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Fan-Art Friday: The SuperFogeys

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Is it Blaugust again already? Oh my!

For 2014 I’m joined once again by John and Thom. Jimmy will hopefully get some stuff up for the last week of August, but will otherwise be absent (he was doing too well, after all, so we sent him off to Sweden). I’m also joined by a host of new Blaugust challengers:

Mark, Paul, Mason, Michael, Rosie, Kevin, Pichy, Laura, Jimmy 2, Shaun, Grant, Brad and probably a few others! Peer pressure is a wonderful thing.

This year I’m aiming to get at least five posts up a week. After last year’s shameful showing I’m a little wary of promising too much but for each day of the week I’m also aiming to get content somewhat like the following up:

  • Fan-Art Fridays for Fan Art of comics, anime, games, whatever else takes my fancy!
  • Sketchbook Saturdays for scribbles, in-progress ideas and art from my sketchbook.
  • Simulacrum Sundays for portraiture, still-lifes, drawing from real-life type stuff
  • Mega Mondays to document the progress of my Pokémon Mega Evolution art project (and to ensure I can’t just use Pokémon for Fridays)
  • TMBG Tuesdays for art inspired by TMBG songs. I’d planned to spend a month doing this after my successful Blaugust 2012 run but ended up too tired to do so. I’m reviving the idea for Blaugust this year!
  • Wheezing Wednesdays for the very worst of my accordion repertoire.
  • Three-Dee Thursdays – documenting projects from throughout the year that have more dimensions to them than just my flat ol’ paintings.

Today’s fan art pieces feature characters from a comic that I also drew last year. It’s the SuperFogeys! Here are a young Spy Gal and Captain Spectacular.

YoungSuperfogeys

Laura brought around some marker pens the other week and I tried them out on a drawing that I decided to turn into Spy Gal. However I forgot that the characters in the SuperFogeys only have four fingers on each hand! John noticed while I was drawing but because I was yet to put the black on Spy Gal’s costume, he assumed I was drawing an alternate version of the character who has the “correct” number of fingers. Nope. Whoops.

The markers were a bit tricky for me. I guess I’m just not that used to how unforgiving they are. So I retreated back to familiar ol’ watercolours for Captain Spectacular and the below painting of Dark Maiden. (Who I also forgot to only put four fingers on, then had to fix half-way through inking).

DarkMaiden

Man, I love Dark Maiden’s costume!

Watercolour Wednesday: A Redtail’s Dream

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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.

 

ARTdAletheaLim

 

Watercolour Wednesday: Ushala at World’s End

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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)

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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.

img203

 

My favourite part of Ushala’s design is her nose! It’s closely followed by her crown.

 

Ushala

 

Watercolour Wednesday: The End

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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.

Ethma

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.

Watercolour Wednesday: Beeserker

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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.

beeserker

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.

Watercolour Wednesday: Rita

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Some progress on my Decrypting Rita fan-art, which I first previewed on Friday.

naturale edits

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.

Bucket of Chicken

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When Red String artist Gina put out the call for guest art with a Christmas theme, I initially thought of something fun with Reika and Miharu decorating a tree together. Then I had a second think about the theme, Christmas dates, and how Christmas is celebrated in Japan.

I tossed out ideas of roaring fires and did a bit of research, and to my surprise I found that Christmas in Japan is celebrated with… KFC! Suddenly cuddles by the fireplace became cuddles and a bucket of chicken. All I had to do was pick which couple to paint…RS_Christmas_01

Ruby Slippers

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Here’s some fan art for the marvelously fun and kitschy webcomic I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space! Lots of comics seem to be having planned breaks in the last week or so, and I was hoping to do fanart for other titles. I only got one done – I’m glad it was this one.

This was going to be a fan-comic to fit in with where the story was up to when it ended the last chapter. Then I realised my punchline had already been used in the comic, so I went on to just make that punchline into a nice painting.