually ends at 184, the last White Fang Show. I’m not sure if it’s surprising or not that both the shift in story and in art happened so close to each other.

Also during the legacy era, I think I discovered “character bloat”; the number of characters actually balloons toward the middle of this period and drops back down toward the end. Also – this was retrospectively surprising to me because I don’t think it was intentional, though it was both known and obvious that it was happening – the characters form cliques(!); certain groups of characters always appear at the same time, though some groups much more frequently than others.

Ultimately I think there is some worldview embedded in the legacy era, which is actually what I don’t like about it. In the last panel of the second line of 217, there is “Old Style Nick”. I have his comic “series”, and while it is only about 20 pages, and while it consists entirely of stick figures and blobs, it has a lively humor, an almost directional plot, and works much better as a comic on the whole. I don’t have Albert’s entire works, but I do have some samples, and his style was much cleaner and much easier to follow. Despite the nearby presence of what I now consider two superior works, I either didn’t notice or didn’t care enough to move my own work in any direction and just kept doing my own little thing.

That’s what I think really bothers me about the legacy era almost a decade after it has ended. Now it’s time to show some pictures:

Enter one clique of two characters that have really stood the test of time. We last saw Prof. Marril and White Fang in d250, for the fifth anniversary of NW. I think they really embody the stochastic process that drove the legacy era; suggesting, from scratch, that you want a comic bout a blue mouse and a half-wolf sounds utterly absurd, yet here they are, and like some random meme, they left enough of an impression on me such that they “got out” of the legacy era more so than any other legacy characters. It’s crazy when I (over)think about it.

This is the evolution of Prof Marril and White Fang over the course of about eight years. The first picture is from 2001/02, “Episode” 136, the episode in which White Fang is first introduced; he is effectively the last legacy character added before I started cutting the fat. The second picture is from 2002/09, Episode 185, the last legacy comic w.r.t. story. The 3rd, 4th, and 5th snapshots are from 2004, 2006, and 2007, respectively. Marril gradually decreases in height/width aspect ratio, and Fang gradually seems to gain some volume. I actually thought I was doing okay with the Prof by 2007, but looking at official art, he should still be shorter and fatter.

You’d also notice that his name is spelled wrong. It should be “Marill”, not “Marril”. As a tangent, most 2nd-gen (gold/silver) Pokemon went by their Japanese names when they appeared in the legacy comics, as US G/S didn’t release until the end of 2000 (Wiki says it was released in AUS a month before US!?). That’s just how hardcore we were back then. I remember beating Gold version in Japanese, then English.

As the evolution of Professor Marril clearly shows, I had much difficulty drawing anything that wasn’t geometric prior to and during the legacy era. Prof. Marril and Dr. Chu look pretty bad in retrospect, but there were definitely more complex Pokemon that turned out worse. But as I mentioned, I never really tried to do anything about it; I just kind of accepted most Pokemon as being out of reach and left it at that. But now it’s 2012. Back in d344, I mentioned something that I discussed with J, that I wanted to try drawing Pokemon again.

But actually, I started with White Fang:

I looked at a lot of references, but in general, if you aren’t trying to be overtly realistic, something like a wolf doesn’t seem to hard to draw. I felt like I could approximate a lot more than on figures and still have it appear more or less “correct”. Most telling of this might be that these really aren’t based off any specific subspecies of wolf, they are really just a collection of features that suggest wolf. I think we aren’t used to seeing wolves in our daily lives, so we aren’t as attuned to what they are supposed to look like.

I think I have a fuzzy ear fetish or something.

Marill was downright trivial compared to a wolf. Once you get into the paradigm of “aqua mouse” (the official description), the proportions and stuff seem to make a lot more sense.

More complex Pokemon haven’t been too difficult either (yet?). The top is from reference, but from that single reference you can already derive most of the views. The text beneath the lower one says “kind of like a concord”. Yes, that “turned out worse” picture is supposed to be a Lugia as well.

Besides Pokemon and wolves, I also apparently had a helluvalot of trouble with scale. Back in the day, everything was basically the same size. Dr Chu. went up to Bradly’s shoulder and they could both drive the same cars. Even in the most recent appearance of Marril and Fang, they are both the same size. I’m not sure why I never considered that these characters shouldn’t have been the same size. At least on Pokemon, the information was clearly available – every Pokemon has always had a height and width associated with it, even if no one ever looked at that data.

This is a chart of how things should be:

Many items of transportation appear in legacy comics. They are always drawn to fit the characters, but I reasoned here that, even given standard gauge track, it might actually be possible to make a slightly less than speeder-sized rail vehicle that a Pikachu could conceivably pilot. The “lab” cars are also conceivably, they just have to be about a third to a half of the size of a regular vehicle. Also of note: an actual boxcar (non-hicube, ~144″) is thrice the height of a sitting White Fang (~42″), who is more than twice the height of Prof Marril (~16″), who is also about twice the height of Kirby (~8″).

Regardless of all my previous notions of the legacy era, drawing the characters and the vehicles again actually made me really happy. In many ways this is really a childhood dream come true for me. Having the Lugia drawing be easy was immensely satisfying and it really made me feel like I’d come a long way since 2000 – regardless of whether or not I actually have.

I think it’s also refreshing in some way to draw something that doesn’t attempt to be bound by logic or whatnot; I’m once again finding the juxtaposition of the wolf and the mouse and the creatures and their cars quite charming, in much the same way I like the combination of old and new technologies (a la classic BKS ships, steam-powered hover barges, etc).

It’s also helped that we’ve kind of had this moe explosion in anime over the past few years. That’s kind of rubbed off on me, which has kind of rubbed off on this redux. Drawing pretty pictures didn’t become a goal of my art until I was far past the legacy era and so I never really thought of Prof. Marril and White Fang as being particularly pleasant to look at (in fact the legacy versions are pretty ugly), but this time around I think I could get away with calling them cute.

Anways, that’s it for this update. Til next time.

Today’s painting is the last of a series of three test paintings (the other two were posted last time). It’s a merged lineart painting, but I basically merged the lineart later in the painting process, and painted over a small portion. The drawing is actually dated for September of last year, almost six months ago. There was a small part painted sometime between now and September, and it was fast becoming a “dead” painting when I finished it up a few weeks ago.

I think the primary difference between this and 120131 is the point at which I decided to merge the lineart with the painting… in the older painting I intended to overwrite the pencil lineart entirely; in the newer painting I just wanted to get rid of it where it stood out the most. I think the reason I took these screens was to indicate when I merged; you can see that it’s much earlier in the latter.

Not quite sure how this sequence will affect future paintings yet; hopefully I’ll get to mess around a bit more over break.

I’m on page 4 of my originally 10-15, then 12, now 6 page one-shot, and it’s occurred to me that, for a while now, I’ve been drawing “new style” longer than I had been drawing “old style” (the division between “new” and “old” being comic 193). Whether this is really significant or now, I don’t really know, but it was just surprising when I thought about it. It’s like one of those time-will-pass-you-by-if-you’re-sleeping sort of things.

I’m actually writing this update because I was angry at a panel on page 4, but now I think I will try to get back to drawing.

So this update is kind of a tale of two paintings if you will, one probably better than the other. The Tear painting from the last update is actually the first of a series of three – sometime in January I told J that I wanted to do “three paintings that I like” – those are it. Basically done, but not posted. Those three are all more or less done the same way; at some point, I thought I really just wanted to clean stuff more.

Let’s pretend digital ink is out of the question for now… I tried to tackle cleaning using pen:

This is just a thumbnail test painting, but the lineart is done in ink. I think my inking ability is definitely better than it was with the last Senjougahara painting, but after completing this, I wasn’t sure if ink was what I really wanted. Conceivably my inking isn’t good enough yet, but the inked lines still look more or less like pencil lines, if only much more consistent.

They’re just still not very smooth at my usual drawing resolution. Again, it might just be because I can’t draw big enough yet, but I’m starting to get the feeling that it might just be the nature of the beast. Maybe a lot of the art that I see that I think is done in pencil is actually done with pen…

So tidying up the lineart with pen didn’t help… so I tried to get rid of it altogether:

This is actually a lot more interesting. This is similar to the Pieces painting. I originally intended to take my time on this and make a really nice painting, but that proved to be a little too ambitious. Basically I drew a rougher sketch than usual, started painting on a separate layer, and then I merged the two layers and started painting on that. I couldn’t figure out when to merge the layers, and I may have gotten impatient.

Either way, I didn’t really end up taking my time, and basically ended up blowing off the characters in the foreground. The entire painting, though, turned out surprisingly well for how badly I thought I’d messed it up. It definitely looks more like a painting (according to J as well), though I’m not totally convinced that’s what I want either. As usual, the “correct” approach is probably some sort of hybrid…

I think do like this more than the older Pieces painting, though. Not quite sure why; the Pieces painting might just be a little too “deliberate”. I think the foreground/background segregation in the Pieces painting works better, though. I’m trying another experiment on a painting that I started a while ago and never finished. Basically I’m going to try to merge the lineart later. We will see how that goes.

Speaking of Pieces, almost a year and a half after its completion, I’ve decided to embark on another one-shot. A year and a half after finishing Pieces, I still think it’s alright, albeit a little corny. It’s corny because I’m just not that good at writing, and my text is a little corny. Hence, for this next project will have no text!

The general premise is this: 20 pages with text is too long and too complicated for anyone to figure out unless they’re really into reading comics, etc. I want to convey a compelling story to the reader with as little effort as possible on the reader’s part. Basically, you should be able to pick it up, flip through it, and understand what happened, and maybe take something away. I supposed it’s a fairly lofty goal, but I think I have something ok.

As of now, I basically have a fairly rough outline completed – I originally aimed for about ten or eleven pages, but once I had a rough plan for that, I decided that there was a lot of fluff… and I cut it down to six. Hopefully I will actually start drawing soon…

An actual incident that happened to me when we were cleaning up the lab. We found a whole bunch of “art objects” (sculptures or models/tiny reproductions thereof) and some rock slabs that had been used in a 3-D imaging project. We sent them to MIT’s mailing list for used stuff that’s up for grabs … and by the next day almost all the rocks were gone.

This comic almost got filed with the other Real-Life Random Acts of Stupidity, except that neither D nor I did anything stupid this time. Also, I debated having a “Completely Unamused” face for the last panel, until D pointed out that “CO-O” is a signature NW pose. J’s never done it before though…

These are watercolor colored pencils. Basically, the core of the pencil is the same stuff those solid blocks of watercolor paint are made of. The idea is you can draw with the pencil, then go over it with a wet brush to get interesting blending effects, etc.

Following the advice in this video, the first thing I did was to make a color test page:

Adding water can drastically change the appearance of some of the colors, so it’s good to know what they look like after water is applied. I also wanted to figure out how the pencils behaved on the watercolor paper, since the paper has a rough side and a smooth side (turns out there’s no real difference).

Onwards towards the experiments! As D has pointed out, scanning colored pencils is tricky business, so I’ve messed with the sliders in Photoshop a bit to get the colors as close as I can to the way they appear in real life.

Here was my first attempt. While I feel the coloring turned out fairly nice on this (particularly in the hair), D argued that it’s not really exploiting the particular traits of the watercolor pencils. Too “precise”, maybe. The jacket has more of the character of “watercolor”, so I decided to go with that on my next attempt.

More of the same. Given the trouble I had waterbrushing the previous one, I decided to draw bigger here. There’s still a lot of pencil markings in the colored areas, although there’s more of a “watercolor” effect this time.

(Aside: I got really used to drawing at a particular scale. It’s hard for me to draw much bigger than that, which I really need to get more used to doing so that I can get some scale variation in when I’m doing comic pages.)

I decided that maybe inking the sketch was working against my objective, so I tried to use the watercolor pencils to do the rough linearting on the next one…

This is probably too far in the other direction. Comic-style art has outlines for a reason. I think this might be a good technique to use for backgrounds and nature scenes though, which would provide good stylistic contrast with outlined foreground figures (I have used this technique previously in Sandstorm and this comic).

Having the brushes out gave me the idea to experiment in another direction though:

This drawing uses the ink I normally use with my nib pens for the lineart on colored works, but diluted with a brush. I discovered that it’s not actually waterproof (despite what it says on the bottle), but that means that I can turn it into interesting shades of grey by adding water to a little bit of ink. Worth experimenting further …

Next time: a comic!

[120121] – [120129]

It’s windy like nobody’s business out there, and I should be sleeping… but I’m writing this update instead. So far I’ve actually done a considerable amount of drawing given that we are fairly well into an academic term, to the point that I’m basically going to be able to post a new painting for the next three or four updates (inclusive) at the rate I’m posting updates (roughly every 20 days).

This Tear Grants 2012 is the start of an effort to really clean up lineart. Included will possibly be my first serious effort to use the pen well since a long time ago. Hopefully with a bit of polish, general art quality can take a bigger step up than it has in recent years, but likewise, I try not to be too optimistic.

It’s a start. The process behind it is a development of what I used for Motoko 2012 in the last update; I got rid of the fairly heavy-handed pencil shading and simply outlined the areas that I would have shaded in pencil. Everything is still done on one layer, and the “effects” are also done manually. There is actually a painting between here and there, but it obviously didn’t make me happy, so I didn’t post it (so many paintings I can skip posting one – wow!). I think just a little bit of lineart stiffness can really put me off.

In a sort of uninspired way, this is somewhat of a redo of Philia 2009, just as Motoko 2012 was somewhat of a redo of DMG 2008. I think redos are just sort of my own little way of proving to myself that my art is getting a little better over time. I have a little graphic too, this time, but I didn’t realize my Tear data points were so few and far between.

From right to left, this is late 2006, late 2007, late 2009, and early 2012. The drastic improvement in lineart quality from 2006 to 2007 is partially attributable to the difference in the scale of the two figures, and probably also partially attributable to the volatility of my art back then; if you look at my DMG comparison from 2009, the 2006 DMG (direct center) is very different from the 2006 Tear, and the 2007 DMG (direct left of center) is very different from the 2007 Tear. The 2009 DMG and the 2009 Tear, while still scaled differently, are much more similar.

Interestingly enough, I believe that 2006 Tales painting is also single layered.

One trend that I would hope is evident is the gradual decline in “splotchiness” in the paint since 2009. It was already better in 2010, and I like to think the paint is pretty smooth in today’s painting. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s less about being “good” at blending the colors than it is about choosing colors that blend well. What exactly it is that makes particular colors blend well: I haven’t yet really formulated a cohesive theory on that.

also concerning color, I do believe I am generally getting better at choosing them from the start. For the most part, I haven’t really had to do any heavy-handed color correction on the past couple paintings; the worst as of late has been the really bad Akemi Homura 2011 piece, which is a while ago now. Below is the non-adjusted original, which, as you can see, is more or less the same thing.

Here you can also see the relatively small color palette and the relatively large amount of cropping in this particular painting. I think colors follow some variant of the 80/20 rule: you use 20% of the colors 80% of the time… or something like that. The lighting effect from her staff came out better than I thought, too. I make an effort to try to do any such effects manually and I think it paid off in this case.

Last but not least, a small craft I designed, partially based off of something I dreamed about; it’s kind of an Aruku Reshivu shaped hull with Last Exile styling. I really like the square-radiator-into-conical-propeller-cone thing, and corrugating the hull does wonders too. Otherwise, this thing has boat elements, plane elements, and car elements all in one. Maybe there will be a painting in the future. I’m trying to do a lot this year.

That’s all for now.

*shame*

I didn’t draw as much last term, but that’s not to say I didn’t draw at all. Presenting: J’s coloring experiments! (In rough chronological order).

So for Christmas I received these markers. I thought it’d be interesting to do the sort of Copic-marker-blendy-coloring that a lot of other people do.

Unfortunately they didn’t blend.

I did some more experimenting with them. One interesting effect was to use a spray-air can held close to the marker to get an “airbrush” effect, as can be seen in the purple bits here:

I tried to put that effect to good use here:

In the end, we wound up returning the markers, as they weren’t really different from “non-art” markers.

I also tried to quickly do a colored work, which is what I believe D was referring to in this post.

I don’t think it’s that good (particularly the ugly background I poured in there just to have one. Probably goes to show I should practice digital coloring more…

This post is getting pretty long (in visual height and content, not in text), so the rest of the experiments will go in another post. Next time: traditional media again!