Life-sized Lucario Papercraft
My latest papercraft project is almost complete, and it stands on its own, too!
Life is good, love is real, beauty is everywhere.
After fiddling around with Sherman’s Circular Gallifreyan (a fan-made alphabet) for a week or so I came across another fan made variant, Doctor’s Cot by brittanybgood which I rather liked the aesthetic of. I decided to redo my previous project in that alphabet instead.
Have I made mistakes? probably. But I’m pretty pleased with the result, especially as it was relatively fast to lay out once I worked out the phonetic breakups of the words (thanks wiktionary!).
Midway
This is my submission for the Losing Altitude collaborative art book, featuring endangered bird illustrations from a ton of talented artists.
Since I like ducks, I chose to paint the Laysan Duck for the book. The Laysan was at one point in critical danger of extinction with a population of only 7 adults and 5 juveniles. By the 1950s they had recovered to around 500 individuals and later a small population was moved to Midway Atoll to ensure that any disasters on Laysan would not result in the extinction of the species. My painting is named “Midway” for Midway Atoll – it also makes reference to the fact that conservation is a continually ongoing process.
Witchy
Decided to have a go at colouring this while on the bus, it took a few bus trips and it’s a little on the gaudy side but it was nice to do something a bit different.
Helix Fossil
With the frenzy that has been Twitch Plays Pokemon taking the internet by storm over the last couple of weeks, I felt that I ought to do something to join in on the festivities.
I started by modeling a helix fossil pendant.
(Want one for yourself? Get it on Shapeways!)
I then thought that I’d like to have something a bit bigger… and since I’m no stranger to papercraft, that seemed like a good way to go!
The model required a fair bit of simplification to make it a practical papercraft project, but I think it came out ok. I’m also not so used to working on smaller papercraft projects, since I normally work on life-sized Pokemon so some of the joins are pretty messy.
Want to make your own? The PDF file is here. I printed the pattern out on light cardstock and then assembled the pieces with the printed lines on the inside of the model. You can start from the top left of the first page and build piece by piece. If you have any questions let me know and I’ll do my best to help you out.
Watercolours – Eeveelutions, Liepard, Mega Venusaur
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.
Life-size Pokemon Papercraft WIP – Lapras and Lucario
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!
Watercolour Wednesday: A Redtail’s Dream
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.
Watercolour Wednesday: Ushala at World’s End
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.
Watercolour Wednesday: The End
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.