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:

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:

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:

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!