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!