Once More Unto the Breach

Welp.

 There goes the summer.

A squid headed goddess of death

"

An avian god of art

A richly adorned, fox headed god of thieves

I made a bunch of pastel sketches based on a random text generator a while back. My final project for the summer was to develop them. Beyond redesigning them, the point of these was to wean myself off of an over-reliance on digital tools.

 The digital painting in this lineup is the thing that frustrated me enough to drop the digital angle. It is decidedly unfinished.

I also have some lore-like snippets written up for these characters. Those I'll have to proofread a little more. There's  A LOT of made up words.

Clouds by my window

This is basically the only study I did all summer. Since I had my laptop reanimated, I haven't been able to get the color settings right, so these could look like... anything, really.

5 min

15 min

10 min

 Last life drawings for the summer. 

This is the same model as the one from the first session of the summer. 

Heh.

Stuff from the zoo.

 I caved and bought a membership on impulse, so now I have to go to the zoo more, if I ever want to recoup my losses. I'm always sort of hesitant to go to the zoo, since people there treat art students about the same as the animals.

I can't really read it either

Finally, this blasphemy of penmanship. I've been waking up at 3 in the morning and writing whatever comes to my head on this piece of newsprint the entire summer. Between this, a .txt file on my desktop and a few pages of Iphone notes are about 10 to 20 different ideas for the group film. Of these, only about 5 are worth anything, and of those five, only 3 have coherent plot beats. 

Still.

Jean Pierre de la Funk

Boy, I certainly do enjoy drawing characters that aren't my own. Like a careless scythe in someone else's wheat field I am! Surely nothing can be a more sublime expression of my counter culture, anti-establishment inner renegade!

Figure I'd make this week's quota with a few (okay two) sketches. I've been itching to do some proper fanart for a while. Top is SCP-682, from http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-682. Fascinating concept, I've been toying with the idea of what it looks like for a while now. As far as I can tell, it's just a big lizard that's really, really menacing. That's a lot of creative leeway, so it's always cool to try and redraw it every now and then. The bottom is ZAH EMPRAH, the leader and God of all mankind. If one puts out of mind the well established series of official paintings made of him, a lot of fun can be had trying to depict the well chiseled visage of the Greatest Human Being Evar.

Even amidst all the studying, and the arduous animating of certain fictitious felines, time refuses to accommodate our suffering. For no man does time relent its merciless flow, forever the icy deluge, uncaring for the desperate throes of mortal animation students. It is a cacophony of avian falsettos, piercing the crisp silence of winter, screaming contempt for the departure of a gently humming summer. Whistling and howling, time is the zephyr that propels itself on the currents of night, dancing at a frenzied vivace upon swollen clouds, cursing its company, a legion of white speckled against deep indigo. 

What I'm saying is that my schedule this semester was cursed by the 9:00AM fairy. FML.  

We Live in Hard Times, Not End Times

You know, it's funny. I began the basic block in for this one during the summer, but then, all of a sudden, I lost interest in it. I only shaded one part of one leg, and then stopped altogether. Yesterday (Well, more like early this morning) I finally decided to finish it (after finally finding a mechanical pencil with lead in it). It's on an illustration board.

You see, it's supposed to be a headcrab. However, for whatever reason, I decided that I could probably wing the accuracy bit, so I boldly decided go through the laborious toil that is the Google search for a reference. As long as it has a main carapace and four legs, I thought it should be fine. I had some fun doing the textures on the legs. I think they're rock formation textures. The main shell has some turtle textures, a tangent that I believe stems from this painting of a turtle shell I did a bit back. I'm fully aware that it doesn't actually look like a headcrab, but still.

As far as critique goes, I think I could have gone further with the shading, and brought out the contrast a bit more. Having a pure white background doesn't help it at all. The positioning of the back legs is probably a bit off plane as well, and the whole drawing is probably a bit stiff from the hard outline. I have, however, tied up a very annoying loose end from the summer. That feels good.