Oh, right, this blog thing.
Been busy this last week… I’ll see about getting the fan art post up Tuesday if not its watercolour version on Wednesday.
Today’s sheet music is the Rocket Jump Waltz, which like Petite Chou Fleur originates from Team Fortress 2.
No it’s not actually a waltz.
This transcription is an accordion-ised version of the track based on a transcription done by another fan.
Tomorrow we’ll find out if I can still play it!
Here are some of the laser cut designs I made tonight. Most of these designs I’ve drafted on the bus to/from work. It was pretty quiet in the Fab Lab today so I was able to send quite few jobs through! I was also able to experiment a bit with the deep etching I’m using on the Tetris pieces and try out some special acrylic glue – I had designed most of my cuts to hold together via friction, but having taken them home and had a play I think I’ll need to head back some time and get some more glue in them.
Regretting not picking up more colours from the acrylic supplier… another time, I suppose.
Some progress on my Decrypting Rita fan-art, which I first previewed on Friday.
On the left – the art as-scanned. On the right, I’ve experimented with digitally deepening some of the shadows. Not quite happy with things yet, but it’s late and time to head to bed.
I was really not sure how I was going to tackle the colours for this one, considering the source material’s approach to colour!
I just had to conquer my fears and dive into it. I got a chance to use some new brown ink (the result of forgetting to empty my wallet before entering an art store), which I’ve used in the shadows across all but Rita1. I was thinking it’d work well to unify the colours across the image but I decided not to use it with the blues.
I reckon I’ll try out some more paintings with the new ink, might be good for some life drawing studies.
Meanwhile I need to work out how to get darker shadows with my watercolours. It’s been a problem in my last few paintings. Might just need to use black ink for it.
On Sundays/Mondays throughout the month I’ll be sharing my adventures in accordioning. The accordion is an awesome instrument capable of rich depths of harmony and melody. Unfortunately, I barely make any time to practice it, so what I share with you this month is going to sound rather choppy.
For the rest of the month I’m hoping to share accordion arrangements on Sundays, and recordings on Mondays. This week I’m a little behind, but that’s okay, because if you’ve followed my blog in the past you’ll have already heard the recording I’m going to share today. (I’m too lazy to record a more recent/fluent version)
That’s right, it’s Korobeiniki, a delightfully suggestive Russian folk song. It’s best known for its inclusion as the Tetris A music across a multitude of Tetris titles. A simple transcription of the song is below. (I haven’t done music theory in aaaaages, so apologies for errors. Let me know if I’ve notated things poorly and I’ll endeavour to fix them)
This is a pretty straightforward arrangement mostly comprising of alternating bass patterns. You start on the hatched E button in the top half of the keyboard and alternate with the E minor chord, then move to A -> Am. After that is the E Counterbass (G#, denoted by the underlined fingering) which alternates with the E Major chord.
There’s only one tricky bit in the arrangement, a little bass run through A A B C. It crawls from the upper half of the keyboard to the middle section, ending on the middle C button. I’ve put in some suggested fingering.
Then it’s a slow progression back up the bass through D minor. (I used to jump up to a different chord from the C, but my hop was just too unreliable)
I was going to add some little diagrams here but is anyone actually going to find them helpful? I’ll consider them for my next post if anyone is interested.
EDIT: Scribbled a thing in the end. Dunno how helpful it is.
Have fun with Korobeiniki! Don’t have an accordion? Try out my accordion simulator. You’ll be able to play most of the piece except for the G#s in the right hand. Just hum them or something.
This month I’ll be featuring fan art for five different webcomics. The plan was to do inks on Friday and watercolour them on Wednesday, but I might end up using Wednesday for different arts.Anyway, there are a few themes for the characters featured this month. They’re all ladies. Many of them have layered personae or alternate identities.
The most complicated of these is Rita – or Ritas – from Egypt Urnash’s aptly named Decrypting Rita. The story revolves around the reality warping adventures of the various Ritas. Frequently told as multiple stories in one, the comic employs many clever visual tricks to keep the action moving across the four main realities.
I started the thumbnail for this one on Tuesday, when I realised that I wanted to substitute Rita in for one of the five characters I’d be featuring this month. The scribble quickly evolved and suddenly Rita went from being the week 5 post to being the first one of the month.
The thumbnail has been done over a couple of other scribbles – the figures in the middle right and in the top left are part of completely separate ideas. (One of them is a sketch of someone on the bus. The other is just a figure extrapolated from random lines on the page)
Here’s the picture transferred to watercolour paper and inked. I completely winged the fingers because I’d left the hands as mittens in my sketch. Mostly I think I got away with it except for Robot Rita’s right hand.
It’s time to kick off Blaugust again, the time of year that I can actually feel good about not updating my blog frequently, because it means that I have a bunch of content to throw up each day while other Blaugust participants have to create new content. Suckers.
Actually I think I’ll end up creating a fair bit of new stuff for this month anyway, so I don’t know when my older stuff will get to see the light of day. I guess I don’t have as much of a backlog as last year. My rough outline for this year’s Blaugust will be as follows:
I also plan to do Strippin’ Saturday content, for which I intend to make comics, but that’s a bit uncertain. Tired Tuesday will be my day of rest, though if I’m feeling not-lazy I’ll find something to upload.
Anyway, today I’m showing off the trophies I made for AVCon this year, of which I’ve shared a couple of times on the Twitter machine.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the Adelaide Fab Lab lately, where I’ve been getting quite familiar with their laser cutter. My first project was to make approximately 300 tokens for us to give away to AVCon attendees. I was then inspired by some trophies on display in the Fab Lab and realised we could make some really cool customised trophies for AVCon.
Also thanks to the Fab Lab I’ve been getting back into 3D modeling, so the first thing I did was to mock up a 3D render of how the trophy might look.
Using Blender I was able to work out the geometry of the trophy and ensure that there weren’t any impossible intersections of the material. I was also able to use Blender to export out the correct alignment of the required cuts in the trophy base.
Initially I had wanted to use some kind of stained wood for the base, and I experimented with MDF. (You’ll notice the plaque has been enlarged here from the demo render, the result of some trial and error, AKA poor conversions)
However as it turned out, there was a ton of scrap red acrylic available at the Fab Lab, and lazy me also didn’t want to work out how to do attractive wood staining. The final draft used acrylic throughout the trophy, with some gold paper for the inside of the Invader.
I ended making up additional thank-you trophies for our special guests as well. Chris Cason took a really flattering photo his!
Next time I try this, I’m going to have a go at mounting some little LEDs along the sides of the Acrylic. Apparently the effect is very cool.
In the early days of AVCon I remember the wonder of sitting down and playing games with strangers. Finding people that loved the same games, finding a worthy contender to battle with. In my involvement with AVCon over the last few years I’ve tried to remember and recreate this feeling.
However as video games have gotten bigger and better, the novelty of attending a con or a LAN to play with others has worn off. More games now facilitate online play with our friends – and we can do it any time of day, any day of the week we please. It feels as though over time that there are less people “Looking for Group”s to game with at AVCon. The magic of finding strangers to play with has faded – it’s no longer something that we can’t get from the comfort of our own living rooms.
But PAX recaptured that magic for me – in its tabletop section.
As our video games have migrated to incorporate online play, board games have quietly remained in our homes. Sure, there have been some great online interpretations and implementations of games, but the interface is entirely different. So it was in the tabletop section at PAX that I was able to revisit the experiences of wonder and joy I’d had at my early AVCons.
We spent most of our free time in the tabletop section over the PAX weekend and it was wonderful. The huge library of games aside, there was great thought put into the various “looking for players” signs that people could grab to attract other interested players. And everyone in the tabletop section was interested in sharing their favourite games with other attendees.
My brief visit to the Mike and Jerry Q&A also addressed the huge board games presence at PAX – board games are games! When an audience member asked Mike and Jerry what the defining game was for them that got them hooked on videogames was, Jerry answered with, “chess”. Board games undeniably belong at an eventlike PAX and I can only wish that one day we can begin to reintroduce(*) them to AVCon.
Anyway, board games at PAX were a stand-out feature, but I also had great fun being an Enforcer. I think CFP might have been my “welcome home” moment – working in that section felt so comfortable and right. I loved my fellow enforcers and I loved our area managers.
Another highlight was being able to play lots of Tetris DS! Over the weekend I took some Tetris challenges and gave out some of the surplus UG tokens that I’d converted into pins. I even managed to trade some of the pins away for some neat stuff, including at least one official Pinny Arcade pin and a nifty Mario coin. I very much enjoyed some of the 4v1 Tetris I played with my fellow enforcers 🙂
Thanks to PAX for providing such an awesome experience. There’s no question about whether we’ll be back next year – we’re counting down the days already. Just give us a date!
* Early AVCon events featured roleplaying and board games including the Doom board game. In recent times we’ve dipped our toes into the TCG/CCG scene.
Finally finished off Tepig today. It’s been sitting around with just the tail to go for a while. The curl in the tail was very fiddly (I can’t imagine doing that at the original model’s scale!) but fun. The tail was a bit droopy but I’ve used some hot glue to make it stand up. I usually use acetone based craft glue, which is great for sticking the tabs together. For attachments however, hot glue is the way to go.
Also, here’s a photo of WIP Lapras.
My work process for Lapras has been a bit different than for the starter pokemon. Since each polygon is so freaking huge, using cereal boxes is a bit impractical. Instead, I’ve had the templates printed at A1 size and I’m pasting them to 200gsm brown craft paper. It’s flimsier stuff than the boxboard used in cereal boxes, so the shapes don’t hold together as convincingly. As I progress more, I’ll have to add more support (I’ve been kind of papier mache-ing around some joints as I go) and may need to make some kind of scaffolding structure for the insides. Another consideration is going to be portability – I’d like to take Lapras out of the house, which may mean making it modular.
Here are some 2-10 minute drawings made during performances at Womad. It’s always frustrating to eye a potential model for a few minutes, then have them move as soon as you start drawing them! A couple of these were finished after the person walked off. A performance ended just as I started another, so I quickly drew him before he packed up to leave.
Whew! It’s about time for another one of these life-sized Pokemon. This one’s been waiting a while to be posted. I started on the templates on the drive to and from Manifest last year and have had it sitting mostly-assembled on my table for a few months now. I stalled in sticking the limbs to the body because I’d toyed with the idea of making them poseable, but I’ve finally given up on that idea and have just stuck them on.
As usual I’ve gotten my papercraft templates from pokemonpapercraft.net. Those guys do really awesome stuff!
Next papercraft: Tepig.