[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.

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…

[110709]

Well, a slightly different kind of fanart from me this time. I liked J’s idea of doing the character sketches, but I tried to put a spin on it. Kind of going off of what I said in d325, I’m trying something like balancing between my style, their style, and the character, but as with any of these sorts of experiments, the success or failure is debatable.

Anyway, this is Phryne from Fractale. I was going to try to be real pro and hash out a bunch of these real fast, but me being real slow coupled with an unexpected hardware failure (I suppose those are usually unexpected), has led to only this one being complete or even in progress. This is also the first non-full-page colored anything I’ve done for… well, a long time.

I last discussed equipment shuffling very recently in d313, but even the best plans of mice and men…

Read more…

[110618]

This month on Nonsense Wars: J makes a post!

Anyway, I have to start grasping at straws now because I haven’t actually drawn anything substantial for the past half a year(!). Hopefully that’ll change soon, but when I read J’s “one post a day” comment, I lol’ed. I’ve been able to sit down and do some doodles recently, but just not much. At all. So at least for today’s post, no real new content. Since Pieces is finally completely posted, I’ve decided to compile and post my lovely Pieces storyboard.

The above picture is a (gasp) “thumbnail” that you can click. The actual thing is 50% of the real thing and still 1.5MB, so beware 56k’ers (if there are, God forbid, still any out there). The thumbnail is 33% of 50% and still 277K. There are 24 “pages” here; while the actual story is only 20 pages, the first two pages in each *.jnt file are notes for me to keep track of what the crap I was doing.

Looking back on this it seems that, for the most part, the actual pages more or less followed their storyboard counterparts to the dot… or were completely different. Not much in the middle. The worst pages (a46 ranks among the worst if you ask me) are apparently those that didn’t have anything concrete on the storyboard and just “this has to happen here” notes. Thus in general, the storyboard seems to have helped, but I suppose it’s more of a “knowing what the heck you’re going to do” helps.

That being said, I’m not sure what I’m doing next with regard to comic, but it’s not going to have a storyboard.

Changing gears a bit; yesterday I did a major cleanup and some equipment shuffling.

Read more…

[110413]

This is, I think, by far the longest we’ve gone without an update since high school (about a month since the last update). I’ve more or less given up on kicking J to update, and am just updating when he does. Obviously I’m just taking the blame off me. So we’re not really officially dead yet, just very much in limbo as these sorts of things generally turn out to be.

… and so here’s the second last page of Pieces. As expected, I still haven’t actually drawn anything significant since then, so in a way I’m glad we have this “break”. Those paintings I mentioned a month ago never happened either. I’m not too sure why I didn’t have the time over break (for all the past breaks I can remember I’ve always had the time and inspiration to do at least one) – I had the sketches and all ready – but it just didn’t happen.

Instead (well maybe not outright instead of painting), I replaced my trusty E6400 with a T400 in the same spontaneous way I replaced my TC4200 with my X200T.

Read more…