Non-Gaming Goodness

So the summer deluge of freelance projects has slowed somewhat and a bunch of projects have gotten finished and I’ve got a nice body of work to start off in the professional portfolio side of things.  There’s just a couple websites to launch and tweak and then whatever new projects come this way… (with potentially a super super exciting project mixed in with it)

So that Gives me a few, precious, moments where I’m not playing with the cutest baby ever, to step away from the computer and rest my eyes on something that I’ve just realized that I miss.

Painting… so I still need to finish the oils, but I want to just crank out some pieces and make fast, bright vivid things and not have to worry about the whole setup and whatnot that the oils (even the water based ones) take.

So here’s a quick peek and the first of 4 24×24 canvases that I’ve got scattered across the kitchen/studio.

The colors are so vivid it totally blows out my camera’s color range.  I love it!

Gaming Goodness

So in few spare moments I’ve had where I can sit down and play something have been consumed by a couple games, Stalker : Call of Pripyat, Amnesia, Elemental and Reccetear.

I’m just going to ramble a few words and pictures about Stalker and Do a post later about the other 2.

So I’ve had it for a while but it somehow just got pushed back into the background since it came out along with the whole bunch of goodness that came out last year around the same time (Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age etc )

So when the chaps over at Rock Paper Shotgun mentioned some of the incredible user mods that have come about since its release.

And the results are pretty dang Spectacular.

Like this morning shot when the morning mists burn off and the rising sun lets you see into the distance.

Very pretty. And dynamic. And Massive.

And Full of Terrifying Wildlife.

But that’s ok.. you get guns.  That each have their own upgrade tree, so as the game progresses you get to tweak out your favorite guns with extra perks.

And when the sun sets, or you have to enter an old dark abandoned pumping station it delivers some of the most tense and jump worthy gameplay that’s been my pleasure to partake of in quite some time.

I feel I can blame it on the impending arrival of offspring and get on with it.

the Devil

Couple paintings are done and there’s now a nice angel and demon in 24×24″ panels in the front hall. You know.. to scare people away from the good art that covers the rest of the house.

So the current plans (subject to revision but hey I feel better when I can pretend life’s going according to some sort of plan) is to prep the baby room and get the 2 paintings finished in time for baby Jude to arrive.    Then it’s baby time and squeezing in the last touches on Mutant Sheep Eat The Planet! and get that finished out by Summer in addition to getting some more freelance work and getting Wenderflonia all set up and ready to take over the art world.

The entry to the kitchen

I really didn’t want to do this, which is why it probably took so long.  You see, I didn’t finish the background first… and you always start in the background and make your way closer to the viewer.   That way.. you don’t wind up having to paint over large swatches of the stuff you’ve already painted.  

Which I did.  Which sucks and isn’t a lot of fun knowing you’ve got to do something you were happy with all over again. 

I actually fudged over the planet area fairly well so there’s just a couple small things that are going to need reworking.. so in all reality it could have been much worse. 

So After that I started re-refining all the shade transitions on the gearwork and after I slopped a little shading on the planet guide beam thing I made up my mind to actually render out the gear works instead of the flat blue shapes.  

The base color for 2 of them done and some simple shading on the smaller one and a little detail and it’s a good stopping point.

So I’m diving head first into another side project.  Which I spent the all of yesterday working on and plan on spending the evening on (after working out) to hopefully have a workable single level.

It’s all so much fun, it’s hard to pick just one project to focus on… Which, I guess, is why nothing ever gets ‘done’.

I guess that’s the whole ‘practice’ thing… 

Oh well here’s where things stand. 

So Next up is the big blends on the sky.. that promises to be exciting.. but I need to buy some more pthalo blue and another tube of white and a thing of blending medium before I can tackle that.. 

So that means its Sunday at the earliest.. more likely i’m done til next week.

[Edit: almost forgot] 

Oh and here’s a picture of the palette at the end .. its actually kind of a fun texture and visual

Sunball texture you want to touch!

But the sun texture is very cool!

I’m going to need to buy some more blue paint before I start to play with the sunlit sky..   Gah  and I’ve used almost half a tube of white so far..  oh well.

Kinda weird tho.. I didn’t work on the parts I wanted to work on.. 

Day 5 - The Darkening

{edit:  oops this was day 5}

when theres no more room on the palette its time to stop.

I got 2 sides of the planet rendered… Not really happy about the empty hillside one… but not really sure what to add to it.  maybe something will come to me overnight.

Kinda went totally ocd on the plantlife  (thanks wen) 

here’s a detail 

Anyway.. it’s a good day’s progress i think.. tomorrow I’m seriously going to have to tackle the gears in the planet and figure out how to get things to work together.. oh well.

I wound up having a great time, put on the headphones and tuned out the universe for 2 hours… bliss!

Anyway  here’s a crappy cellphone picture (color corrected in photoshop) (and the trees were still wet so that’s why theyre shiny.)

Day three- earth and grass

Took the plunge and started on a big canvas..  It’s definitely a big project, maybe a little too big.. but it’s actually been a lot of fun so far..

first steps

here’s the (1) initial sketch done as a doodle during a meeting at work. (2) A brief color rough / enlargement done in about 20 minutes on the pc.  and (3) finally the first couple of scribbles to get it onto the freshly gessoed canvas.

Drawing on canvas.

Here’s a picture of the canvas with more of the sketch transferred.

The Sun and Moon and the Stars

Not a bad start  Got most of the base colors for everything laid in..

Yaay and It’s actually quite addictive, and embeddable into myspace/facebook etc etc.  I’ve got a whole list of secondary features to add to it and minor bugs to iron out.  

I’ve been playing with the acrylics again and starting to get a feel for it.  Maybe things actually get easier with practice…. nahh.  Anyway it was quite fun  to just glop paint around and see what emerged.  Can’t wait to do it again.

just messing around

Oh well back to the salt mines.

After some sanding the mask is given a nice even coat of grey primer.

Then the fun part, painting with acrylics,  something that I’ve been experimenting with more and more lately so its nice to get a chance to just go a little crazy.  I decided to go for more festive instead of dullish realistic colors.

After a bit more touch up and drybrushing workI grabbed some black ribbon and ran it through the holes and tried to figure out a way that would let me put it on myself, since holding the mask and tying 2 bows on the back of my head turned out to be… problematic.   I wound up just holding the mask in place and pulling all the ribbons tight and then taking it off and tying all 4 ribbons together a little closer in than I had been holding it.  This gave me a nice knot that i can grab on the back of my head and slide down to snap everything in place.  It actually feels quite comfortable, surprising considering its weight.  But it pulls tight against the forehead and rests on the frame of my glasses evenly.

Next up I got a small childrens black T-shirt and cut it in half and glued it to the bottom lining of the mask.Rinse and repeat for the other half of the shirt on the top part of the mask.

Put it together with a black shirt and the hooded robe and you get something like this. (Yeah its blurry I’ll get a better shot tomorrow) The glue still needs to cure and the fumes were burning my eyes a bit.