Esa concepts

So, yesterday I made a new warlock character on World of Warcraft, and caught myself trying to create a character for her. It all started by trying to decide what talent spec I wanted to make her - affliction or destruction. I didn't really want to go the typical "leveling spec" route of demonology with her. I wanted to have fun and just run quests with her.

I started formulating a personality - she was wearing an heirloom headpiece, so I decided that as a worgen, she was ashamed of her face and didn't like people looking at it. Depsite her implied meek, sweet personality, I thought it would be funny that she actually had a bleak outlook on the world, and just wanted to set it all on fire. So, I went with Destruction.

Something clicked in the back of my brain. One of the things I've really been struggling with lately for August Rye is that I needed a female character that could fit somewhat into the circle of August's 'friends', or rather a loose collection of people August can somewhat get along with. The only female August's age was a girl who she hated, plus was dating the boy that she was smitten with. This creates a bit of a sterotyping problem, because on the surface it looks like 'two females who can't get along because they like the same man.' I'm not too big on that kind of cliche, so I've been trying to think of a suitable female character to fit into the narrative. The problem is that the main character, August, is not exactly a friendly little ball of sunshine, so the trick was finding someone that was not so like everyone else that she'd get shot down by August as just another peasant. No, this girl had to be someone special.

So yesterday, Esa was born. Roughly around the same age as August and Billy, Esa roams around the demon world, keeping only undead and a few other demons as company. She's absolutely erratic and eccentric when compared to the main cast, which may be part due to her upbringing with other demons in the demon realm. She absolutely hates when people look at her actual human face, to the point of being ashamed of it. Instead, she always wears a hood, or a mask that resembles the face of the species of one of her closest undead companions. Her main powers are lighting things on fire and necromancy on Thursdays. When it comes to her outlook on life, she sees no problem with her rampant acts of destruction - as far as she's concerned, everywhere you look is something that needs to be destroyed, so you might as well watch it all burn. Despite her bleak outlook on life, she's very pleasant and polite, if you can get past her cultural quirks.

Commissions

Got a couple more commissions done recently, a Furcadia portrait and a full digital artwork.

 A portrait commissioned by Banish. When I showed the final product to a friend as a way of getting some extra feedback, they remarked that they could really tell how much better I've gotten at portraying the male form. I have to admit - they're right. I'm rather proud of what I did here. I usually tend to avoid drawing shirtless men because I simply cannot do them justice, but I'm glad I got a commission for one and was brave enough to take it on. It came out well.

This picture is a rendering of an avatar, from one of the avatar sites similar in function to Gaia Online, or at least that was my impression anyway. I'm a sucker for the kind of dress-up factor these kind of games offer, but I find little patience for the endless gold farming to buy items. It just kinda rubs me the wrong way nowadays, which is why I 'officially' quit Gaia a year or so back. Still, actually giving life and personality to avatars is still always fun, so I was more than happy to do this commission for an old friend, who was more than generous with her offer for it. I kinda shuffled my feet a bit on this one, but it did come out quite well overall. I'm just fussy about details I can never get quite right - it's something I need to work on.

Two very enjoyable commissions that I think have shown some of the progress I've made over the past year. An interesting starting point for my summer!

A little pixel project

Well.. okay, it's a bit bigger than little. Sort of.

I got the idea for a friend of mine's Furcadia dream to add in some first-person sprites to go with a couple non-player characters that were mainly there to explain game rules and tips. I thought the sprites would make it a bit more lively and feel a bit more whole. I also decided to take on the challenge of having them animate speech. On the surface, it doesn't look hard, but I can be very particular in how well done I want them to look. When I want the characters to speak, I want the face to respond to that speech!

Unfortunately, my little project had to go to the back burner temporarily for two reasons: I was still waiting for my tablet pen nibs so I could actually use it, and I've been busy with school work. Though I have my tablet in use again, I've still been pretty busy. Hopefully next weekend I'll scrape together some time to work on it.

I did make a fair amount of progress, though. I used my mouse to piece together some bases for the characters and even fully animated one shot of the first character. All she needs is a bit of shading, which will come last, after I've finished all the rest of the shots, which are about five total poses and about 6 frames.

 They still need some work, and some consistency kinks to smooth over, but for entire mouse work (which I haven't done in years!) I'm pretty proud of how they've turned out.

Recent Commissions

Due to my extremely poor advertising skills, I usually don't get a lot of commissions. However, there was an awfully strange weekend earlier this month where I was bombarded with about four different requests at once, on top of a commissioned larger work that I was making for my aunt, and had been slacking a bit on. Very unprofessional, but there was no rush.

This is the commissioned picture in question... albeit it's an unfinished scan of it. The finished picture still only has red bits colored in, as she requested. I think the red cape had more of an impact on the first attempt I did at this piece - but I did not care for the picture (plus I realized I had misread the cape requirements!)

I also got three Furcadia portrait commissions from two different people. Zuko came back for a couple more portraits, while an old friend commissioned a portrait as well. I'm extremely proud of how these came out. I do wish the portrait of Ewickly could have had a bit more details in the clothing design, though.

I also got a quick and dirty digital lineart commission. I feel... okay about it. Rather wish I had put more effort into it (or started over), but the commissioner loved it anyway. It's always a sad dissonance, when you feel like you didn't put your all into a paid work, but the person who paid for it sees absolutely nothing wrong. It makes for a rather awkward exchange, especially when you have to send them more final copies because you were fixing your mistakes.

Volcarona Portrait

I still like to do remappable Furcadia portraits, and I did this as a spontaneous favor to a friend. I tried to push myself to play with the lighting a bit more... I usually default to a generic top-left light source, which is a big no-no. So I tried a bit more of a dramatic top lighting along with an interesting perspective angle.

The character depicted is a Pokemon named Volcarona, one of my favorites from the fifth generation. This portrait is actually made to go with an avatar I made for the same friend back in August.

I'm pretty happy with both of them, all things considered!

30 Characters Challenge completed!

Here's a link to the thumbnail post linking to all thirty characters!

It's been a lot of fun! Not much else to say, I mostly say it all in the post. I did kind of barely make it, but I did it! Some of the characters were old ones, dragged up to be polished and re-made, or some very recent ones that weren't quite as developed or even designed.

Chell falling; incomplete

I'm not too happy with how Chell's face came out in this picture, so I think I gave up on it several weeks ago. It's worth sharing though, I'm still pretty proud of some of the color experimenting I did.

Some artwork from the past year

While I procrastinate a bit on updating the Samples page, here's some examples of my work from over the past year, in chronological order.

An image summarizing the first arc of August Rye.

 

This was a collaboration - Heather drew the sketch, and I did the rest.

This was for a small contest, which I won first place in.