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!