Wood Puzzles, Pokemon, and Paper Mache

When I first started those Trigun + Pokemon pictures, I originally meant to do the main quartet, plus the main bad guys and perhaps a few secondary characters.  But I knew my attention span wouldn't hold out that long, so I cut it down the to four heroes.  Good call, because I have one left that I've started the sketch for and I'm itching to do other things!  So much so that I've been slipping in other small projects.

Project One:  Last weekend, I revamped a wood puzzle.  A friend gave it to me, and for some reason, I looked at it and said, "I want to paint it."

 

I painted the pieces black with acrylic paint, and then drew on the pieces with a silver sharpie.  I've been playing Zelda: Twilight Princess, and got the idea for the color scheme from the Twilight Realm, which features dark colors with light highlights.  The text is the Hylian alphabet used in that game.  It actually correlates with the English alphabet, and the blocks have real words on them, although I chose random, Zelda-related words like, "Link," "Hyrule," "Hero," etc.

Project Two:  If you could call it a project.  There's a drawing challenge floating around tumblr in which the participants go to a website that generates a random pokemon.  They then redraw that pokemon three times, redesigning it three ways.  It's for general drawing practice and for exercising your imagination.  I spent an evening doing some sketches.

Look at this derpy guy!  I tried to make him look a little cooler.

Keldeo's a little cutie.  Here's "Slightly More Realistic Keldeo," "Epic Stallion Keldeo," and "Baby Keldeo."

Project Three:  Naka-kon is coming up and I need to get cracking on my stun gun.  Today I started paper mache-ing it.  My paper mache paste kinda weirds me out.  It's made from flour and water, which the internet assures me is a totally common paper mache recipe.  But it has the look and feel of thick pancake batter, and I can't shake the feeling that I'm smearing pancake batter all over my gun.  I feel like a mad scientist creating an experiment in which a styrofoam gun, breakfast food and newspaper combine together into one monstrous abomination of nature.  Science has gone too far!

Here's a picture, by the way.

Tomorrow, I'll smear pancake batter on the other half.  Later in the week, or next weekend, I'll add a second layer.  The internet says to use about four layers, but I think that's for a hollow paper mache project that needs to be really sturdy?  I'm just going to go with two.  I think that'll do me, since I'm doing it to hide tape and to give a better surface to paint on, and I don't need it to be all that sturdy on it's own.

That's all for now!  Peace out!

Surprise! More Pokemon!

Okay, so it's not really much of a surprise.  Here's the next picture for my Trigun + Pokemon stuff.

Not much to say, I guess.  Just like the other ones, this was inked in pen and colored with color pencils.  It's dark, but it didn't come out as overwhelmingly black as I was afraid it might. XD  One of the precautions I took was to layer the black with another color.  So his suit is black layered with blue, and the pokemon are black layered with brown.

Something funny:  Trigun's creator once jokingly implied that Wolfwood looks like he belongs in organized crime.  (He totally does, by the way.)  I worked on this while I was visiting my parents last weekend, and my mom looked over my shoulder and says, "So, is he kind of a dark character?  Because his pokemon are kind of scary looking."  Dangit, Wolfwood!  XD  Stop being such a bad-guy-esque good guy!  (Just kidding, don't stop.  It's one of the things I like about you.)

Okay, so, I have Vash next, and then I'm done with these pokemon pictures.  And after that, I promise, I'm gonna do some not-Trigun stuff.  I know it might be hard to believe, but there are other things I care about besides Trigun.  And those other things need some love.

Peace out.

Happy Valentine's Day

I made some Trigun themed valentines to share on the internet.  I always think it's cute and amusing when I see people make their own valentines based on their favorite things and wanted to do it, too.

(An explanation of the jokes, for those not familiar with Trigun.  "Makes my heart stampede" = Vash's nickname is Vash the Stampede.  "I need to make a confession," = Wolfwood is a priest.  He's holding his "portable confessional," which is a little model church that he claims allows him to take confessions anywhere.  He can never talk anyone into using it, though.  "Just doing my job" = It actually is part of Meryl's job to follow Vash around everywhere he goes.  "Mille feuille cake" = Milly loves food and mille feuille cake is one of her favorites.  The last two are bad guys.  That should pretty much explain everything.)

I think the seeds for this idea were planted quite a while ago when I saw someone add pick-up lines to pictures of a Trigun cosplayer.  Then, there were some valentines going around the internet lately featuring historical figures with pun-filled pick-up lines.  And then this happened.

I wanted these to be quick and easy, so I drew them on paper, did the line art in ink, and then scanned them.  In photoshop I colored them with the paint bucket.  I put together the backgrounds and text in photoshop, too.  (Fun fact:  the hearts are on their own layer, and are actually black in every picture.  The layer is set to a low opacity to make them appear a darker shade of the background color.  This way I could copy/paste the layer onto every picture without having to recolor them.)

Happy Valentine's Day!