This took way longer than it should have. In fact, I was going to update on Saturday, but a nasty cascade of events happened:

1. Photoshop fails to start.
2. Reboot, launch PS again, scan.
3. Spend about an hour looking for the stylus for my tablet so I can draw the speech bubble in the last panel.
4. Fail to find the stylus, reconnect scanner to scan in hand-drawn version.
5. PS crashes, taking all my work with it.

That said, I think that panel 2 and the last panel are some of the better panels I’ve drawn in a while (in b4 ‘lol J never updates’ jokes). I don’t think I would have been able to draw a sleeping pose at that angle before — staring at this image seems to have helped. The last panel is one of the best dynamic poses I’ve drawn in a while, and I regret not adding more speedlines on the bat to convey a sense of speed.

Anyway, now that I’m actually settled in somewhat, I might be able to post more. Next time: gadgets I’ve picked up recently.

[110921/111015]

Well, this update was originally scheduled at least for sometime in September, but with J not making any posts, I’m falling back on a more or less monthly update schedule for now. Today’s update (ultimately completed sometime in September, as mentioned in the last update) is like the fourth for this year.

As with the Tales 2011 painting, the lineart for Makise 2011 is a “complete” drawing by itself. While some of the scratch lines have that did not get contrasted away have been erased digitally, basically nothing has actually been added (unlike some older paintings where the entire lineart was basically redrawn). Furthermore, all of the painting is done on a single layer.

When I first said that I wanted to try doing a “proper” painting this way, I envisioned something on the lines of the character sketches, but I don’t think the last two paintings have turned out anything like that. I think they’ve turned out well in their own way, but it’s definitely a hybrid rather than a straight up “full-painting” implementation of the former.

I actually spent more time post-processing this than I would have thought. There’s a beta version with black gears, which I apparently didn’t like as much a month ago – in retrospect I think both are fine (though it might have been a close call back then as well).

Since we’re kind of failing on the update side of things, I’ll try to add a couple more tidbits into this one to make up for it. I don’t know why this one never made it onto the site, but toward the end of summer, J and I (after our Gatling gun) also made a K’Nex clock, which, although kept time fairly well, only had a run time of a couple tens of minutes.

Read more…

[110919]

Well, there’s a painting in the works (third one this year, and it’s almost done, actually), but J doesn’t look like he’s going to update anytime soon, so next update, and thus, said painting, may not go up for a while. This week, it’s Titanic redux.

We last left Titanic about a month ago after it lost its propeller thanks to my craptastic piloting. I didn’t intend to get it back out on the water again this season, but obviously, fate intervened. Through some sequence of events, I made a trip out to “local” J&M Hobby with some siblings and family friends, and I asked them if they had any propellers for model boats and the like.

Read more…

[110914]

Quite some time ago, I posted about something I saw in the Chobits anime. Well, as of this week, it exists! Unfortunately it costs more than all my laptops combined, and I don’t really have any room for one… but I can dream. Minoru’s seems like a 27 or 30 incher though. In some strange way, it’s surprising how accurately we predict the future.

Between some reading, Transport Tycoon, and the usual distractions, I actually have been drawing, too…

This is, as is the case once in a while, something different. My sister is trying to learn how to draw, so I’ve just been tagging along and working off of the same reference drawings. I’d say the last time I did anything remotely similar was back in 2009.

Read more…

[110829]

The third “official” painting of the year (seventh if you consider the character sketches) is my now called Tales 2011 painting. It used to be that all the characters got their own paintings, but obviously times have changed. The last time I had a painting with a comparable or greater figure count was 2007.

I’ve actually been meaning to do a painting in this style since the first character sketch a couple months ago. I just didn’t have a vision of what it should be until more recently (about a week ago), so it obviously didn’t happen ’til then. I think in general the figures are okay and the painting is okay, but I think the tree is pretty good considering it’s the first time I’ve tried to paint a tree at this resolution since basically the year NW started (and that painting was rubbish). I think the ground and the colors turned out pretty nice as well. I don’t usually use yellow as a master color.

There’s a little bit of cheating here and there: J always asks me how I stay in the lines on single-layer paintings like this one, and part of the answer is that I don’t. In some cases here, neighboring, discrete colors across a “hard” divider blend into the same shade of yellow, so I just merge the two colors instead of stay “in” the line. The other part of the answer is just “be pro”. Obviously. The other notable shirk is the fade-to-white background. It’s not that I didn’t want to paint anything in there, it’s just that nothing I put there, whether it be hills or simply a curved horizon line, seemed to give the same suggestion of space on paper so I just blanked the whole thing out.

And of course, since the lineart is basically a sketch in and of itself, it stands alone pretty well:

This painting would have been posted earlier, but I got distracted by one of my occasional urges to move stuff around.

Read more…