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Finishing thoughts

I find that the end of a canvas is almost as hard as the beginning. When you start a piece there’s the fear of the blank canvas, and at the other end, it’s the end of the canvas, the last stroke, sticking a fork in it, calling it done.

It’s not a loud panic inducing fear, its more like the quiet fear of stepping away from it and saying it’s the best that I can do with this at this time. Pre-separation anxiety you could call it.

But then again, maybe it’s just me. Loads of artists don’t have a problem going back and reworking an old painting. I just can’t get myself to do that. When I finish a piece it’s a snapshot of where I am in a moment of time and what I’m trying to say at that point in time, and going back and re-working it well… fells wrongish.

(but boy is it tempting sometimes.. there’s some paintings that I know I could do it so much better now.)

Anyway, it took a bit but I wrapped up the Undine painting, and now I can’t wait to go and get started on the next one.

Good, but stressful week, all things considered.

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Missed a few

Ok missed a few updates like updates 24-32.. they’re there, just not gotten around to posting them

However on sketch 32 this little guy popped out.

sketch-32

and then I decided he needed a chance to get a world to live in. And by 37 it was looking like this:

sketch-38

 

 

 

Then pulled in some rough textures and and blocked things in a bit more.
sketch-39

By update 40 the trees were looking flat and the overall color was beginning to be a bit washed out.
sketch-40

 

 

And that puts us here at update 41, time spent pushing back the stone some and final rendering of the character and more minor details.

Still need to touch up the bear, abird and pants, but we’re 99% there.

 

sketch-41

 

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Long time no bloggy.

Ok, been a bit hectic and I’ve been a bad blogger. 🙁

I feel I can blame it on the impending arrival of offspring and get on with it.

the debbil
the Devil

Couple paintings are done and there’s now a nice angel and demon in 24×24″ panels in the front hall. You know.. to scare people away from the good art that covers the rest of the house.

So the current plans (subject to revision but hey I feel better when I can pretend life’s going according to some sort of plan) is to prep the baby room and get the 2 paintings finished in time for baby Jude to arrive.    Then it’s baby time and squeezing in the last touches on Mutant Sheep Eat The Planet! and get that finished out by Summer in addition to getting some more freelance work and getting Wenderflonia all set up and ready to take over the art world.

The entry to the kitchen
The entry to the kitchen

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unscheduled diversion & waves of light

So Progress on the main project has been really slow this week.   That’s not to say a bunch of stuff didn’t get done.. It’s just not tangible stuff.   I got the high scores put in and it seems to be working fine, and then I just ran into a mental brick wall of ‘now what?’.  So I just let things stew in the noggin while I did other things.

  So what other things did I keep myself occupied with one might ask?

Well, such things as going ocd in trying to lean guitar.. step 1. hurt fingers daily until you can press a string for more than 10 seconds without pain.  well.. im still working on that one. 

More interestingly I dusted off my lightwave 9.6 and started digging in to finally trying to learn the damn thing.  Sloooowly making progress.  I have managed to make a cube and some ovals and give them a texture.  The whole layout side of things is making a bit more sense as well with the lights and timeline etc etc.  Anyway the results of this is:  

box-v8-desktop

And in the meanwhile, I’ve been jotting down whatever ideas that have popped into my head as things to add to the game and I’ve now got a pretty handy idea of what i need to do next.

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Mar 7 update – alpha 4 released

Whew, so It’s been a while since I released alpha 2… Soo much has changed and been improved.  Here’s a brief changelog of stuff I can remember off the top of my head.

  • New main menu and faster startup times. 
  • Lots more assets to load at startup so it’s actually doing stuff while you have to look at the pictures.
  • New map. A huge dungeon assembled off arenas from the web map generator.
  • Rooms seal upon entry and then depending on how deep you are get harder and harder.
  • Sounds!  ok just some basic sounds but man does it make a difference.
  • New look for gameplay areas and tiles. 

Alpha 4 new main menu

Aplha 4 - screenshot 2 gameplay

Lots of hooks are ready for easy insertion of new enemies, powerups, and the special items that will be included in the store  you can visit between levels (soon).

Overall I’m incredibly pleased with the amount of progress.  I’m mostly excited about having reached a point where I can do so many thing (new graphics, monsters, quests… the mind boggles!!!)

For now, I’m just gonna play a bit.

As always you can download it here(~12mb), and as always use it at your own risk, I make no claims that it won’t terrorize your cat, melt your eyeballs, or do any other unpredictable things..  But it seems to be working just fine for me.

[edit] changed out some sounds for better samples of what I intend for the end product. [/edit]

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Painting update – day 8ish

So after a nice little hiatus with the game programmy project its back to work on the behemoth that’s been hogging up the kirchen for going on a month now. 

painting-day-8-002I really didn’t want to do this, which is why it probably took so long.  You see, I didn’t finish the background first… and you always start in the background and make your way closer to the viewer.   That way.. you don’t wind up having to paint over large swatches of the stuff you’ve already painted.  

Which I did.  Which sucks and isn’t a lot of fun knowing you’ve got to do something you were happy with all over again. 

I actually fudged over the planet area fairly well so there’s just a couple small things that are going to need reworking.. so in all reality it could have been much worse. 

So After that I started re-refining all the shade transitions on the gearwork and after I slopped a little shading on the planet guide beam thing I made up my mind to actually render out the gear works instead of the flat blue shapes.  

The base color for 2 of them done and some simple shading on the smaller one and a little detail and it’s a good stopping point.

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Painting day 7 – Castle on the bottom

Well technically its day 8 but we’re not talking about the first attempt to paint the castle.   Next picture I do.. definatly no weird lighting.. standard 3 light..   Not 100% happy with it but Technically the blends on the castle are as good as they’re going to get until I get a bunch more practice.   I did a lot of blending and its still mostly luck wether I get the effect I want when I make a stroke..  sometimes the paint on the brush stays on the brush.. some times it decides to make a thick sharp stroke and sometimes it come out with this beautiful soft edged blend between what was already on the canvas and what’s on the brush..  

I guess that’s the whole ‘practice’ thing… 

Oh well here’s where things stand. 

painting day-7 castle-take-2

 

So Next up is the big blends on the sky.. that promises to be exciting.. but I need to buy some more pthalo blue and another tube of white and a thing of blending medium before I can tackle that.. 

So that means its Sunday at the earliest.. more likely i’m done til next week.

 

[Edit: almost forgot] 

Oh and here’s a picture of the palette at the end .. its actually kind of a fun texture and visual

painting-day-7-castle-take-2-plaette

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Painting – Day 5 Darkness falls.

It did waaay not flow easily today.  Not happy with it but its still an improvement so I guess that’s a plus.  

I’m going to need to buy some more blue paint before I start to play with the sunlit sky..   Gah  and I’ve used almost half a tube of white so far..  oh well.

Kinda weird tho.. I didn’t work on the parts I wanted to work on.. 

painting-day-4-darkness
Day 5 - The Darkening

{edit:  oops this was day 5}

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Painting- day 4

got a good 2 1/2 hours of slapping pigment around.. was nice but eventually aching feet and the palette told me it was time to call it a day.

 

when theres no more room on the palette its time to stop.
when theres no more room on the palette its time to stop.

I got 2 sides of the planet rendered… Not really happy about the empty hillside one… but not really sure what to add to it.  maybe something will come to me overnight.

painting-day-3-002

Kinda went totally ocd on the plantlife  (thanks wen) 

here’s a detail 

painting-day-3-005

Anyway.. it’s a good day’s progress i think.. tomorrow I’m seriously going to have to tackle the gears in the planet and figure out how to get things to work together.. oh well.

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Painting – day 3

Got a good couple hours in last night.  I was originally just going to put in the base colors for the earth and grass and block out the buildings… buuut.. I simply had to paint something instead of just filling in boring flat blocks of color.

I wound up having a great time, put on the headphones and tuned out the universe for 2 hours… bliss!

Anyway  here’s a crappy cellphone picture (color corrected in photoshop) (and the trees were still wet so that’s why theyre shiny.)

painting-day3
Day three- earth and grass

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Art weekend… succcess

Spent the weekend playing around with acrylics with Wendy.

Took the plunge and started on a big canvas..  It’s definitely a big project, maybe a little too big.. but it’s actually been a lot of fun so far..

first steps
first steps

here’s the (1) initial sketch done as a doodle during a meeting at work. (2) A brief color rough / enlargement done in about 20 minutes on the pc.  and (3) finally the first couple of scribbles to get it onto the freshly gessoed canvas.

art-weekend-002
Drawing on canvas.

Here’s a picture of the canvas with more of the sketch transferred.

Further blues

Laying down the base blue

Laying down the base blue
Further blues
Further Blues

And wrapping it up for the weekend

The Sun and Moon and the Stars
The Sun and Moon and the Stars

Not a bad start  Got most of the base colors for everything laid in..