What has it been up to?

Weeks of silence. Ominous indeed.

Actually, I've just been focusing my attention elsewhere. Mostly on Dragon Age and Dragon Age fandom, but there's been a little more lomography too. I haven't produced anything stellar, but here are the scraps I have done.

First up on the queue are some redesigns of Sabrina Shepard, the main character of a story I will probably chip away at very slowly for years to come. I wanted something more distinctive and less emo goth. There's nothing here I'm going to stick with, except for the red hair/headband. Nevertheless, it was a good exercise. The first one was practice with clothing and folds, as well as a messy little cell shading technique I may pursue further.







The next piece is some Dragon Age fandom I'm not very happy with. At all. It's a mess that reminds me of my work from five years ago. The background was an accomplishment, though. I'm terrible at backgrounds, and apart from all the architecture being crooked, this didn't turn out too bad. It was also my first real try at cell shading, which is strange because I believe most artists start with cell shading and from there learn to paint. For me it was the opposite, which made this difficult in an awkward way. Practice, practice...



This last piece is just silliness. On the Bioware Social Network in the Varric fan thread somebody made a connection between Varric and Fabio and suddenly artists started producing mock romance novel covers featuring Varric as a Don Juan protagonist called The Stone Heartbreaker. So naturally, I had to make my own contribution. As I said, silliness. I'm proud of the way it turned out regardless.




And that's all! Hopefully I will get back to being productive soon. That will probably be around March 8th when Dragon Age 2 comes out and I am unable to buy it. I will drown my sorrows in art.

Lomography

Okay, so when I started this blog I decided I wasn't gonna put any photography... but screw that.

I haven't really drawn anything for like a week. Or half a week that has felt like a week. I had a ton of work build up for my classes that I just couldn't ignore anymore... also, Dragon Age 2 marketing has ramped up a ton in the last two days, so I've spent a little more time obsessing over that than I should have (but really... hot dayum).

Anyway, suffice to say I haven't been able to commit myself to the 3-6 hours it takes to do a drawing, let alone a finished piece of work. Instead I've been doing little ten minute slices of lomography style editing in Photoshop. Lomography, for those who aren't aware, is the style of photography that embraces imperfection and a more casual approach to shooting. It imitates the look of retro film cameras. It probably won't amount to anything, but I think I've got some pretty interesting shots here. Including two experiments: one with my frame drawing placed over the lomography, and another paint dribble type thing that suddenly came to me as I was writing this (the latter not being so much a finished work as an inspiration blurb I didn't want to forget).

MaD T-Shirts (pt 4)

Yeah, it's another one. I spent considerably longer on this one than the others (twice as long, probably? 6 hours is my estimate) because of the complexity of the image. I really like how it turned out, though, especially with the white on black lettering. I probably had more to say about it, but I've forgotten what that might have been since last night when I did the brunt of the work. Enjoy.

MaD T-Shirts (pt 3.5)

This morning I revised my design from last night. I did a more "finished" looking version for my DeviantART account, in which I found old portraits and woodcuts of people and made them into a textured background (do you see the people? Do you see 'em??). Then I added ink splatters, because ink splatters are the lazy man's answer to a static composition (in other words, it makes the picture flow).

Anyway. The paint splatters looked so much better that I added them to the t-shirt design, too. Enjoy!

MaD T-Shirts (pt 3)

I know I promised I would put up some real work yesterday, since Thursday I spammed you with Varric Tethras and nasty old artwork. But I suddenly remembered the chapter and quiz that I forgot to do for my Geology class, so that's what I did last night instead of drawing. :/

Another design! This was a little more impromptu. It's an old photo of mine that I came across today and thought might work well. And I think it did. I don't like it as well as the other design visually, but I feel like this one communicates better.

My first design I had a lot of people saying, "Well, what does it mean?" And it's pretty simple, really. A girl laying, daydreaming or something. This one I chose the picture because of the honesty in the expression. And I tried to draw it very honestly. Being a self portrait, it would have been easy to try and make this flattering. But it's not supposed to be beautiful. It's supposed to be truthful. The thing I love about Meg and Dia's music is the incredible honesty that it shows. They're laying their bleeding hearts on the table, and that's pretty rare in today's music industry. So with this picture I tried to match that honesty visually. I hope that it worked.