fox

Fixed Fox

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Smashed With Four Aces is one of my old paintings that I still love. Sure it’s a cliche idea but I so enjoyed weaving a lot of easter eggs into the artwork, referencing both the original series of paintings by CM Coolidge and of course, the various titles that the dogs appear from. You can read all about the process of creating this art in an old blog post.

One of the common critiques about the artwork was about Fox’s face. When I’d just completed the artwork I had trouble seeing it, then, over time the issues became really obvious but I didn’t find the time to address them. In some ways I was just so exhausted by the painting still (and the fact that my computer chugged whenever I opened the massive file). Mostly the problems emerged because I drafted Fox’s face after his Melee model, then swapped to his Brawl/Smash 4 partway through, trying hard to hew to the small snout, which didn’t really translate well.

Now that I’ve decided to do a new print run of these posters I’ve been able to find time to fix up Fox’s face. Matching up to the colour sensibilities I had when I first painted this picture was difficult. It’s not perfect but I think it’ll do for now.

Watercolour Fox Badges

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More experiments in lasers + watercolours. I’d planned to create something based on the bird sketches I shared the other day, but I’ve been having a lot of trouble doing the vector traceovers for them. This fox design I sketched yesterday has been much easier to work with.

I need to refine my painting work a bit, I think, but I’m very much looking forward to working on a variety of designs like this.

PS. I need a better name for these than badges or charms, any ideas?

Smash Brothers

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For some months I’ve been meaning to start work on a massive poster with the entire Smash Bros cast. Of course with new characters being announced regularly for Smash 4, I’ve had a great excuse to not start that work. Besides, the prospect of fitting some 50 characters or so into a single image terrifies me.

Still, I needed an idea for something to scribble today, so I got started on the Smash Bros. What was going to be the massive poster has instead turned into the original 12. Much more reasonable. There’s a bunch of white space though because I thought I’d need to fit four times as many characters in!

original12_1

If I was to paint this it’d need a lot of refinement first. But it was a fun exercise in seeing who I could draw from memory (Mario, Link, Samus, Pikachu, Fox, Ness) and who I needed to look up reference for (Captain Falcon, Kirby, DK, Yoshi, Luigi, Jiggly). It surprised me because I’ve never drawn Samus before but I have drawn some of the others. I guess part of it was that I started out scratching things in very low detail but decided to be more detailed for later characters.