Adventures in Minimalism

I heard someone say once that everything we experience gets thrown into a big pile in our brains and gets all jumbled up in there, and then, once in a while, we can reach in and pull something out that's new.

Once upon a time, I watched an anime titled "Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo."  (Don't ask me how to pronounce that.)  It's is, indeed, The Count of Monte Cristo, but moved to a steampunk-ish sci-fi setting, and given some trippy animation.  Seriously, the whole show looks like this:

Notice there's little to no shading, and nearly everything is colored in with some kind of texture or pattern.  The show was a little darker than what I usually go for, and it was told from the point of view of Albert, (the son in the story, and the kid in the picture above,) who was annoyingly emotional most of the time.  So, to be quite honest, I watched it for the art style.  (And for Albert's friend Franz, who was the only person in the show besides the count who was competent in any way.  He rocked.)  It's been on my to-do list ever since to do some kind of picture that imitated that style.  I just never really figured out what that picture would be.

Some time later I discovered an art style called minimalism.  I really don't know how to describe minimalism, so here, have an example:

kuabci.deviantart.com

Honestly, I never had any intention of doing anything in this style.  I just really liked it, and logged it away in my brain under the label "Things that Look Cool."

I own a nook, which I quite like.  (This is all related, I swear.)  It comes with a few wallpapers for your screen, but nothing very impressive.  I finally decided it would be cool to make my own, and to do something related to my favorite book characters (in hopes that seeing them would inspire me to read and not just play the sudoku app.)  So, I reached into that pile in my brain, fished around a little bit, and pulled out this:

 

Erik, aka The Phantom of the Opera, Inspector Javert (Les Miserables), Sherlock Holmes, and Percy Blakeney (The Scarlet Pimpernel).  (There's so much space at the bottom because the nook puts a row of icons down there.  I managed to get the spacing so that they fit pretty comfortably in the free space on the screen.)

This was one of those projects that, the farther along I got in making it, the more I realized there were easier ways of doing it.  Even by the end, I was probably making things more complicated than they needed to be.  So, suffice it to say that this happened in photoshop, with pictures of the characters combined with pictures of fabric.

Finding pictures of the characters standing full length was by far the hardest part.  The Phantom and Holmes saved me by being popular enough to have Halloween costumes, and those were the only full length images of them I could find.  Javert came from a book illustration.  Percy was a pain in the butt.  His top half came from a book cover, and the bottom half from a picture of a period costume sewing pattern.

Finding pictures of fabric was the most time-consuming part, but also kinda the funnest part.  The background is a stock image of old paper.

So, yes, now my nook has awesome wallpaper, and I'm pretty happy about that.  It was really time consuming, but really fun, too.

Peace out, gang!

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Bonus ramble, if you want to stick around to hear it.

Making this was strangely nostalgic for me, because, a few summers ago, I did a lot of fanfiction writing about these guys... all together... in one story.

I really wanted to write something, but didn't have any good ideas.  So just to scratch the itch, I started doing these little drabbles in which a teenage girl named Michelle had the ability to enter the world inside of books and bring characters back out with her if she wanted to.  These four guys practically lived with her.  All the little scenes I wrote were plot-less, pointless, inconsistent, and out of order, but they kept me entertained.  Erik was well-behaved because Michelle bribed him with an ipod.  (Oh, did he love his ipod!)  Javert hated him, unsurprisingly, but Holmes kinda liked him because he was interesting, intelligent, and played the violin.  (Holmes still watched him like a hawk, though.)  Percy just kinda hung around, cool as a cucumber, being a bit of a goof sometimes.

I don't even remember now what kind of stuff I wrote.  I think some of it was melodramatic.  Javert was taken from the end of his story, which is a very unfortunate ending for him, and had some lingering issues that crept up once in a while.  And Erik... was Erik.  But mostly it was just silly stuff, like everyone being really impressed with the microwave, except Holmes broke it because he started putting random stuff in it just to see what would happen.

And, yeah, I just felt like sharing.

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!