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Wow. The past week has just been a maelstrom of tasks. I've been making it my spring semester goal to draw an average of twelve hours a day and with all the projects lately it's been hard to find a way NOT to draw at least 12 hours a day. Usually it's start drawing by 8am, finish drawing before midnight, eat when I remember to. But hey, it's got to be good for skills, right? Right? ....Guys?

Between classes and personal projects the planets have aligned in such a way that all I do is thumbnail lately. Thumbnails forever, thumbnail until YOU LOVE IT. Seriously, getting a little punchy here. What were we talking about?

Ah yes. Thumbs. So earlier this year I mentioned that I and a couple of mates started a club and out project is adapting The Old Man and the Sea for video games. Weird concept, I'm sure Hemingway is doing backflips in his grave over this one. Funny thing is, I think it would actually be a pretty sweet game the way I'm doing it. The specifics are in one of the posts below, but I did some inspiration boards today.

I have mixed feelings on open world exploration type games, because I'm all about the story, but I think that for what I'm doing a Shadow of the Colossus type approach is really spot on for the material. It reminds me of wandering the dune sea in SWTOR, or even in Uncharted 3. The desert can be very powerful and beautiful. With the right backdrop, music and random encounters what fun that sort of world could be. I haven't played Journey, but I wonder if it's a similar concept.

As part of my Visual Development class we were given an exercise. Usually I don't care for exercises too much to be completely honest. They're often "for your own good" sort of things that really ARE beneficial but also time consuming and horrendous. (I recently had to draw 100 cubes from different angles. It gets old quickly, let me tell you.) This one was really fun though, here's how it works:

Write down 6 emotions. Write down 6 place types. Write down 6 occupations. Then, roll a d6 for each list and do a thumbnail of a character that embodies all three words. It can be pretty hilarious, the combinations. Reminds me of dwarf fortress! (Crafty unicorn steaks anyone?) The top two rows are from that exercise and it was really pretty awesome! I would do it again, for kicks. Also good for brainstorming when the creativity isn't flowing naturally, so that was really great.

Then I did some silhouettes of soldier guys because I thought it'd be a good personal exercise. Then I thought about it and remembered how lady soldiers always seem to get ripped off, so I did some of those too. Armor for ladies is harder though, hard to still make them look like ladies while also making them look appropriately soldiery.

I'm also continuing work on my 3 part props for a game puzzle. I'm doing a reactor that powers a futuristic lab facility. The reactor gets sabotaged and the PC has to locate a vile of the reagent (volatile), get it back to the reactor and insert it to restart the power. The hose lines also need to be reconnected in the correct order, so the props are the reactor, the reagent/ transport vile, and a tool to reconnect the lines. It's coming along, hoping to have it finalized and colored by the weekend.

Finally, I decided to do a character speed paint last Monday for a change. I did it from imagination, wanted to make a spacey bounty hunter type character:

I like the red one, but my friend said it looked like Samus Aran. I guess you just can't do a spacey woman in red without someone thinking it looks Metroid. There are issues, but I finished it in just under three hours with no references, so I'm kind of proud. I like to usually use some kind of reference, just for inspiration. I went into this one not really sure what I was going to do and just sort of let it happen and I'm reasonably happy with the results.