Early Atlantis sketch

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My Atlantis series of paintings was (is?) based on a single dream I had during the summer of 2011. In the dream I was walking through a forest when it opened into a clearing filled with abandoned and broken but incredibly ornate and beautiful mosaic statues.

Above is the first sketch I made while thinking about how to convey the dream in a painting or series. After struggling for an entire year with the problem of conveying the simultaneous sense of wonder and unease I felt in the dream, I finally decided to depict a series of smaller pieces of the scene rather than try to encompass the entire thing in just one image.

What Is Happening: Line Drawings, So Many Line Drawings

I was in Maine and Connecticut for various reasons last week, so I’ve saved up a fair number of drawings and things that I haven’t posted on here yet. Also, I’m launching a new regular comic tomorrow BUT because it is launching tomorrow and I have all this unposted stuff, blah blah blah I’m going to go ahead and wait till tomorrow to talk about that.

So here’s what I’ve been up to.

1. Final Fantasy Legend III PaletteSwap: An artist who does really awesome things, Rusty Shackles, invited me to submit to his PaletteSwap blog, on which artists reinterpret videogame cover art. I did three, all of which are going to be posted this week! It is exciting. Here’s the first one:
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And you should go check out the whole blog, because it is full of excellent videogame-related art. Oh! And you can buy an art print of the one above, if you’re interested!

2. Content-aware studies: I’ve been planning on doing a series of non-comic-related paintings based on the weird deformations that sometimes happen in Photoshop when you use the “content-aware” fill tool.

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Basically, the content-aware fill is for if you have like… Okay say you have a picture of the sky with a bunch of clouds, and there’s a smudge or a bird or something in the middle of one of them, and you don’t want it there. You can select that area and use content-aware fill on it, and that should “smart” fill it, so it will look seamless and like the bird/smudge was never there and it was always just a sky full of clouds.

That may have been a needlessly complicated explanation. Anyway the point is that sometimes the content-aware tool glitches, and if it does so near an image of a person, sometimes it can get really weird and creepy and gruesome.

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So I have a bunch of these content-aware deformations saved, and eventually I plan on painting them. The two sketches above are just studies! And they are the first I’ve done.

3. Final Fantasy IX’s Lindblum: Final Fantasy IX is my favorite game of all time. (I wrote about it a whole bunch in Manic Pixel Dream Girl 2, if you missed it!) I’ve done a lot of drawings of things from FF9, but my favorite thing to draw is the game’s largest city, Lindblum.

Here’s a study I sketched last week, for another one of the alternate cover arts I did:
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And, for comparison I guess, here’s a little painting I did of Lindblum like two years ago:

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That was from way before I’d become comfortable with my current painting process. I think I actually used gouache, which is WAY too expensive to use regularly. Now I use acrylic, very very watered down. Also I’m a lot less afraid of putting in lots of details now, just because I’m more practiced. For example, the line drawing above I drew in one go with a pen, over the course of an hour or two. The painting I did in like a hundred steps… Pencil, pen, paint, like 3 more layers of paint, then pen again. And as you can see, even after all those steps, it’s still less detailed and the architecture is a bit off.

I like the colors though. One of the first paintings I ever did that I was REALLY happy with, so even though it’s easy to criticize in retrospect, I still kinda like it.

4. Trees on Lake Pemaquid: No, you’re not going to escape my post-Maine blogpost without some drawings of Maine. I drew some trees over a lake. In context, and then just some random trees there at the bottom.

trees

Okay, that’s it for now! Big announcement about a new comic, coming tomorrow! :)

Giant XXL Special Edition MoCCA Fest Blogstravaganza!

I’ve actually been drawing quite a bit over the past few days, but I’ve been doing so in Maine, where I sadly don’t have access to my scanner. Luckily, I still haven’t blogged EVEN ONCE about the wonderfulness that was my experience at MoCCA Fest NYC last weekend. So this is the perfect opportunity to do that.

Last Saturday, I intended just to “stop by” MoCCA Fest, but I accidentally stayed for about four hours. I talked to a whole bunch of artists all of whom are doing really interesting things in the intersecting worlds of comics and illustration. I also bought a metric shitload of comics:

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Keep in mind, none of these cost more than $5, and most were $1 or $2, and some were free.

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And that’s not even everything…

I’ll probably end up doing more posts on some of the comics and, especially, ideas I acquired at MoCCA Fest, but for now I just want to do a round-up of some of the cooler stuff I ended up with. (Generally the reason I have dubbed these comics “cooler stuff” is because they are in richly-printed color, which tends to make my eyes pop out of my head, in a good way, and I do most of my comics in color, so I’m always looking for tips on how to successfully make the transition to print.)

Okay! Let’s go.

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Above is just ONE SPREAD from an issue of the Comix Reader, an ongoing series of anthologies, printed on newsprint, in which each of 20 participating artists gets one page to do with whatever he or she wants. It’s committed to being fun and iconoclastic and hilarious… and it is all of those things. Also, it’s sold for just $1/issue, which means I bought all four that have been published. Aaaand I will absolutely be doing a post dedicated just to these so I’ll move on to the next thing for now. Suffice it to say that the Comix Reader is fucking fantastic.

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This one, by Kaisa Leka, is kind of important to me because its form is so interesting. Little Fish Big Fish is printed on both sides of a long accordion-style book, which is something I’m considering exploring for print publications of my own. I found it at a table dedicated to Finnish comics, and it smells like an empty crayon box, which is a bit weird but not necessarily a bad thing.

I asked the woman who was tending the table how exactly Little Fish Big Fish was printed and she said it was done on a couple long pieces of card stock, then folded and glued together by hand. Very intriguing.

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This is a tiny bit of a BEAUTIFUL comic (drawn by Ellis Rosen and colored by Sam Marlow) called HomeQuest. It’s a satire of fantasy quest narratives, especially those found in kind of your run-of-the-mill RPGs, my personal favorite genre of videogame.

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Okay in service of not making this post entirely NSFW, I am only including a small piece of the cover of this anthology which is descriptively titled Pizza and Sex. Inside you can find short comics and visual narratives by a bunch of artists, all about, well… pizza and sex. Some stories have people having sex and eating pizza; some are having sex WITH pizza; there’s also some pizza having sex with other pizza. Basically it’s hilarious, and a well-orchestrated example of a ridiculous concept that ends up inspiring some pretty excellent art.

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On a um… completely different note, Here’s a part of one of the many gorgeous pages in Molly Ostertag‘s Khutulun, which is based on the true story of a Mongolian princess-slash-warrior. (This is the same artist who does the visuals for the ongoing webcomic Strong Female Protagonist.)

I talked to Ostertag about her process, because I fell in love with her art style—specifically the really delicate-yet-bold way that she colors her work. It turns out she colors in Photoshop! This blew my mind a bit, because I am such a proponent of doing things “the old-fashioned way” when it comes to painting (for my own work; I definitely don’t look down on other people’s methods, regardless of what they are!). Not that I’m going to stop using actual physical paint any time soon, but I am super impressed with how real-actual-paint-ish many artists can make their Photoshop-painting look.

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Above is a tiny, hysterical piece of Sylvan Migdal‘s Rho. Oh uh… that link is probably NSFW. Sorry bout that.

Anyway, I was already familiar with Migdal’s work on (definitely NSFW) Curvy, which is a lovely, smutty sci-fi/fantasy adventure story. Thing is, I actually was sure that Migdal, who sometimes goes by the pen-name M. Magdalene, was a woman! Maybe it’s just because there are so many different types of queer ladies in Curvy. But when I saw Migdal at his table at MoCCA Fest, I said “Oh, I like Curvy,” and he was like, “Thanks!” and of course I immediately said, “YOU did Curvy?? I thought you were a woman!”

Everyone at the table thought that was pretty funny. Comics: defying gender stereotypes!

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You’ll notice that this last thing isn’t in color. It also isn’t really a comic. But it IS a fortune-teller about global warming. So obviously I had to buy it.

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It came in a $2 “grab bag” of comics by Hazel Newlevant.

Whew. Okay, that’s enough for now. I’ll be sure to go into more detail about individual comics at some point, as well as talk about various things I learned from talking to all those artists, other than what I briefly mentioned above. More soon!

What Is Happening: Hands & Feet & Tentacles Edition

A couple days ago I finally finished Manic Pixel Dream Girl 3, so at least until the next intense deadline I’m all yours, People Who Read My Blog.

Oh, MPDG 3 is going to be published next week, and I will post about it here when that happens! In the meantime, here’s what else I’ve been working on in what little spare time I’ve had. Enjoy!

0. Retronauts Kickstarter Prize!!!: Okay so this isn’t really something I’ve been WORKING ON (which is why I’m numbering it 0), but it’s an announcement I’d like to make anyway. Retronauts is a podcast about old videogames, and it is amazing and brilliant and informative and I’ve been listening to it since 2006 (really!). Unfortunately, Retronauts is now without a home because its parent site, 1up.com, has been shut down.

So Retronauts launched a Kickstarter to continue the podcast, and it has already been funded several times over. “WHY POST ABOUT IT NOW, THEN?!” you may be asking. Well, the Retronauts guys have added a bunch of “stretch goals,” things they will do if they reach certain levels of funding. (For example: At $42,000, which they’ve already reached, they will do two 24-hour livestreams for charity.) And, because they were funded so much more quickly than they expected, they’ve also had to add a whole bunch of new prizes for backers.

MY POINT: At the $250 funding level, backers can choose to receive custom videogame fanart from one of a number of artists, including me! I don’t expect many people reading this will want to drop $250 on Retronauts (though everyone should; they are really a wonderful group of talented people doing an awesome thing), but sharing the Kickstarter or checking out the podcast if you like old videogames does just as much good. And, on the off-chance that you want some custom art by me AND want to donate $250 to a good cause, you can’t go wrong here. ;)

Now on to the drawings…

1. Hands: Sometime in the last week or so, I managed to extricate myself from the grasp of Manic Pixel Dream Girl and go outside and take a walk in the park near my apartment. I sat down on a bench for awhile and watched people walk or run or bike past me, and I tried to draw their hands as quickly as I could.

Hands are easy to draw, but very difficult to draw WELL. And there are certain hand positions that are really really common (hanging loose by one’s side; holding a cellphone; holding a water bottle or glass; gesturing while talking) that aren’t super intuitive to draw. Or else I’ll have some idea in my head of what they look like, but that idea is actually pretty far from reality. So I think looking at and drawing an endless parade of hands was a helpful exercise. Here are most of the fruits of my labors:

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2. Feet: Oh, and feet are fucking impossible to draw; I’m absolutely terrible at them. I plan on doing a similar outing where I just draw feet in the near future, but I’m a bit scared to be honest because good god do I have a hard time with feet. Eventually I will stop being a coward, but for now here are my own feet from when I was sitting on the bench drawing hands. I’m actually happy with how they came out:

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3. Final Fantasy Legend III alternate boxart: One of my fellow Retronauts-volunteer artists, Rusty Shackles, has a blog-project called PaletteSwap, at which he invites artists to submit reinterpretations of videogame boxart. He alerted me to its existence and I think it’s a really awesome idea, so I spent yesterday working on a painting of a new design for the boxart of Final Fantasy Legend III, one of the first RPGs I ever played as a kid. (I wrote a bit about it in MPDG1.)

Rusty prefers that his artists not post their entries on their own blogs until they run on PaletteSwap, and mine will run in two weeks (I’ll post the final version here at that point), so I’ll show you my concept drawings instead for now:

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This is hopefully just the first of a few of these I’ll do, all centering on an iconic or slightly-overlooked-but-should-be-iconic monster or villain from an RPG. For FF Legend III, I chose to show Xagor, the game’s final boss, in a battle with the Talon, the game’s signature time-travelling airship. I have plans for a couple other games like FF7, FF9, Chrono Cross, and probably some others that are slipping my mind at the moment.

And that’s about it for this post! Next on my list of projects to work on like a crazy person: Finally finishing Lost In Hong Kong. Have a good weekend!