Sandshrew, Breloom and Goodra
I drew these guys while attending Adelaide’s Pokémon VGC event! Sandshrew was drawn as part of a Reddit collab where each artist would draw one Pokémon. You can check out the full album of art here!
blaugust
Watercolour Wiimote Cover – Lucina
This custom Wii Remote cover features Lucina. The technique I used to paint it was the same as the Splatoon covers I shared last week. In my pictures today I show the considerations I make about the inclusion of the sloped sides of the cover. I try to keep detail out of the sides and all of the main features to the middle.
I also painted a cover featuring the Kanto Starters, but it looks like I sold it without taking a photo first! So I’m down one post for the upcoming Pokemon Week. It’ll probably be a mix of Pokemon and miscellany 🙂
Sparring Partners
Lucario and Little Mac! I think this was meant to be a prep sketch for a larger piece, but I abandoned it for some reason. The file has many layers with Little Mac in a few different punching poses. This is one of the more energetic ones.
“I brought you this lit bob-omb!”
I drew this one after some early gameplay footage of Smash Bros for WiiU was seen. In it, people observed Olimar’s Pikmin bringing him items. Someone observed it would be somewhat humorous if the helpful little guys brought dangerous items to Olimar!
I have no idea how I forgot to draw in the bob-omb’s limbs and face. I had them pencilled in but when it came time to ink I just went into “it’s just a bomb” mode I guess.
Ness and Lucas
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.
Lucas
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.
Zelda and Roy
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.
Octoling Pins
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.
Judd WIP
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.
Duck ‘n’ Cover
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.