Kinda' moved. Kinda'.

I've kind of moved over to tumblr. I like the idea of being able to post work without walls of text accompanying it - on Blogger it feels lonely when I simply post a piece and move on and I feel obligated to have text with everything.

I'm thinking of using this space to create and share tutorials. I always note the same questions coming up or hear the same problems within my circle of fellow software users, so instead of retyping the same advice/tips on Steam or Skype over and over, I might just drop them here with visual aids and descriptions too.

And now for a picture dump.

 

InDeeSign

I've been InDesign's slave for the last weeks in order to make progress on the great overarching mission to compile a master "sourcebook", if you will, for my RP group's world's content. I've got a special guest appearance or two lined up in the next year's worth of play so this is an excellent opportunity to iron out details and get some form of stable setting to my player group.

Somewhat sentimentally, too, is that I like the idea of something more permanent of a record of everything my players and I have created. We're rapidly approaching a 10 year mark since having started and it feels like a good time to do such a thing - at the least - as a commemoration for our huuuuuuge legacy of creativity.

A majority of my time has been spent reading/watching educational materials this last week. I'm finding that many of my ideas are solid but my execution is often sub par or poor due to the fact that I have little to no formal training with subjects such as color and light.

There are some amazing resources in the form of books, printed materials, and even video classrooms. I've got a batch of three or so pics I'm using to develop certain skills over this new month, and hopefully there's some form of clear improvement and/or I learn at least one thing along the ride.

Leona

Just some more pretty women-but-also-ass-beater type drawin'. I always liked this character in the game she's from, but never got to --and oh god this is going to sound creepy out of a context-- spend enough time with her as I wanted. Ugh, see, I feel creepy dirty now for saying that. But you understand my meaning, of course...right? RIGHT?

Remastered, Special Edition, Disney Vault - all that stuff!

This here is a revision and update of an older picture to be used in the previously posted/mentioned character sheet. The philosophy being that a new quality sheet deserves a new quality look vs. the character image used last time.

The particular trouble with this image is that the silvery-blue species depicted is normally described a bit elven like; graceful, sharp features, and sort of "pretty". These qualities have made it hard to ride that line without being too feminine in appearance - as you can see in the lips and eyes, it's very much a work in progress.

Nonetheless, it's good to see at least some sort of quality enhancement from three or so year's time.

The SWTOR bug seems to have passed, and I'm really just waiting for my subscription to run out at this point. In the meanwhile though I've been drawing (a pun!) upon it as a source of inspiration combined with various other outlets this month. I'm enjoying seeing what other characters people have been building in game, and the semi-speedy speedpaint of the dark jedi here is one such example.

I installed a new HDD this month too, and while I take precise measures to save my brushes and settings, I still seem to be missing those tiny little nuances that make brush strokes and wacom use king. All things considered though, the pic came out well enough.

Y'all Postin' In a...

While the span between post dates indicate some form of hiatus, the truth is that I actually haven't been slacking (for once).

A big idea I've been pushing this month, last month, and well...pretty much since October or so, is a new character record sheet for my roleplaying group. There's a few things we do differently and/or have got into a routine of wanting over the years, so there was a lot of back-and-forth-trial-and-error to get to the point I'm at today. The most fun was collecting information and requests to fulfill from my players, and then subsequently translating that into the layout and design.

There's still some last touches, color matching, and tweaking to be done (as well as actually starting to use them in our games) but I'm pretty confident I'll be able to call this complete after a test weekend.