Project Wrap-ups and Naka-kon

Okay, let me start by getting this picture out of the way.

Here's Vash with his gang of Pokemon.  That makes all four of the main characters, and this little series is complete!  Yay!

I've also finished my stun gun.  Remember how I was putting paper mache on the whole thing?  It took longer than I thought it would, because when I put the paper mache on, I had to leave some parts of it dry, so it could sit on that part while the rest was drying, so I had to break it up into parts and do a part a day.  (And also because I procrastinated some.  But you didn't hear me say that.  Sh!)

When I hit crunch time, though, I couldn't afford to do it in parts, and ended up with wet areas all over the place.  I got a little creative trying to figure out how to let it dry.

Then I painted it, which went much faster than I expected (and waaaay faster than painting styrofoam goes), and so, finally, I had this.

Which is pretty much how it looked before, just with a different surface texture.  I took it to Naka-kon this weekend and I'm very pleased to announce that this is the first con which I didn't have to do any repair work afterward.  It got a little bumped and scraped, but nothing is loose and no paint came off.  Woohoo!


Naka-kon was a lot of fun.  (Of course!)  I think I had fallen into a rut before hand, in which nothing existed in the universe except for my job and the internet.  It was nice to have a reminder that there's a whole world out there with fun stuff to do and awesome people, and that those things make me happier than the internet does.

I won't post pictures on here, since they're already on facebook, but I will share one since I likely won't post it anywhere else.  I met one of Trigun's villains, Legato, and he suggested we take a picture of me shooting him.  Except I tried to kind of scowl at him and just ended up laughing.

(This guy was one of the highlights of the con for me.  Not only was I really excited to see someone cosplay Legato, but he was a super nice guy.  He caught sight of me the day before and told me he would be Legato on the next day, so "you should come find me and shoot me."  I told him his costume was fantastic and he said, "Thanks!  It makes me feel pretty.  I think it's the hair.")

Okay, that's everything!  Peace out!

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!

Stuff that looks suspiciously like stuff you've seen before...

Second picture of a Trigunner with their pokemon.

(I accidentally made Meryl's hair a touch too long and it blurs together with her eyes.  Oh noes!)
Meryl has water and ice types.  At first I was afraid that Krabby would be this awkward red blob in the middle of the picture, but I'm actually really glad he's there, along with other areas of red and yellow, to give some warm spots to the picture.  These are kind of giving me a lesson in color choices, I think.  I liked Milly's a little better, with the pink, yellow, and brown pallet, and seeing this one is kind of making me worried for the next one, since it's going to have a heck of a lot of black in it.  (Vash's picture is last and it's all red and yellow.  It's either going to look good, or it's going to look like the page is on fire.)

Anyway, not much else to say, I guess.  This was done exactly like the last one, with inked lines and colored pencils.

In other news, remember my cosplay prop?  My stun gun?

You know, that thing that I bring up because I have to repair it over and over again?  Well, I think I went to a whole ONE convention without it, and I decided I wanted it back.  But I had deemed it too unstable and unrepairable, so I was mulling over my options and decided we can rebuild it!  We have the technology!  It's going to take drastic measures, though.  The plan is to duct tape the ever living daylights out of the weak joints, and then paper mache over the whole thing, not just to cover the tape, but to give me a more reliable surface to paint on.  (The paint is constantly chipping off the styrofoam.)  Yesterday I did the duct taping, but I might add more for good measure.

So, yeah, that's it from me.  Peace out, guys!

Because I'm an adult, dang it, and I do what I want, even if it means drawing pokemon but not doing my chores.

So, there were some pictures floating around the internet of the Avengers and the pokemon that they would own.  (You can find them all here.)  I thought that was a really fun idea and wanted to do something similar.  Only, of course, there's a certain anime that's my one true love, so guess what characters I used?

I want to do at least Vash, Wolfwood, Meryl and Milly.  If my artistic ADD hasn't kicked in by then, I may do some bad guys and/or secondary good guys.  This week I did Milly and her team.  I told myself it was because I was saving Vash for last, as something to look forward to, but I think, honestly, I just love the crap out of Milly and wanted to do her first.

Milly's an uncomplicated girl, (in fact, she's pretty much the only one in the story who doesn't have issues) so I went with normal type pokemon.  And she's the type who'd love anything adorable, so I gave her a bunch of cuties.  (By the way, the walking Easter egg on the end there is pretending to be Milly by wearing her coat, and the pinkie on the other end is unhappy that the coat is being dragged around and made dirty and such.)  The Avengers pictures gave stories for how the character gained each pokemon, but I didn't bother.  (Although I like to think that maybe the Chancey was given to her by her parents, because it's associated with nurses, and they know that Milly's a bit ditzy and that she's running around having adventures with a guy who's a supposed outlaw, so they're like, "Oh gaw, our baby could be toast any minute.  Take a nurse with you!  Take a nurse with you!")

Anyway, as far as the drawing style/technique goes, I was pretty much making it up as I went along.  I've gotten into the habit of doing little doodles that I outline in pen and then color with markers.  But the markers are kinda lousy because it's just a packet of twelve crayola fine-tip washables (some of them smell like fruit and the black smells like licorice) so they don't exactly do a professional level job.  For this picture, I felt like doing more outlining in pen, but wanted to do a better job than the markers, so I went back to my colored pencils.  The texture that the pencils gave turned out to work really well, since it kind of gives a soft, fuzzy feel, and it's a pretty cutesie picture.  So, yeah, this is the first time I've used that pen/pencil combo and I kinda like it.

Okay, that's all from me!  Peace out!

Legato Drawing

Okay, here's the drawing I did but wasn't able to post last time.

This is Legato from Trigun.  He's not very high of my "Favorite Characters" list.  In fact, he's creepy, sadistic, and... creepy.  Oh, and he's creepy.  The first time I watched the anime, I absolutely hated him, and every time he'd come on screen, I'd point my fingers like a gun and pretend to shoot him.  But the manga gave him a little more character development, and, over time, I've developed a sort of morbid fascination with his character.  What led me to actually draw him was someone on tumblr complaining that there wasn't enough fan art of Legato out there, so myself and a few others volunteered to provide some more.

I actually started this drawing by tracing a screen shot from the anime, and then tweaking everything into more realistic shapes and proportions.  (Which actually was an act of laziness, to be honest.  I could have just looked at the picture and drawn it, but whatever.)  You don't really realize how wonky anime actually is until you do something like this.  Apparently anime characters use volumizing shampoo, because there's, like, two inches of hair sitting on top of their heads.  (And those are the ones without the spikey hair.  Like, seriously, what hair products does Yu-Gi-Oh use?  I want to know!)  And when their head is turned a little to the side, their eyes are still so wide, they're practically on the sides of their heads.  Oh, and their eyes are big and their noses are pointy, but we knew that already.

I had a hard time with his expression, because originally, I was going to give him a wicked smile.  But with his hair across his face, I couldn't use his eyebrows to portray emotion.  So if I made him smile, he looked like a genuinely happy guy.  (No, Legato.  You are NOT a genuinely happy guy.  And if you ever were happy, you little creep, I'd be worried.)  So I changed his expression to hopefully make him look kinda ticked off instead.

On a related note, I took art class every year of high school, and a portrait drawing class at a Vo-Tech, and the portrait drawing class was the only useful thing out of the lot.  I'm pretty sure the teacher was gay.  I don't have a problem with that, I just distinctly remember noticing that he tended to call his students "honey," and the fact that that's the thing I remember the most is amusing to me.  He also had a prop one day that was a skull with pantyhose pulled over it to illustrate the curves and indentions of skin on the face, and he made some joke about how the pantyhose weren't his, he had bought them just for the class, and I thought, "Really?  Are you sure?"  I'm not really sure why I included this story.  It's just that I remember that guy every time I draw a portrait and I felt like sharing.

Peace Out!