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:
final-fantasy-legend-3
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.

content-aware-1

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.

content-aware-2

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:
lindblum

And, for comparison I guess, here’s a little painting I did of Lindblum like two years ago:

lindblum-small_o

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! :)