Why hello there.

It's been a while.

I have no excuse.

Please forgive me with this clean-up of an old sketch.

The balance between detailing is really lopsided, but that makes it kinda interesting I think.

Seasons Greetings!

Dorothy's on a roll

What is this place :O

It's been a while. This time it's fanart for a DS RPG called RIZ-ZOAWD. Based on The Wizard of Oz, the game's main gimmick is a virtual trackball used for character movement which I found to be quite charming. So here is the main character, "Doroshi", on said trackball.

This is the game's site: http://www.d3p.co.jp/riz/

It's in Japanese, but the headings are in English so it's easy to navigate. You can find a trailer featuring gameplay under the "Special" heading.

Random mecha - Gaiking

Daikuu Maryuu Gaiking. I loved this, back in the day (it was the only actual mecha show I saw as a kid)... the remake is pretty awesome too, keeping the original designs and adding a lot of stuff.

I liked this picture as I was doing it, but as usual, after I finished I realised that the perspective kind of petered out suddenly. I sketched it properly, but the head was just a doodle and I went off on a tangent when I drew it... if I just sized it down and angled it back a bit it might pass, but its not worthwhile. Still, really gotta break that bad habit...

Random mecha - Gespenst

CALL GESPENST!

About time I did something from SRW. I like the head, but I made my usual mistake of a) drawing everything without sketching it and b) doing so while zoomed in too much, so... fat Gespenst. The arm is a bit lame too. I could have repaired it easily enough, but really, its not worth rescuing.

I like the design of it, but it seriously sucks ingame... it gets given to your crappy pilots, it's stats are bad anyway, it has rubbish movement, can't fly, and since it's a deathtrap you're not going to give it any good weapons. Even the specialised versions are lame compared to pretty much anything else you have... which is a pity because mass-produced units make a nice change from "everything is the ultimate robot" designs.

Random mecha - The Hatter

YES!

LET'S BURNING JUSTICE!

ROLLING STAAAAAAAAAAAAART!

FINISH!

THAAAANK YOOOOOOOOU! VERY MUCH.

Random mecha - Aestivalis

An Aestivalis. Wasn't coming out as I wanted it to, so I just did a quick + dirty colour job and left it. I'm kinda rubbish at mecha heads - much like drawing a human head, if you mess up the positioning or spacing of elements, it ends up with a kind of "inbred" feeling to it. The body's ok, perspective is kinda ok, but neither are what I was originally going for.

Heh, just as I'm typing this, "The Aestivalis March" started playing on my playlist.


I hardly draw any mecha stuff because it takes me so long, so I'm going to spend a while doing some doodle-quality stuff (but more of it).

Touhou - Her Sake Not Even Drop

Always wanted to do a "inexplicably flying anime girl" style pic, so... now I have. Yuugi Hoshiguma, sake balancer extraordinaire. I was concentrating mostly on the pose, so I didn't bother fixing the face and gave up on the hands... I'm fairly happy with the colouring and colour choices though. Just wish I'd remembered to do it bigger, since it loses the subtlety at this size (this is pretty close to the original's resolution).

I keep meaning to do more mecha stuff and other series, but Touhou is so much quicker and convenient to draw since you can just fudge the details...

TFA mosaic comics

Here is something I did for Transformers Mosaic. Created in the IDW forums. Its a fan made comic in TF fandom. One of the things I like about doing these 1 page comics is that it helps get your name out there. Eventually people will recognize your name, if you do enough of these. I know you guys are super talented, so if any of you guys have time, I have some scripts. Send me an msg! 

PacYuyuko

Lol procrastination!

Just a random doodle I felt like doing, to get back in the swing of things (yeah right). This kind of lazy shading / lighting isn't bad for the time it takes... I don't like Yuyuko being all blue, since it looks like her hat is just a tight skirt on her head or something, but skin-coloured and hair-coloured both looked weirder. Should have thought about it before I did the lineart...

Technically Yuyuko is a ghost too, but eh, details.

Touhou - Flandre is Love

Just a quickie for WTFR's Flandre Friday. I thought I'd get some perspective practice... its not terrible, but I rushed through it so much that i didn't learn anything from doing it. The skin contrast is a bit off too. I still kinda like it though, but it needs some finishing that I can't be bothered with.

Touhou - Patchouli Moon Attack

Zambot 3 reference. I wanted to do this for a while... it doesn't look that much like it, but hopefully people who know Zambot at all will get it.

Lazy cel colouring... I only had 2 hours to do the whole thing, so it's just a colour layer and a colour dodge layer. I kinda like the high-contrast effect, but I don't think I'd normally do it like this on purpose. The lightning is decent, considering it took about 3 minutes (some squiggles and a cloned blurred layer placed into a group set to "screen" (which for some reason looks totally different to a layer set to "screen")),

Touhou 4koma - Touhou UFO Spotter's Guide

Geez, you go away for a month and the place dies.

The motivation for this came from "8" being marked as "drunkard" in "Uwabami Breakers" (leading on from "9" being "idiot" in "PoFV"), so I thought I'd see if I could invent a series of them. I tried not to list the usual jokes and references, but I'm not sure how well I did that way... Drawing silhouettes is kinda fun though.

Touhou - CIRNO IS STRONGEST

In widescreen-o-vision™.

Typical "joke gone too far" picture (comparing Cirno's ice crystals to Flandre's... uh, back decorations). This was something like 5 hours work, start to finish. I got to cheat a bit with the crystals, but the rest was just flat-out drawing 2 characters in the same pose, which seems unnaturally fast for my speed. You can kind of see that in the quality, of course...

Touhou 4koma - "You Reap What You Sow"

Just realised I can use the comic title as my post title to save thinking one up each time!...

Someone spotted a nikoniko video with some of my art in it (at 3:33).

Translating some of the comments:
"Haven't we gotten to the [named artists] yet?"
"SO TALL"
"Nice China"
"More guns than a Zoid lol" (?)
"ear transplant lol"
Along with a bunch of "WTF"s and "awesome"s.

Anonymous Japanese internet people are so civilised!... Although, I guess Youtube comments are much the same, so maybe it's just message boards that have all the manners of a chimpanzee tea party.

Touhou 4koma - Cirno

The beloved tomboyish girl. I guess people coming here won't recognise it, but this is taken from Cirno's profile story about her being eaten by a giant frog and then freezing it from the inside to escape. Not sure the joke works in 4koma format...

Did this with a timer running to make myself go quickly, ended up pretty much as I said yesterday. 1 hour for sketching, 90 min for lineart (panel 3 was the only complex thing anyway) and under 1 hour for tones. The big difference was that there was only 30 minutes of timewasting in there. This is the first comic I finished in one night~

Touhou 4koma - PCB #1

Something (probably Photoshop) came very close to deleting this just as soon as I'd finished... I wound up spending all evening undeleting a 99% done version. Doggedness triumphs over poor technology once again~

Tried laying out the text before the art, but it doesn't seem to work too well. Quite like the joke though. Took too long, again... I was hoping to produce one of these a day, but 6 in 3 weeks is a joke.

If I add up the time, its something like:
1 hour sketching
2+ hours for lineart (expanded to 4 or 5 due to MSN and web browsing)
1 hour for tone

Not impossible in an evening.

SD Vader vs Obi

Probably one of the more famous scenes from the first movie...

SD Trash Compactor

Phew, this one took a while.

But I think it was worth it... maybe?

Oh yeah, I saw Speed Racer a few days ago, and it was totally awesome. I cried a few times because it was so awesome.

It was a true RACING movie. I think they tried to have a plot or something, but mostly it was about racing, and in that regard it was beautiful.

Also, when trying to guess who the movie was targetted at through the pre-movie adverts, they showed a YTV spot (kids TV channel) followed by a lingere spot. I thought it was pretty odd, but my friend figured it out: the ads were aimed at kids who came for the movie, and the moms who brought them.

Touhou 4koma - Marisa+Nitori

So, the Touhou 11, "Subterranean Animism" demo is out. It has Marisa + Nitori, giving Marisa the power of SUPER SCIENCE. This is awesome.

The other 5 partnership options in the game are pretty much the standard obvious fandom ones, which kind of leaves me wondering if ZUN had thought of them originally or wound up adopting them as fanservice? I don't really care about that (beyond Nitori), but what is good is that the mechanics they have attached to them are fun (as opposed to balanced - it kind of feels like 6 different gameplay modes, it changes so much. Personally I prefer it this way). I should play 10 sometime, which I skipped over out of apathy...

Er, comic-wise - I actually like this for once. Probably because it has robots. I like robots. It took a bit longer than normal, but considering that its fairly detailed, and I just made up the designs and poses on the spot, it was pretty quick.

Star Wars Scout trooper

In keeping up with SW theme. Here's a scout trooper! He looks kind of weird the more I look at him, but really fun to draw and good for practice. 

Touhou 4koma - China #4

Whoops, finished this one a while back and kept leaving it too late at night to be able to post it.

More China antics... pretty simple joke. Grabbing a prop from the BG is kinda cheap (especially when I've stopped drawing BGs). I think I'm getting the hang of the art, although I realised when I was toning it that I positioned it badly for a lot of the main colour areas (like Sakuya's blue frock).

2 more to go, although I still don't know what to do for the next one...

SD Obi espionage

More SD Star Wars.

Mostly focusing on background practice, so I'm choosing memorable scenes with a lot of perspective. Luckily there seems to be many of those :)

...I guess I still need a lot of practice with backgrounds.

SD Vader invades

Interesting... well lets go with the Star Wars theme for a while.

On a related note, I saw the new Indy movie and it was silly and epic, just as it should be.

05/27 - Oh god the background is so wrong... that's what I get for trying to do it from memory.

Star Wars Stormtroopers

Love those old school Stormtroopers but I find it hard colouring characters in white. Anyways not sure if this works but I'll post anyways.

Touhou 4koma - China #3

Continued~

This was technically done yesterday, but today's isn't finished (thanks to a jerk powercut reminding me that I should save more often), so it's not a double post, boo.

Touhou 4koma - China #2

Another one~

I'm dropping the backgrounds... they're more work, and they look worse than not having one at all. Also, sepia-colour~

Also, much thanks to Icey for making me rewrite it into something that makes sense without mindreading.

Touhou 4koma - China #1

I finally did a 4koma~

It took much longer than I thought~

That's even ignoring the rejected ones that didn't make sense... hopefully this one manages that at least (assuming you know China). I've been writing down a load of 4koma ideas for a while now, but somehow it was easier to get rolling with a multipart one than a single one - there should be 6 or so in the series. I'm hoping to get over a dozen done for the end of the month (Reitaisai) as an arbitrary goal... wish me luck lol.

Also, blog post 100 woo~ I'll start on my speech.

Unfinished GM

Tired

Hot

Sick

:(


Tried doing some painty stuff in Sai, but couldn't see how to get it to do what I wanted it to without spending a month on it. Do people really paint over the whole layer a million times, even when shading block areas? Seems like too much of a pain in the ass to me... or I just don't have the patience for it. Might try it again in Photoshop though.

Another Seeker

Hey What happened? No more postings? Where are you guys? haha... anyways here's another seeker. He is Thundercracker, one of  my favorites. My best friend had this toy. 

Funky colours

Something interesting happened here. I colored it in CMYK and then saved it as a JPEG all of a sudden I get these funky colours. Perhaps he is a new seeker. Any suggestions on a code name for this character? 

Big feet

Its been a while since I posted, with exams and all... its insane, Now that its almost over, I'm going to start posting again.

I went to Isaque's house last night. Cool collection of figures. So here's my latest drawing. As I was drawing, something weird happened and I messed up his feet. It's big feet Starscream.

Show me your moves!

Mrr... It's been like three months since I last posted... (Morrigan's sword way back then was based on Alastor from Devil May Cry, by the way. Yeah, it was a bit off...)

Last weekend, a few days before a friend's birthday, I told her I hadn't drawn anything recently and asked her what I should draw. She said "Captain Falcon FALCON PAUNCHing Peach!" which was soon more specified to him punching her while she's doing her la la la thing (one of her taunts in Super Smash Bros. Brawl).

A bit after I asked for background ideas. "Mcdonalds or a KK Rider concert!"
I don't know if either suggestion was supposed to be serious, given she was surprised when I actually did go with McDonald's... =p

Marisa ze~

Just an ordinary magician. I wanted to settle some details of her outfit in my head.

I spent seriously way too much longer on this than it deserved...

Monster Hunter art contest 9

This is what I submitted :(

Still incomplete... I discovered that midnight of the 20th in Japan is about 14 hours earlier than it is here.

Going to finish it up and see if they will accept an update.

Monster Hunter art contest 8

One more character sheet.

This guy is a gunner, but he doesn't have his weapon with him in the image. This is impossible. So I guess I need to decide on a gun.... probably will go with a light bowgun of some sort.

Monster Hunter art contest 7

I forgot to choose armour for one of the characters... and it was unexpectedly hard to choose waist and leg pieces that matched the upper body pieces.

I think it worked out okay in the end though?

Monster Hunter art contest 6

Extra post to celebrate my scanner working properly again!

Apparently using the right driver helps...

Also, cats!

Monster Hunter art contest 5

Oops missed my post for the 18th...

This time it's a look at how I was developed the scene and background elements. Actually this just looks more like generic middle-ages fantasy rather than Monster Hunter in particular, but oh well.

I didn't use any of these, but you'll get to see what I ended up doing soon enough :)

Monster Hunter art contest 4

More cats :)

... I think my scanner is dying.

Alt Reisen

lol regular posting


This arose from a terrible pun someone made about "Alt Eisen" from SRW and "Reisen" from Touhou. Wasn't terribly high-effort, and looks ok for it, although it took FOREVER anyway.

This is also the first lineart I've done in PaintTool SAI - usually I can't be bothered with picking up new software, but Photoshop's lineart was bugging me for a long time, and SAI is pretty awesome (and uses shortcuts which are almost identical to Photoshop).

Monster Hunter art contest 3

Cats! Nevar forget!

Now this is one of the things I love about Monster Hunter... it's a game where this kind of situation wouldn't be unusual in the least.
There's just something awesome about a game with such a serious tone having this kind of humor in it too.

I definitely can't forget to represent this aspect of MH in my composition.

Monster Hunter art contest 2

Another character sheet.

I chose mostly silver and grey coloured armour pieces to match the Silver Rook gunlance. Also since the Silver Rook is practically an end-game weapon, most of the armour pieces are pretty high-level as well.

Ah I just realized that forgot about the cats :O

Monster Hunter art contest 1

Monster Hunter Portable 2G is out!

Well actually it's been out for a month now... but I only managed to get my copy recently :(

So now I'm working on an entry for the art contest they're holding to celebrate the release.
This is one of several characters I'm going to have in my image... it's too boring to just have full armour sets, so I'm mixing things up. I'm making character sheets like this one as references for the final image.

I'll post the sheets over the next few days so it looks like I'm not actually taking a billion years to finish the final image.

Lol Comic ver. Touhou

I don't seem to be able to produce anything worth finishing recently...

So for a change, one more practice comic. I was trying to get black not-thick lines here, plus trying out "tone"-ish shading. Verdict: maybe a bit too thick, and the shading is actually decent (aside from BGs... need to look at other comics more closely I think). Need to do something about the speech bubbles too, doing them myself looks pretty terrible... and definitely need to be less slow, as ever.

No meaning to the contents again, if you want a generic Touhou situation then you can't go wrong with "Marisa + mushrooms"... also if you so much as recognise the first panel then you're spending way too much time on the internet.

A post for a new beginning

Ok.

I think I have not posted for long enough.

Time to get back in gear!!
Or something like that...

Non-dead Patchy

As opposed to "undead"...

In short, someone started a series of pictures of Touhou characters being killed by arrows, so I did a pic in response showing it was 'fake' (it wasn't like it was the most horrifying thing I'd ever seen, but I'm not exactly fond of depictions of human suffering either, so this was my 'counter' to it). Fake arrow, fake blood, and she can fly so the rope does nothing anyway lol.

I like the eyes, although her breasts seem to have migrated to her stomach......

Blood effect was stolen from Half-Life, using my eyes.

Voile, the Magic Library

Actually Baroque, the Prague Library... with Patchouli Knowledge, the magically anemic youkai librarian. Can you spot my subtle doctoring in this image?

Thought I'd use this to try my hand at some image manipulation. In the end though, even though I fiddled with lots of things (extra shadowing, ambient blue tint, reduced saturation, noise) to try to make her look properly integrated, at a basic level she just didn't fit so I just gave up and made her look half-integrated, half-decent looking.

On the one hand, her outline is a bit too thick, and I didn't light her quite properly (should be less backlit and more ambient)... on the other hand, the original photo had a lot more noise in it than I realised (since the room was really dark), and was pretty grey too. I couldn't even do any filters like "watercolour" since that exaggerated the problems.

Not really sure what I could do to fix this... maybe do a sphere or cylinder as a test for how the lighting should go? Maybe it's plain easier to do with a better photo...

Saber expressions

I've been doodling the past few days, but I've produced nothing but rubbish... this isn't too far above that.

Wanted to try random expressions like you often see for character designs, it's Saber because she came up first in a google for "anime". The range isn't as great as I was intending... Took 90 minutes, which is ok for the linework, but I was intending it to be rougher (so I could do more). No point in applying good linework to all those distended heads. Apparently I'm also bad at being consistent in size since they all needed scaled to match. Sigh...

Halo vs Metroid

Its Master Chief vs Samus!

Lol Comic

Lol comic.

Same as before, no real story, I just drew a typical everyday situation so that I could test some stuff. Need to work out something for speech bubbles, the ovals are easy but seems like anything hand-drawn is going to look odd. Not sure about the fonts I chose too...

Seems I'm really not good at a) guys, b) hands, c) speech bubbles, so from now on my comics will be about mute girls wearing mittens. Really though, even just from these 2 tests, while I can make it look passable it feels like I have a ways to go to have the artistic range to do a comic...