A pair of Psi-kids!
The background for this one ended up as a happy accident with the green gradient turning into purple by the bottom of the piece.
Also, I had a phone case with the design printed on it, I think it works quite well for the size and shape of the piece.
I almost forgot to post today but I’ll squeeze in a post and backdate by an hour. Since it’s late I can’t really think of much to say along with the art, so enjoy.
After Lucas’ announcement as DLC for Smash 4, everyone wanted to see more art of him! I was asked to draw him in his Grey alt-costume. I used this painting as a chance to experiment with some splatter effects. I put very wet washes of ink down around Lucas, then blew on the patches to make them splatter outwards. It’s tricky to control the results but I really like the effect that it provides. I hope to integrate it a bit more into some of my paintings.
The plan for this week is to be posting mostly old art, and although I have been wavering on the idea I think I will go with it anyway just so I don’t end up in some kind of “but it’s old, I shouldn’t post it” mindset where I end up posting nothing at all.
As always with Blaugust, it’s important to keep momentum up, so we’re heading into what I’ll informally call Smash Week.
Tonight’s post is a painting featuring Roy and Zelda. It was requested by a Project M player, hence Zenda appearing in her OoT costume. Actually I guess it’s what she would’ve worn in Melee too, so perhaps they were a Melee player.
WIP sketch. I think some of the issues with this painting could have been avoided if I worked a bit larger. Some of the detail was hard to tackle.
Bonus: There’s a Zelda player that goes by the name Cosmo, and a while back I spotted someone asking “Has Cosmo made a Zelda guide?”. My brain said I had to make this! I kinda wanted to do a whole series with magazine articles that used awful vapid headlines that actually covered game mechanics in great depth, but it’s a pretty big time investment for someone who only dabbles occasionally in Smash.
We’ll finish Splatoon week as we started it, with some cute brooch pins. This time featuring Octolings! They’ve also been added to my store.
Today’s post is not a complete work, because the new Splatoon update has arrived and I must absolutely prioritise playing it over completing my blog post.
Besides I’ve started to go a bit cold on the art itself so it might get scrapped and started from scratch again.
Anyway it’ll let you get a little bit of insight to the creative process when I prepare files for laser engraving. Here you can see the initial sketch drawn up and my vector lines over the top in red and black. Red areas are for cutting, black are for etching. I took a slightly different approach with this piece as in previous pieces I have done the whole lot in black lines and then cut up the outline borders. I’m not sure which method is faster overall as I’m still a bit slow in the vector world.
Also, I only realised it yesterday but perhaps some of my fondness for Judd stems from his similarities to the wallet I’ve used for the past 10 years or so.
Since there’s a Splatoon tournament coming up I gathered together a few friends and formed a Squid Squad. Needing a name for the Squad I tried to think of something with a ducky theme but couldn’t come up with anything on my own. So I turned to John who suggested “Duck and Cover” – I think it works quite well considering the aim of the game is to cover turf!
Based on the name, I made a logo for the team. The art is entirely vector art, traced over an initial pencil sketch.
I think I could have done a better job with the art if I thought about it as overlapping shapes rather than as lines that needed to be filled. I haven’t gotten into the correct headspace for vector art yet!
PS if you think you’ve seen this art before you’re not quite right. It’s the same lineart, but for the first draft it was vector lines only and paint-bucket fills of colour, as opposed to being filled vector shapes. This version is much cleaner.
Inkling/Octoling society is rather interesting, and we’re fed just a little info about it via single player’s Sunken Sea Scrolls.
In one of those scrolls we spot the only male Octoling to feature anywhere in the game. I tried to imagine what he might get up to in his spare time – namely, dropping some sweet taiko beats. But we’ll call them Tako beats for the neat multilingual pun.
I’ve posted this image a couple of times previously (though not on my blog) so let’s not go too much more into the Splatoon aspect and instead look at the seal in the bottom right.
Regular readers will know that I often sign my works with a seal containing the top character. That character is in fact the Chinese version of my surname (Ling in Mandarin). It features two trees and has the meaning “Forest”.
I have been toying for some time with the idea of expanding on this seal to make it even more personalised. I do have a Chinese name that I could use (Yi-Fei) but I don’t particularly identify with it, not least because I think one of my Chinese teachers for a while thought it was Zhi-Fei and I was taught my own name incorrectly. I speak the rest of the language equally poorly as I know my own name so I wasn’t keen to include it in the seal.
So that left me with my English name, Alethea, which I quite adore. I decided to take elements of the name and turn it into a Sinogram of sorts, aping the look of Chinese characters and hinting at the English alphabet.
You can see a variety of Chinese scripts here, the evolution of the language has gone through many different appearances and stylisations! I chose to experiment with seal script and standard script. I also played around with going from very simple stylisation where the letters were more obvious to more abstract interpretations. Here are some of my experiments.
At conventions I like to do free watercolour name tags, so I worked a lot on the idea with the hope of offering commissioned Sinographs as a “tier” up from the free name tags. I’m hoping to also experiment with my laser cutter to be able to offer another tier – I’ll engrave your name into a physical seal. Experimenting with this idea, I filled many pages with Sinogram drafts, challenging myself to think of the letters in various different ways and practicing to perfect the style of each character and stroke.
Obviously to be able to offer these at cons would require me to actually have time at a convention to spend on them, and time in the evening to complete overnight work if I’m making physical seals. So, that kinda leads into a little internal debate I’m having over whether to do another table at Supanova in November.
Well, that ended up going from a very lazy blog post to a much longer one that touched on more topics than I’d expected! Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again tomorrow.
Just a quickie for today’s post. These custom Wii Remote backs are another experiment in using watercolour on not-paper surfaces.
One of the tricks with painting these is taking into account that there’s a larger surface area to paint than is necessarily usable due to the curve of the wiimote.
These guys sold at AVCon so hopefully they’ve gone to a good home! I may open up custom Wii Remote commissions at some point.
As promised, here’s my next experiment in laser-cutting + watercolour detailing. I’m really happy with the results!
Here are some extra pictures to show you the process from idea to finished product.
As usual, it all starts with a sketch!
Once I’m happy with the sketch, I trace over it with vector lines in Illustrator and use these to laser cut my designs. Remember what I said yesterday about priming the MDF and masking it? I do the exact same thing with these!
The technique for painting these is also the same as in yesterday’s post! I peel the masking off each area that I want to paint, going from darker colours to lighter ones. I then apply colour in careful washes of watercolour paint.
Once they’re done, I apply a gloss varnish over them. This protects the watercolour paint and gives things a nice smooth feel.
I need to work out a good process for sealing the paint before putting the varnish on, as you can see with the picture below some of the colours bled or faded a bit when I put the varnish on.
There’s some variation between each piece – even though they have the same lineart they are each hand painted and finished!
Pins on the back so that I can use them as brooches. I’m also testing to see if they are durable enough to use on keyrings.
Okay that’s all for today – Stay Fresh!
