Posts Tagged ‘painting’
Slow progress, but good things none the less
October 9, 2009
Wow time sure does fly, and whoa am I so totally not going to make the Oct 31 deadline! Which more or less means that November and December are going to be choked with Holidays and Family.
And it turns out there’s a little baby boy inbound, eta Feb 25(ish) (holy crap!)
So that has got to be more or less the last deadline, beacause somehow I don’t think there’s gonna be much free time after that for a while.
So, you might ask, what the hell have you been doing for the last 18 days. Well, Mutant Sheep progress has been slow… much slower than I wanted but I seriously needed a break. More After the Break, Pictures too! Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Art, design, Post, SwiftThought.com news | 
Tags: acrylic, Art, baby, focus damnit, mutant sheep eat the earth!, paint, painting | 
1 Comment »
Sheep benchmark
September 21, 2009
Time for a little progress update, eh?
Ok so some more sheep have been done but it’s time to assess the situation and get a firm grasp of where exactly I stand. But first a picture of the prototype tuckbox that the game will be shipping with (some assembly required)
Why Include something as silly as a tuckbox, when it will surely impact the bottom line One might ask. Well the answer is simple, with the last couple playtests it’s become obvious that the system of green tokens to track the value of the current place is massively cumbersome. So I decided to put in a little track sheet that you can just put a couple counters on to track the value of the current place as it is eaten. And the price difference between a 4×4 board and a board big enough to have a tuckbox to be cut out is negligible. So the tuck box is almost free.
But anyway… back to the current state of the game development process. So it turns out that 85% of the time it’s taking is art. That’s right. It’s taking much much longer to draw silly sheep than it is to creating the game and the cards and exporting them and uploading them and writing / editing the rules etc. etc.
Crazy eh?
As of RIGHT NOW, I have Drawn and Painted 60 of 125 sheep. Of those 50 have been placed into their final art location in the inDesign files that are the decks.
I have 65 sheep left to Draw, ink, and paint. A happy estimate would be that if I totally buckle down I can probably do a sheep every 2 hours, maybe a bit more. So let’s call it 90 min. So that’s just a hair short of 100hrs of ART work left to do. Not too terribly bad.
Other than that I probably have 6 hours of editing and tweaking on the cards’ text to make sure they’re clear and are easier to understand.
Then toss in the other little things like re-writing the rules and finalizing the web and packaging art, realistically it’s probably closer to 120 hrs of work.
That’s some really long weekends in my immediate future if I’m to hit my goal of having it launched by my birthday.
Time to buckle up, it’s gonna be one helluva ride to see if I can do this.
Posted in design, Development, Games, Post | Tags: crazy pet projects, game development, Games, invigorating the creative, learning, mutant sheep eat the earth!, painting, website | Comments Closed
Clockworld, It’s Done!
July 14, 2009
So it only took a little under 7 months, this weekend I finally wrapped up the behemoth that’s been hanging in the kitchen since January. The biggest change was wiping out the sun, which I spent so much time into getting perfect the first time around. However it just wasn’t working. Once the sun got off the canvas the remainder just fell into place.
While it was fun for the most part, I’m seriously gonna think twice before starting another canvas of that size. It just takes so long and so much effort you wind up just tired of it before you’re halfway, and then once part comes out brilliant, just as imagined, everything else seems sub-par. Thank god it wasn’t in oils though, or I’d just be starting the glazes.
Next up, a commissioned (I barter for exotic liquor) series of cute jungle animals for a cute little niece. Lions, gazelles, giraffes and a penguin(?) oh My!
Posted in Art, General, Post, SwiftThought.com news | Tags: acrylic, Art, castle, clockworld, finally, painting | 4 Comments »
Springtime doldrums and overthought thinkings
April 10, 2009
So, I’ve been running around in the total overwhelmed mode for a while and it’s time to steer the frantic caffinated ADD besotted herd of cats that is my attention span back onto track.
Some basic concept art got created, and then I wandered off the project to illustrationland and then got mired down in EPIC project full of GRAND ideas etc etc and just essentially spent some time thinking myself to exhaustion. Time to think less and do more.
I’ve made a list damnit! With a great big list of bite size (a week or 2) tasks to do. I’m going to pick one and just do it and then simply rinse and repeat. Theory being that this will decrease the amount of time spent bashing head on desk/wall/art table/sidewalk by not getting overwhelmed by any one thing or medium.
Updates to follow.
Posted in General | Tags: Art, crazy pet projects, focus damnit, game development, invigorating the creative, painting, sculpting | Comments Closed
Painting update – day 8ish
February 11, 2009
So after a nice little hiatus with the game programmy project its back to work on the behemoth that’s been hogging up the kirchen for going on a month now.
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.