Dog House

I recently realized that I’ve been drawing lots of creatures over the last month or so. I never made a conscious decision to start a creature trend in my art, but when I lined up my recent drawings side by side one day, I just happened to realize that they all featured creatures of some sort. My bro calls me an animal-loving hippie so it’s no surprise that I love creature art and designs, but at the same time, I kinda love… everything… about art and designs… be it creatures or landscapes or characters or items…. I may want to make up my mind and focus on something someday, but for now, I think I’ll stay a sponge and try to absorb what I can. So for now, have some creatures:

My most recent piece, Cursed Bokoblins, from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. I made this for the Link’s Blacklist II tribute on GameArt HQ.

A preview of a piece I submitted to a contest. I think this cropped version might look better than the full piece, haha! I’ll post the full piece on dA at a later time.

And then here’s another preview for yet another charity art book, Symphonic Hue. Preorders are currently open here. Be sure to give all of the options a glance, as they have bonus sets with bookmarks, as well as an option to pick up the book at AX. All profits will be donated to Deaf Child Worldwide.

So… that’s a lot in just a month for me, and I’m pretty happy I managed to make so much considering I’m usually such a slowpoke! :D I could probably stretch this creature trend even further back in time to include the Manta Ray and Headless Horseman pieces, and probably many many more (wow… now that I’m writing this all out, maybe creatures/monsters are my calling…), but that’s really stretching it and there were trend-breakers along the way like the Candy House piece and Valentine’s Day Eynord.

Still in the works. To be another Zelda fanart (cookie to whoever can guess which dungeon this is, even though I added an extra picture frame).

Practicing Painter, since my ancient Photoshop CS is incompatible with Lion. About time I upgraded it I suppose… but it’s great that I can run Painter smoothly now! While I’ve had it for a while, I’ve only used it for touch ups (with the exception of the whale doodle that I made into a pencil case), so trying to make an illustration start to finish on it is still challenging. I keep catching myself thinking about my Photoshop brushes and layer effects and filters, and trying to find similar functions in Painter, when it’s not about a software’s functions at all and I REALLY should be thinking about the basics like color and value. I’m still at the stage where this is all so hilarious to me and I’m having fun, but I’m sure it’ll start becoming frustrating fast… at least it’s not lag that’ll be the cause of the frustration this time.

I wish I’d studied art in school when I still had the chance… *noodles forever and ever and ever* :(

Making slow progress one pen stroke at a time. Poor Link is still a blur on the right there, haha.

One nice thing about not sticking to a weekly update schedule for the manga anymore is that I can CG things for fun like this again. I also noticed that I haven’t finished any SC-related illustrations in… years… so maybe I can do something about that too. I don’t know how all these webcomickers out there manage an update schedule and still churn out gorgeous illustrations. :/ I’ve always been a very inefficient person, but I guess this holds true to my artist side too. orz Hopefully I can find my balance someday…

Work in progress. Skyward Swooooooord! :D
I know I’m not alone when I say that I make faces of the characters I’m trying to draw. So I bet my face had this look this entire weekend. \^o^/

I think I’ve mentioned time and time again that my sketches are incredibly messy. While a lot of it simply is that I do sketch messy, another part of it is that my eraser adds to the mess more than it erases. Case in point.

My mum walked by and saw the mess I was making, and gave me these:

They’re erasers shaped like Japanese candies. As much as I adore food-shaped erasers, I had my doubts about their erasing abilities. Mum told me to use the brown part, so I did.

Lo and behold, these candy erasers actually erase better than my failure of an eraser that’s marketed for it’s “amazing” erasing capabilities.
I love my mum. :3

Testing out Painter again, but this time instead of giving up after a brief period I’m actually sticking to it a bit longer to the point that I actually might be able to make something! I probably should have just done a simple portrait since it’s a test and I still don’t have a clue how I really want to use Painter yet, but I just had to make it into something scenic… :/ Then again, I think I’m starting to like backgrounds/landscapes more than figures. /swt I took this screenie since it was split in half between my super rough and somewhat refined parts and it looked kinda funny. Everything I make usually starts out that rough… OTL

By the same artist who made the 25th Anniversary piece a few posts ago, Ag+ (check out his pixiv account for the completed painting). I checked out his NicoNico account and found he had more recordings, and thanks to his fanbase, it’s already available on Youtube for viewing! He makes more comments about the process of creating a piece in this video, which if anyone needs help reading, I’d be happy to try and translate. I’ll probably revisit this video several times myself and see if I can learn more about Painter from it, which appears to be the program he’s using (dunno which version though).

Amazing video showing the painting process of a Zelda masterpiece.

The artist’s (Ag+) pixiv profile.