New watercolour paintings! The Eevees started on a whim but I got them done in a weekend, which was pretty cool. They’re my largest watercolour painting to date.
Liepard was painted for NerdbotMk2‘s Twitterdex project.
Mega Venusaur may be the start of me drawing all the mega evolutions. Iunno.
Just thought I’d post some updates on my Papercrafting since I’ve been silent for a while.
If you’ve been following my comments on some of my previous papercraft posts (Bulbasaur and Charmander, Squirtle, Tepig) you know that I’ve had Lapras in progress and that I’ve been planning to make a Mewtwo.
I got Lapras done enough to display at our local Anime and Videogames convention, AVCon. It had everything except the flippers – a pretty good effort for a couple of weeks solid work, I think! Since AVCon I actually haven’t picked up the Lapras parts again, so I haven’t been able to finish it off. I guess my interest has waned since I solved the major engineering problems involved in getting the head to stand.
Here’s Lapras with me for scale. This was taken the night before AVCon. At the time I honestly didn’t know if it was going to work – getting the head to stand was a huge triumph.
When I wasn’t supervising the models, some kid crawled inside Lapras! You can see his legs through the side of the model.
As for Mewtwo… in December last year, pokemonpapercraft.net released a Lucario model, which I decided might make a better subject for my first attempt at a bipedal Pokémon. For a start, the finished model would stand at about half of Mewtwo’s size (1.2m vs 2m). Its smaller size also meant that each piece that I cut out would quite nicely fit on my cereal box cardboard, which is much nicer to work with than the cardboard that I used for Lapras. And in general, Lucario’s limbs are much less intricate than Mewtwo’s.
Over the Australia Day long weekend (exactly two years since I made Bulbasaur!) I got most of Lucario assembled. He used about 24 cereal boxes worth of cardboard… after saving up my housemate’s cereal boxes for a year I’m now almost completely out of boxes!
Here’s an in-progress shot of Lucario. I’ve been working on making this one in modular parts that can be slid in and out of the model. I learned from Lapras that if something is going to be big, or if you’re not sure about how the pieces are going to fit, it’s easier to deal with things if they’re in their own pieces. If you need to remake something, then you can just remake a single piece instead of having to take apart the whole model and potentially start from scratch.
I hope to finish Lucario off soon – since these photos I’ve already completed his arms, tail and legs – just the hair bits to go!
An extra watercolour painting this week because one of my favourite webcomics is holding a fanart contest. How I wanted to paint something for this comic during August, but none of the characters fit the arbitrary naming rules I’d set for the month.
For an evening’s worth of work I’m pretty pleased with this. Ville’s face looks pretty silly though.
The last painting for Blaugust! (which is spilling into September because my original schedule had the lineart for this teed up for last Friday).
Ushala at World’s End is a fairly new comic which I’ve had the pleasure of reading since not long after its debut. I’ve actually scribbled Ushala a couple of times before, if not drawn inspiration from her design.
This painting dates from around April (and is what you would have gotten as my cop-out post if I was feeling too lazy to do a new painting)
Whilst this marker sketch is a little more recent. It’s not really Ushala, but I’m pretty sure I had her in mind when I was drawing the skull and huge hair.
My favourite part of Ushala’s design is her nose! It’s closely followed by her crown.
We’re getting closer to the end of Blaugust and my enthusiasm has visibly waned. Truth is I have content for at least a couple of the missing updates, but I can’t quite get things together to my satisfaction. Anyway, let’s have a look at this week’s fanart, which was also almost a no-show. Fortunately my attempts to procrastinate ended up spurring me into this piece – I was doing some watercolour scribbles and decided to turn it into the painting for the week.
Last week we had an alien – Zurida, and this week it’s another alien – Ethma from The End.
Because this started out as an unrelated sketch, I had to do some work to coax the composition and colours into the final image. I had a bit of fun with the vivid colours in the shadows, but I think my attempts to introduce darker tones didn’t work across bird-Ethma’s face.
We’re going from green hair to green skin this week, and over the week I’ve learned that I should have drawn Trigona with three fingers. I make up for it today.
Today’s piece features Zurida, alien villain from The Superfogeys, a comic about superheros somewhat past their prime. She’s accompanied by her son, Percy, as they walk past [spoilers spoilers in fact the rest of this post is probably going to be spoilers].
This art depicts a scene that I imagined occurring not long ago in the story (although after showing John my pencils, he questioned whether or not this might actually have happened, I simply retorted that I wanted to draw it so there)
I had a good time thinking about what might be running through Zurida’s head here. Is she proud of her handiwork? Is she just getting on with the task at hand with no time to be sentimental? Perhaps she feels a twinge of regret – not because she’s done wrong, but because she’s granted Michelle eternal youth, while she herself has grown old.
Speaking of old, I did put in a token effort to portray Zurida’s age, but it was all quite secondary to getting the perspective and foreshortening right.
Finally, I liked the juxtaposition provided by Percy’s presence. He has an innocence and dumbness about him, in this picture he definitely wants to linger a bit longer and let the cogs in his head move as he makes the connection between Michelle and his mother.
[edit] Argument settled. The whole time I thought Zurida had been running things out of the Society of Heroes, but no, duh, it was her palace.
This will probably be the best recording I put up this month, and that’s taking into account the fact that I’ve edited the ending slightly to take out a flubbed chord.
Audio Player
I forgot to notate some of the fingering and counterbass notes in yesterday’s sheet music update, but I think it’s fairly self explanatory. There are some respectable jumps in this one, but even with the distances involved they feel quite manageable.
Anyway, enjoy!
Running behind… running behind. I’ll get the recording up tomorrow.
This transcription presented me with a few dilemmas as I kept swapping between time signatures (3/4? 6/8?) and tempos. Anyway, here’s the score. A very straightforward one – but feel free to repeat ad infininatum instead of ending after two loops as I’ve done here.
I designed these badges and had them 3D printed by Shapeways. The first set is printed in sandstone, and the other set was printed in alumide. For the alumide badges I painted them and then used liquid polymer clay to create the glassy filled-in areas.
I have also printed Johto and Sinnoh badges, however they require additional work to complete.
You can get your own Hoenn badges from my Shapeways store here:Â http://www.shapeways.com/model/1065186/pokemon-gym-badges-hoenn.html
If you’re in Australia, total price may work out cheaper if you buy directly from my Storenvy store:Â http://chenonetta.storenvy.com/products/2257809-pokemon-badges-hoenn
Contact me if you’re interested in a set of Unova badges.
Today I reveal the other common thread between the characters I’m featuring this month – their names all end in “a”*. Today’s character is Trigona Ambrose, from the comic Beeserker. She’s featured here with the Beeserker and Scootsie – or better known to some as Imposter Minineko.
Where are the Scienceman Twins? I don’t know! Maybe they are too busy with their new game or something.
The artist behind Beeserker is an old buddy from the depths of the internet ages, and an inspiration to all who aspire to maintain regularly updating blogs. Kyatt’s blog, Burn the Internet updated daily for five years until he decided to retire it from daily use on its fifth anniversary. Secretly I’m a little relieved, as I have a habit of checking Burn the Internet once every few months – or more – and forgetting where I’d last checked up until, inevitably leaving me reading the archives until 3am in the mornings.
Moving to this picture after last week’s painting was interesting. There were certainly some common threads – both comics feature robots and restricted colour palettes, though the kinds of colours available are quite different. A lot of what drove the direction of this week’s painting was the fact that I started the art tonight, so I didn’t want to be ambitious. I went for bold colours and lines (I used a sharpie for some of the inking!) and didn’t worry about fancy backgrounds. I’m pretty pleased with the result.
*Initially I planned to feature five ladies with three-syllable names ending in “a”. However I wasn’t very excited by two of them so they were cut. Bad luck Rumika and Marina.