2009, for serious?

Happy New Year!

I brought in the new year last night by playing videogames at a friend's place and not drinking at all and also not kissing anyone. We managed to get through the Mortal Kombat side of the Mortal Kombat VS DC Universe story mode so I think we came out on top as new year's celebrations go.

I'm spending the first day of 2009 cleaning up after 2008. Packing away the Christmas tree, trying to tie up loose art ends (that'll take a few more days yet), trying (failing) to fix my sister's computer and just generally cleaning up.

2008, you were pretty okay, and the bits of you that sucked were probably preventable or not that big a deal. 2009, I have high hopes!

More art, I've been busy not studying today, hooray! At least I've cleaned the office and cleared 1.5 owed arts off my list. ALSO a little while ago I resolved to enter at least one competition a month and hey I'm totally doing it so far! I didn't think it would hold but I've entered three in the last two months, woo.




Aaawright, three ATCs for lemurkat:









Work In Progress on that competition entry from last month ahaha. I think I'm going in the right direction colour-wise but we'll see if I don't overdo it.



Yay it's Halloween time in Guild Wars (and, er, elsewhere). omg I feel so guilty about the progressively terrible inking on this thing. I TOTALLY APOLOGISE (but I am not fixing it). I'm hoping to score an honourable mention or something maybe 'cause I just want a set of skill pins and every prize pack includes them! Cooome ooooon lowest place, let's go.




Yes, that's right, no DnD sketches for once. Craziness!

Does anyone else hate PITT artist pens? God I hate them. I mean, I love them, for about the first ten minutes of inking and then the tips break down like the absolute mofos they are and I am filled with this hideous rage toward Faber Castell for manufacturing such a cruelly short-lived product. GRUAOARRGH.

So, what's up, peeps?

Art as promised. I am not like politicians! I deliver on my promises sometimes! Having said that I still owe...7 people art. I think. I hope! It better not be more than that, far out. Plus a couple sketch meme things I have to do/finish. Nnggg.





Lilly Clarentine, ship's quatermaster, doing something or other with rope. Apparently I never posted this but it's a few months old. Huh. Maybe I was keeping it for something?


Getting a hang on a friend's DnD character. The character promptly died a horrible death, I don't know why I bother sometimes.


I guess all these DnD characters is good practice. Inbetween getting a feel for different characters, trying to be creative with armour/clothing and trying to keep up with players' requests/whims, hey, I am probably learning something!


The dragon dude is my character, ,Paragon Paladine (rofl). We made the jump to DnD4 rules so of course the first thing I did was make a character from the most inhuman race available. He can breathe fire!

My favourite thing about the dragonkin is probably this one line of their race description in the DND4 rulebook. "Play a Dragonkin if you want to ...look like a dragon!" WOW REALLY???


Okay, something that is not DnD! BUT still roleplaying games, ahaha. A preliminary sketch/concept for a painting of one of my Guild Wars characters. It's meant to be really dark and gorey, pools of blood, that sort of thing. A bit of a departure from my usual.

I've got a super cute a shiny idea for a GW character portrait partly sketched out too so it balances. :P


Monsters, yay. That little kappa dude is pretty cute, I think I'll do something with him in future.




IRLs I totally bought 18 drinking glasses for $5 yesterday! Hot deal! I think I'll go back and get some more some time during the week. Gonna get in on that hot glass etching action, as soon as I can get some etching cream. Apparently some Australian legislation was passed that makes it difficult to get (some brands?) here and also it's a hazardous material and technically shouldn't be sent through Auspost. What a pain!

I'm getting sick! AWESOME!

I felt so on track with art and uni but if I get worse...waugh. You know what sucks? Music. And food. They all suck. Well, I guess music is okay except for that one track before that made me feel MORE sick. wtf, music can do that?

Right before the website launch too. Screw you, too, universe!

Oh well.

For The Many Worlds Contest:


I won a prize! Now I just have to finish the thing. Can't decide if I should go digital or traditional colouring.

And here's 3 Pokemon ATCs that I'm trading to Lemurkat

Huntail



Lileep



Magcargo



I think Lileep will come out the best.



I know I shouldn't skip the tute tomorrow but it's so tempting. D:

Waugh, spent too much time today finishing my Project Rooftop Vampirella ReVamp thing. T_T

Spore is really cool btw but probably lacks replayability for a great majority of people.



Or, hell, drawing any "hawt chick" makes me feel totally gay. What kind of girl draws girls with huge boobs and teeny waists and these mile high legs and STILETTOS, bygod the stilletos? THE OBVIOUS ANSWER WOULD BE: a girl who likes girls *wiggly eyebrows*.


Here's a prelim sketch just for the hell of it:

I took a lot of cues from traditional male vampire attire. Slicked back hair, widow's peak, tuxedo, that sort of thing. Traditonal female vampires are dead boring with totally impractical long flowing gowns and bathing in virgin's blood. Sooooo last century.


I almost gave her long sleeves but then it looked like she was wearing this strange business jacket miniskirt combo and it was kind of weird. 80s BUSINESS ATTIRE = HOT STUFF AMIRITE?


The real problem with giving her clothes at all is what happens when she turns into a bat? Obviously I haven't ever read a Vamirella comic so maybe that is dealt with already but really if she lost the clothes she currently wears in the comics who would even notice?


Okay I am so sick of vampires for months now, ty.

LET'S TALK PIRATES, ARRRRRR!

Actually I have almost 0 new piratey things to show. I have HALF a piratey thing to show. Here it is!



Enthalpien and Fleance! These two are too fun to draw. If I get around to doing a little graphics like this for the rest of the pirates they'll all go up on a cast page on the website.




It's Talk Like A Pirate Day in a couple weeks! I'm aiming to have the site up by then. That'd be awesomesauce. It'll be pretty rudimentary though since inbetween midsemester assessment and, er, regular assessment I am pretty slow at getting things done. Also CSS is freakin' hard, what the hell.

Posting those comic pages, as promised to the curious. There's only three pages and they don't really go anywhere. :D







I had to reink that first page a second time when my computer crashed just as I was finishing it. :| Also, man, look at that lack of line variation. Really going to have to do these over with more attention.



Waugh.

There is totally something I am meant to be doing right now and I can't quite put my finger on it. Hate that feeling!

MOO stickerbook :D

Yay, stickerbook from MOO arrived. :D





So I ordered one of these cool looking little stickerbooks from MOO.com a little while ago. You get 90 1" square stickers in the book divided into 15 pages of 6 stickers each. You can choose to have your stickers distributed however you want (90 different designs or 15 sets of 6 designs, etc). They're about $10 and then an extra couple dollars for shipping international (MOO is based in the UK).

I just uploaded that old button art to see how they'd do with it. It printed pretty well actually! I'm happy with them. So mini sticker sheets are definitely on the list for my next con. Each mini sheet of stickers is perforated so it can tear right off. Even selling them for $1 each you make your money back.



Here's a clumsy photo of my hand and a single sticker so you can get an idea of size or something.



I'm surprised at how happy I am with the printing. Colours look good, the gradients aren't screwed up, good resolution... Totoro maybe is a tad dark from memory but still looks good so someone over there is paying attention, or they've got a neat algorithm set up that's keeping things in check. Or both. Extra bonus: The gloss finish is waaaay shiny, oh mans.



Iiiiin conclusion, MOO stickerbooks: Awesome. Here's hoping they eventually come out with larger sticker options and stuff as well. Maybe some more shapes too - circles and whatnot.

Printer Colourhouse

The postcards I ordered arrived today! I'm sort of on a crusade to find good cheap printers and eventually compile some sort of database for other artists. Haven't worked out a rating system yet but these guys are probably, like, a 5/10?



Ordered from Colourhouse at $50 for 100 cards and prices go downwards from there. Their site would like you to think they are based in Australia but even the samples I requested a while ago came from China so that explains the low prices and such. :P Proofing is only available as a PDF (a fairly accurate one, admittedly, the colour discrepancy was pretty true and I just didn't bother to make them fix it) and uploading files to them is a bitch. They're *trying* to do the whole customer service thing but given the distance, dodgy website and language barrier it's actually pretty hard to communicate with them. It doesn't help that they have some crazy email system whereby the listed emails don't actually work (save for one NZ one?), and the on-site message system is hella buggy.



They're about the quality that I expected so I'm not disappointed. Actual printing quality is kinda low considering the printing facilities the printer apparently has but the cardstock is decent (whether it is actually 350gsm I'm not sure yet). No printing errors (besides some colour inaccuracy that I was too lazy to upload a new file to correct), no cutting errors, no markings from grubby hands or ink spills, etc. Probably going to use them as promo items or inserts. :D

And here's the back:



Yeah, 50c per card for full colour both sides. That's an okay price for such a small quantity. Slightly bent corner there is my bad, been manhandling this one. The rest are safe in the package though. Coooouuuuld have been packed better - the external package was quite beat up and there was no bubble wrap or scrap paper protecting the block of cards.

My one unexpected annoyance is that there's a laminate finish on both sides. Who laminates the back side of a postcard? lol. Still write-able on with a pen though so w/e.




Conclusion:
Despite the hilariously engrish-y website and free shipping mostlikely won't use these guys again. The only thing I might consider them for would be cheap business cards or more promo material (simple images will give best results, probably. Something to keep in mind) and I reckon I'll run across a better (local!) printer with similar prices sooner or later...

Got back from SMASH!/Sydney today and I'm totally exhausted. Joey and I had a lot of fun though and my art and the pirate comic sample/preview we had went down pretty well which is encouraging!



I stayed up all night on Thursday night trying to do up a 6-7 page ARGH! be the way of PIRATES sample/preview for SMASH! Needless to say I failed utterly and all I actually managed was a 3-page sample and a slapdash cover. My home printer was being a jerk though, printing blacks as, like, 50% grey! So we ended up throwing everything onto a CD and hoping against hope itself that we could find somewhere to print samples when we got to Sydney. 8D;;

Got our Jetstar flight to Sydney without too much trouble. I kind of like the flight to Sydney - compared to Thailand and England it is hella short. Then caught the train from Sydney airport to Central station for $10 each (that's STUDENT prices) which was pretty overpriced for only three stations worth of train ride? :/ We discovered that it's about $40 by taxi though so it was actually a good option despite the 1km walk through the rain with our luggage to get to the hotel... :P

We stayed at Y Hotel - $100 a night for a double room and only a couple kms walk from Chinatown/Broadway/those places which was pretty decent. Right next to a ghetto though and the rooms are super teensy weensy (like the size of a bedroom in a normal house fits EVERYTHING including bathroom at this place!) so that's something to keep in mind if you're travelling to Sydney with a budget...

Once we reached the hotel we went to pick up the buttons we ordered from a dude nearby (ended up accidently walking through a ghetto to get there, yay). They didn't print very well. :( I was pretty disappointed. Paid the guy, took them back, inspected them further - yeah, disappointing. The art should have looked a lot better. :/ So, learn from my experience, kids, don't get buttons from here. The website is very professional and I suspect he'd be able to handle simple designs very well but it was a mistake with the art I had. :( I think we're going to BUY our own button machine and do our own buttons from now on, as I don't trust someone else with them now... When that happens I'll offer to rent the machine to people in Brisbane and/or offer a badge making service at a small price.


Disappointing buttons. :( Mostly the Riku/Sora ones are just too dark/dull.

Later we wandered the area looking for food and, if we were very lucky, somewhere with a printer. We were VERY lucky. Found a fantastic little place that was like a cross between a convenience store, a bubble tea bar (you heard me), a bakery, and an internet cafe. They had a printer that could print at 1200dpi. CRAZIER.

I could sleep on Friday night at ALL. I was so nervous about the convention and going up on stage for Manga Idol. D:


The venue being set up. It's so...empty.

Saturday morning - hurried to SMASH! Skipped the free breakfast at the hotel because we got moving pretty late... (We met Chuc, who was our table neighbour, for the first time. He's working on a really awesome looking story about a French soldier in WW1 - it looks super hot. Also classy. I'll definitely be buying a copy when I can. :D) It took us over an hour to set up the table. D: People were already coming in before we finished, whoops. I had to bugger off and leave Joey to fend for himself at that point as I needed to get down to the main stage for Manga Idol preparation (omggg).


Joey at our table as the congoers flood in. Yay! There really needs to be some kind of warning siren when people are first allowed through the front door...

Met the other Manga Idol contestants! They were awesome people/artists and I was really pleased to meet them, though I was so worried about going on stage that might not have come across... :P Syku, H Li, K6, it was really awesome to meet you all and hopefully we'll run across each other again some day. :)

Moving on - I somehow MIRACULOUSLY won Manga Idol and scored a Wacom A5 Wide Intuos3 (worth I think $450?). Hot damn! All the entries should be up on the Wacom site eventually so I'll post when they are. :) I-I was so shocked. If anyone took a video of the thing I'll post that too so you can all see how much of an idiot I looked. The tablet's packaging took a bit of battering on the trip home and almost got crushed beneath the wheels of a train in Brisbane but it's home safe and sound now and I don't know what to do with it! On the one hand I'm tempted to keep it (after all, it IS my prize!) but on the other hand that $400 from Ebaying it would cover the costs of the whole trip... Our table didn't sell all that well (expected) and we had a lot of extra costs, being out of towners, so the money would be a big help. :/ Hnnnnnn.

Spent the rest of the day manning the table - trying to sell badges (sold, uh, 34 Totoros somehow and 7 each of Sora and Riku. A few Sogekings! NO ONE liked Ifrit or Shiva! I partly blame the printing issues for low sales but I think our display and designs could have been better too. Live and learn!), fetching food and drinks. Joey and I took turns wandering around the place throughout the day - SMASH! had a really fantastic setup with a lot of events happening on centre stage keeping things fresh and letting people walk around and look at stuff while STILL listening to/watching the stuff on stage. I was super impressed with it. In addition, the food court had asian drinks (tad expensive but my god they were THERE) and a takoyaki stall and cake store! Among other actually decent food. So so so impressed! Supanova, take notes (although I know you won't T_T).

The biggest draw to our table was the art I had on display from Pokemonathon. Glad I brought it along, it was sort of a last minute thing I threw in. But yeah, consistently got the most compliments and comments on the Pokemon art. I guess everyone else feels the same way about Pokemon as I do... I shouldn't be surprised, since it's such a big part of all our childhoods. We got a lot of requests for Pokemon badges so rest assured, people, next year I will be all over that! Also came up with an idea of a little Pokemon artbook for next year with all my pokemonathon art in it - I think a big appeal of the originals is flipping through the book and seeing all the different takes whether or not they are favourites.


The table front! It looks okay, right?

The sample comic also got quite a few reads, some comments, a few laughs. One guy apparently was very keen on the art, a fusion of American and Japanese styles that needed to happen as he saw it. :P Thanks, guy, that was encouraging! I wasn't at the table to speak with him at the time but Joey relayed the exchange to me. Again, when I was away from the table, someone came up and DEMANDED that the comic be done by Animania. Unfortunately even if it is done by then we won't be going to any more Sydney cons this year! Sorry! Anyway, the overall response was good and really encouraging. There was some kids who kept circling back to our table to reread the three page sample there, so cute. :DDD I'm going to work hard to get the comic site and the sample pages + more up by the end of August. Thankyou to everyone who stopped by and read the sample or commented or even just cracked a half-smile, it made everything we've been working towards seem much more REAL and I'm super motivated now! :)

Got a small amount of interest in commissions but didn't sell any at the con. I might find myself getting some emails about commissions in the next few weeks though. We'll see. Joey was worried that my prices were too high when people weren't all that interested but I refuse to work for any less than $5-10 an hour. I'm not desperate for money and I refuse to push the prices that budding artists are expected to work for any lower than they already are. My prices ARE low, I will not draw for free, geez. /rant sorry. :P

Left the con about 7pm when the crowd had finally died out. Got home and collapsed. Hoo boy.

Saturday Joey and I wandered around Broadway, Market City, China Town, and part of the inner city. It was awesome. :D We went to this great fully automated internet place called Everywhere Internet where we caught up with stuff and we played some Warcraft 3 with some hilarious bratty kids. Internet was really cheap there too at $2 an hour! Man, we need a place like that in Brissy! Eventually we had dinner at Chat Thai (across from Capitol Theatre) - really authentic Thai food. It was great to go there again though I don't know if Joey fully appreciates authentic Thai food... :P While I'm on food recs - Crocodile Thai (round the corner and down the street from Chat) is also pretty fine!

After dinner we had ice cream at a place nearby called Passionflower. Really fancy desserts, done up all pretty (with a price to match, mind...). Then we went upstairs to what looked like an arcade but turned out to be this enooooormous collection of those Japanese Photo Booth. Jeebus, you only need one or two photo booths in an arcade, right? Not TWENTY. Dayum. Fortunately the other side of the floor was filled with skill testers which are SORT of like arcade games... :P We tried so many times to get a Chopper Chup toy and then to get a regular Chopper toy and then Chopper Chup again... It was freakin' impossible. At one stage Joey's determination to have a Chopper of his own wavered and he won me a bear at a different machine first try which just goes to show how horrible and impossible the Chopper toys were! We also tried to get me an adorable plushy flavoured milk carton toy. Soooo cute! I wish I'd taken photos to show of all these high quality japanese skill tester machine toys, man!

At least I can show off my bear. :D He hangs on the door to my office from now on. :)


He has really short soft fur! High quality toy, man. Now wonder UFO machines do so well in Japan, there is actually decent stuff in them!

Spent Sunday night packing up bags and whatnot. We made a real mess of the room - stuff just sort of strewn about the place in our haste.

Monday we somehow managed to miss free breakfast yet again because we are losers who woke up just as the kitchen was closing. CURSES. Hightailed it out of there with just enough time for Joey to check out a local gaming store and buy 5000 Magic: The Gathering cards. FOR $50! That's an insane price. 1 cent each! Joey doesn't care about the tournament worthiness of his MTG cards and just likes to play with friends so it was a real bargain. :D Then we rushed to the airport only for the plane to be delayed an hour. Nurrrrr...

So now I'm home again, jiggety jig, and everything's come back safely with me. :) Amazing! We had a really good time. I'd love to do SMASH! again next year but I don't know if I can afford it. I had help from Mum this year in the form of a 21st birthday present and the winning Manga Idol will help out heaps if I sell the prize. Not exactly the kind of circumstances that will come up again any time soon...


The loot. I was trying to keep my spending down but a few things still snuck in... There's a couple other things, will update later. :D

THE END!

Notes for next con:
- Nicer display (A3 upwards PRINTS to put up on the wall and more prominent/colourful signage)
- Put the Pokemonathon art in a nice, flexible, DURABLE folder (the originals were getting manhandled, man!)
- Have a float ready BEFORE the con... :P
- Keep track of sales and float in a register book or something!
- make own goddam badges
- Postcards and bookmarks - a good idea!

If you actually read all that, you are nuts. Grats!



In summary:
SMASH!: FUN!
SYDNEY: DIRTY BUT FUN!
ART: WELL RECIEVED (more pokemon)!
COMIC: ALSO WELL RECIEVED (finish it)!
BUTTONS/PRINTS: DON'T TRUST OTHER PEOPLE!
SKILL TESTER TOYS: ARE BITCHES!

:D :D :D :D :D

GO SPEED RACER GO

Just saw Speed Racer and it was fantabulous (insert sparkles)! OMG YAY RACER X ILU. Hell, I love all those characters. Even Annoying Kid and his Monkey Sidekick! Joey says it is the greatest thing he has ever seen. Now that's a glowing endorsement if I've ever seen one! I can't believe this movie bombed at the box office argh damn you EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD. We are totally buying, like, two copies of the (special edition?) DVD when it comes out and an enormous TV to watch it on or something. I don't know.

In other news: Money Art!. What better way to usher in good financial luck than a money plant/flower? :D Awesome.

Shmans, updating Pokemonathon should not be this hard! C'mooon Photobucket, upload faster! I've had about five server errors tonight. :/

Speaking of Pokemonathon, it sure is teaching me to colour better. (Geez I'm tired, I just tried to spell "colour" as "coller" D8) The most valuable piece of knowledge I've gleaned thus far is "When in doubt push the contrast/saturation like a mofo." Also I rely on the primary colour triad a leetle too much, hurrhurr. Guess I can work on breaking that with the next 142 pokemon. :|

Mamomath postings have begun over at Pokemonathon! Hurrah! The Pokemaniac within me rejoices!

Sharpened pencils are really dangerous. BOXES of sharpened pencils even moreso. Ow.

Mostly contour drawings this time. Apparently I'm pretty good at them, yaaay.

These first two are without looking at the sheet (except to re-place the pencil):


Monster feeeet D:


Claaawwww haaaaaaaaaand D8

The rest are WITH looking at the paper. Which actually makes it harder because I have no excuse for getting the proportions wacky, hahaha.



This one's ten minutes. I think the rest are 20-30 minutes each.

And the only non-contour, really, drawing of the night:


I dunno, now I look at it, it looks kind of off balance and bleh.




Nnnn, Photobucket, why are you such prudes?

Long overdue lifedrawing stuff under the cut! But first, here's the banner I came up with for the Smash! site. Finally!



It ended up being so simple and it shouldn't have taken this long, lol. xD Might tweak the colours tomorrow. Thoughts, guys?

Um. Also here's the final minus one attempt because it was kind of looking good! Just way too complex for a tiny banner. xD


Maybe I can polish him up and use him on business cards though so I don't feel like I wasted all that time. :D

Really need to do more digital painting. I feel like with a bit of practice I can improve a lot. You know, like I'm just before that bit on the learning curve where the gradient starts to slant like whoa. If not with technique then speed, for sure.




Turns out I am hell of a slow life drawer. This took me, like, half an hour of starting and restarting and aaauuuugh.


I can never resist drawing/shading all the awesome curves before I've even finished the overall figure. Must. Resist. It's no good in the long run. T_T




Don't think too hard about her midriff. Whenever I try to work it out I start wincing.




In other news: Should start updating at Pokemonathon next week! Just got to get Missingno down and then I'll start posting. :B I'm up to, ummm, approximately Sandslash with the inks. Gotta start colouring though!