A Psychochronography in Blue

Really, I had to use that title, how can you ever pass up the chance to use a word like "Psychochronography"? Why I have the chance to use such an insane title is the entire point of this post, so hang tight and I'll explain.

You may recall that I'm fond of a show called Doctor Who? Well, I'm not the only one, it's a rather popular show. One of the other fans out there is a guy called Philip Sandifer, and he likes it so much that he's decided to watch every (existing) episode and write a blog about them. Then, he compiles the blog, cleans it up, updates it and publishes it as a book. It's a very in-depth blog, I rather like it.

Anyway, when it came to the book he needed a cover and asked for people who would be interested in doing it. I contacted him and he said "Hey, that's cool, but you couldn't do anything that could get me into legal trouble, like a portrait of William Hartnell" (the subject of the first book). So I decided I'd do a spec cover to show I can do more than just portraits - but I was in the UK at the time, so I did it when I got back to the States.

Which I thought was pretty spiff, as did Philip when he saw it. Unfortunately while I'd been away someone else had done a cover for him, so mine didn't get used. He requested I not show my version publicly until after he'd published the book though. I had no issue with that, so since the book is now available (with the other artists cover) I can show you this and talk about it.

My first thought when told I couldn't use a likeness was to go very graphic with it. My second thought was to do something in the style of a book published at the time Hartnell played the Doctor (1963-66). Since I couldn't use his face I thought I could perhaps use the costume (which is perhaps even more distinctive on a per doctor basis). But since I didn't want the new book to look old I though I would do the cover as a picture of an old book on the white background of new cover (oh the post-modernism!). After that it was just a case of doing it.

There, that really didn't take long. I didn't polish it all that much since it was just a spec (which is also the reason the finished piece isn't print resolution - if he'd wanted it I would have to do it a second time, but better). After getting my graphic looking cover it was time to age it and wear it, which is not something I'm a stranger to.

I think the wear was around 15 layers of grime, creasing, chipping and so on. Probably half were created using photographs, the other half were done by hand. This resulted in the final "aged" cover that I would then add into the white background of the actual cover. The shadow of the book was a combination of Photoshop's layer effects and hand painting. I think it turned out rather well - although I prefer the aged version (not on the white) to the final spec cover.

As a consolation Philip said he'd let me know when his next book was in production if I wanted to do the cover to that. It won't be about Doctor Who apparently, but I think the subject matter might be even more fun to work with...

TARDIS Eruditorum is available in digital and print from Amazon.

The Best (Not Worst) Sketching of November

Merry Christmas! Yeah, so it's a day late - well, I'm not going to actually post on Christmas day am I? So it's a day late, whatever, Boxing Day still counts*. Some of you probably don't even celebrate Christmas, and that's fine too I hope you have (or had) a wonderful whatever you observe this holiday season. I do observe it though, so as an added bonus for what would otherwise be a very short post I'll throw in a speed paint I finished at 11:50PM on Christmas Eve.

There we go. If you bothered to enlarge you'll see that it's not a terribly good paint at full size, but when it's small it looks OK. It took 50 minutes using ArtRage, and as I said I finished it 10 minutes before Christmas itself. Badly done or not I still think it's a cute image.

On to the sketching!

I said it was going to be a real short post, and yes, that's it. November went in a hurry as I've mentioned before, and I didn't get a whole lot of sketching done (not at all from photographs if memory serves). You'll note I started working on the anatomy of the arm again - I'll work it all out one day, but there are a shocking number of muscles in there that are usually forgotten about, not to mention I can never remember which bone in the forearm connects to where in the wrist and elbow. I'm rubbish really.

I'm quite proud of the perspective sketch of the chap reclining and the girl on the far right - just feels pleasantly dynamic. I'm not terribly pleased with any of the free sketching, but the guy to the left of center is OK, as is the woman to his right (if a little tired looking).

Another added bonus for you. Back in October I finished my second 50 page sketchbook, so I've now compiled all the scans I made into one big image (click to enlarge obviously). This is direct from the sketchbook, not laid out and tidied up as I usually present things, so you can see what a waster of space I am when it comes to filling up pages. A couple of pages are blank - one was lost when my son tore it out of the book, the other I guess I just didn't scan, and I wasn't about to work through all 100 pages to work out which one it was. Yes, that big black hand print is my son's - I have no recollection as to why it was needed ;).  It was right after this that I decided I was done with showing things on the pink background for a bit - I still mostly sketch in a newsprint book, but when I clean it up I throw it on white - which I also now sketch on, having two books going concurrently.

OK, that's it - I'm hoping to squeeze in one more post before January, but we're going out of town for a couple of days so don't hold your breath too hard. If I don't catch you until after the event (again) have a happy New year and I'll catch you on the flip side.

*Note to those who have no idea what Boxing Day is - it's the day after Christmas in the UK (and a handful of other places, but in the UK it's a legal holiday). In Ireland it's St. Stephen's day and in some other places it's "Second Christmas Day" in whatever the local language is.
Why's it called Boxing Day in the UK? No bugger really remembers exactly why - there are a whole host of things to do with boxes traditionally done on the day after Christmas (giving the servants and the poor gifts, opening the alms boxes in churches, handing Christmas boxes to tradesmen etc), it's probably a combination of them all that led to the name. No actual boxing is involved. See, Pretty pictures and education on foreign places - good value for money this blog.

Bearing Gifts

So I clearly lied about getting the November sketching up ASAP. In fact this post isn't about the November sketching either; I still have to scan it in in fact (It's only 6 pages or so - I'm hoping to get it scanned tonight). In the mean time you get to see the only other thing I did in November, but first a little background.
I finally joined Deviant Art, which I had always assumed was, well, y'know, for deviants? Well, turns out that's not it at all (though some of the stuff on there is a little twisted), and it's full of artists of all types sharing their work. One thing that happens a lot is that people share "stock", which is stuff you can use for free as reference or whatever. So this is based on Stock, and you can see that original, by AimeeStock, here.

So it's not as good as I was hoping when I saw the original stock image, but there are bits of it I'm really pleased with, and other bits that I think are fairly terrible. Her face doesn't look right, and I think it's far more lopsided than Aimee's actual face. Despite this it took an age to paint. Pretty much the whole of November was spent on it, and in terms of hours I wasn't keeping track, but I saved a new file every hour on average and I have 27 files saved so make of that what you will.

Since it took so long I'll be presenting more step by step images than perhaps I normally would, and I'll also include the traditional step by step animated gif later on. The image above is expandable if you click on it by the way, the rest of the images are not (even the expanded version is only 50% of the size I painted it, but it's more than big enough for most purposes).

Step 1: Pencils

I spent a lot longer working on this stage than I usually do. I'd already decided that I wasn't going to rush the piece and that I should spend a fair amount of time on this step so as not to fall into the trap I have on so many images before, where I have to fix things as I go along. That didn't really work out, and as I've mentioned I'm not really happy with the finished piece. This isn't a real pencil sketch by the way, but one done digitally in Art Rage. Other than being a bit cleaner than a real pencil sketch it's surprisingly convincing I think.

Step 2: The First Mistake

This isn't actually the mistake, this is what I came up with in frustration at actually making the mistake. I had started with far to light a colour, and it was making the contrast difficult to manage, so I abandoned it and took a (simulated) palette knife to it. I quite liked the effect of that actually, but it wasn't what I was aiming for with this piece. In retrospect I think the lighter paint might have worked out better in the long run. Live and learn, as usual.  I told another porky pie by the way, you can expand this image ever so slightly - though why you'd want to is anyones guess.

Step 3: Roughing out the Flesh

I think that heading sounds vaguely dirty personally, but it's exactly what this step entailed.  You can see I've started adding detail to her eye already, and this is something I continue into the next step, getting the first pass at her face done.  In this step she looks like a bulldog chewing a thistle, but it is extremely rough as I hope you can appreciate.

Step 4: The Face

First pass at her face as I said.  While I should have been trying to rough out the rest of the image at this time I felt that I should at least see if I could get her face to a presentable place before continuing (especially after the first failure).  This was close enough, and infact I don't think it really ever got much better than this throughout the process, just different.

Step 5: Starting the Cloth

Here I've added the basic outline of the cloth, and you can also see the ears and base of her hair have been done.  The lines are visible again.  The lines were always there, but I turned them off when I was actually painting quite often, only using them as a guide on occasion outside of painting her face.

My initial plan was to paint everything on one layer, but it was at this stage I discovered that Artgage's latest version had a bug (which I still need to report), making it extremely difficult to paint complimentary colours on the same layer if they're thin.  I painted the cloth on a new player as a result.

Step 6:  Continuing Work

Not much to to say here.  I've made a first pass on her arms and started on the cloth.  Her hands are one of the things I'm most pleased about with the finished image, and you can see one of them is almost complete at this point.

Step 7: Roughing the Background

Here I've come much further on the cloth and repainted quite a bit of her face (it will be much more apparent in the animated gif I suspect).  I decided I needed to make a start on the background.  Originally I was going to copy the draped cloth from the photograph, but here I decided half way through painting it that a mountain might work better visually.  I decided to keep the composition though as I felt it worked well.

Step 8: The Home Stretch

Almost finished at this point.  It's really just a logical continuation from the last image.  After this I add jewelry (and I'm not happy by how her headband came out, but I'm fairly pleased with the necklace and earrings), complete the cloth and hair and take one final pass at her face before calling it quits, signing it and cropping it.

Here's the animated gif as promised.  Each image is about an hour further along than the previous one as stated above (each image representing a fresh save file).  It's quite large, so hopefully it will load in a reasonable timeframe ;)

The Best (Not Worst) Sketching of October

I think by this point we've all acknowledged that I can be pretty tardy when it comes to updating the blog, especially when there are other shiny things I could be looking at/reading/playing/watching etc.  This was definitely the case last month as you'll note the new record low of 1 solitary post.  Bah.  If October felt like an eternity then November offset it by going in a flash.
"Oh look, it's Guy Fawks Nigh*VOOF*t...  I mean Thanksgiving."
Partly this was down to the excitement of having shipped another game, and it being reviewed very well, and also being really really fun to play.  Yes, I've played rather a lot of Saints Row: The Third recently.  I only spent six months of so working on it, but it's hard to miss what I did.
Pretty much every ship in the game is something I built, as are a couple of vehicles. They all got touched by other people after I was done (and quite a few people when I was still making them, for technical aid and so on), but they're still enough of mine that I can point and say "I made that ship!".  Anyway, enough excuses and prattling, I'm a month behind, we stuff to catch up on...

Free Sketching

Click to enlarge of course...

So you should immediately notice something different this time. get used to it for it is the way of the future. Basically, another reason I'd put off writing this post was that I couldn't face another month of organizing all the worst work of the month into an image for people to cringe at, so the showing the bad stuff is gone. Prepping these sketch images for online takes a while at the best of times, and since I'd drawn a ludicrous amount in October, and the usual percentage of it was bad I just couldn't face the workload, so I put it off. Eventually I decided I was never going to get around to doing any of it unless I just got rid of the fat, so it's gone and I'm making this post, so that worked. Showing the bad may come back in the future, but right now I'd rather post something than nothing.

With the bad gone I'm dividing the work up into whatever categories work best for a given month, so these are "free sketching" Which is really just a fancy way of saying "Doodles". No reference, very little planning, just sketching. This is what 90% of my sketching consisted of anyway.

I'm quite pleased with a lot of these, although you'll note the lack of full figures. I'll address that last further down, but there are a handful of them there, and they look reasonable. Of the portraits I'm happiest with the girl who's also the thumbnail for this post. In the main I'm pleased with the expressions I'm starting to improve at, with a range of emotion on display here rather than just flat and dull "waiting for the bus" faces. The princess in the top right has a bit of that, but she's a princess, they're supposed to suppress their emotions for the public. ;) I haven't decided if cat face girl is in Halloween makeup or if she's a hybrid. One is pretty hot, the other pretty scary. I'll let you make up your own minds.

Reference Sketching

Here we have the referenced work - drawn from life or photographs (mostly photographs). Actually I can't recall if I drew Iron-Man from a reference or not - I have no recollection either way. It's too good for me to have made up though so I must have.
The girl on the right was not in fact wearing that cloth, but I liked how it looked when I placed the images, so I left it.
I can't remember what I base some of these things on - they're usually very quick sketches while I wait for the kettle to boil and then I forget about them until it's time to scan them in. Not terribly professional, but am I charging? No I am not. :) The unhappy chap at the bottom is me though, for my facebook profile picture - I may have posted it before. Time I did another I think.

Figure Perspectives

And finally this is what I'm calling Figure Perspectives.  They're not really figure studies since I'm not actually studying anything and the anatomy is weak at best.  What happened was that I finished my old sketchbook and realised looking back through it that the vast majority of my good stuff was heads.  I would quite often draw a half decent head and then decide to continue it only to muff up the perspective and ruin it all.  On top of that my anatomy was middling to poor, so I needed to do something about it.  Back, as the title says, to the drawing board.
So now I'm doing lots of these things.  They're a bit like gesture drawings (that I've posted a few times int he past) but they take longer - the idea is to work on perspective and pose and then work on my anatomy more as I go along, but now with a reasonable grounding in three dimensional space.  After that I can work more on lighting, which I've always been dreadful at.   Anyway, expect to see a few of these from now on.  I'll still be doing portrait sketches, but I need to move my focus if I'm to become more well rounded as an illustrator.

I didn't really do anything else in October, and I did less sketching in November (October was 15 pages of sketching, November only 5 or 6), so I'll get the sketching for November up ASAP.  I did something else in November too, I don't like it as much as I had hoped, but others have said it's petty good, so I'll share that with you soon too.  I've got more game assets to post as well - I'll get around to that eventually.  Fingers crossed that the next couple of months go better than the last couple in terms of updates.  My fingers that is, what you do with yours is your own affair.

October 2011 Electronics Engineering (ECE) Board Exam Results - Top 10

1 PAULO JESSIE RAMOS MORALES


UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES DILIMAN

94.60



2 MARIE THERESE SINGZON ROMANO

MAPUA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY-MANILA

94.30



3 RYAN TOBESA VILLAMOR

ADAMSON UNIVERSITY

93.90



4 NIXON ALBERT ESTACIO RAMOS

POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES-MAIN-STA MESA

92.10



5 JOHN RAY NAVEA VILLACERAN

UNIVERSITY OF SAINT LA SALLE

92.00



6 JANELLE PANIS ESCONDE

SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY

91.90



7 JONEL DELA CRUZ DE LEON

BULACAN STATE UNIVERSITY (FOR.BCAT)-MALOLOS

91.70



JOSEPH SANDOVAL RIVERA

UNIVERSITY OF SAINT LA SALLE

91.70



8 MARC STEPHEN DOLOT OCAMPO

UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES DILIMAN

91.60



9 JOHN RYAN DINGLASAN REGALARIO

TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF THE PHILIPPINES-MANILA

91.50



10 EVRHOY DEJAPA COJA

TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES-VISAYAS

91.40

"Daddy, Can You...?" Episode One

In what is likely to be a very occasional ongoing series I bring you some of the wild and crazy things my Son has asked for that I have needed to build, draw or otherwise create. Usually at the drop of a hat.
Yes, I could be posting some badass Halloween picture I drew last night or something, but I didn't do one. What I did instead is right there to the left of this paragraph. And yes, I think that's the first photograph to ever appear as a thumbnail for the blog, and I didn't take it (my wife did). But more on that later...

Flames - Christmas 2010
We start quite a while ago. My Son loves firefighters and anything to do with them. Looooves.

He has a collection of many firetrucks from the very small, to the very large. He has a dolls-house thing from Sylvanian Families that exists primarily to have fires fought in it. He builds Lincoln Log structures just so a "fire" can spontaneously break out.

You can buy a lot of firefighting paraphernalia for kids, but my Son hit upon the one thing you can't buy - kid friendly fire. As tempting as it is to burn his dolls-house down it's not really very safe.

He has firefighters, yet they have no fires to actually fight. He pointed this out in his Christmas list for Santa last year, which I dutifully transcribed: "Fire, for my firefighters to fight." Sound logic there; doesn't miss a trick this kid.

So, what's a Dad to do? That's right, I sent off his Christmas list to Santa and let him sort it out. But he couldn't. On the phone he was the very next day (Post to both Greenland and The North Pole is very fast these days).

"Mr. Taylor," Santa says "I cannot bring your son fire, it's not safe!"
"Yes Santa, but he really wants some - I was hoping you could come up with a child friendly solution."
"Hmmmm," replied Santa, and went dead quiet.
"What you could do," I said, interrupting his no doubt unprintable thoughts, "Is take some coloured foam and stick it together in the shape of flames. You could do two versions, one with regular flames, and one with sort of pixelated ones for use with Lego."
"Yes," and unconvinced sounding Santa drolly commented, "I could do that, or rather the elves could." and he rung off.

Unconvinced or not, on Christmas Day there in the boy's stocking were two sets of flames, one regular, one pixelated, just as I'd suggested. Brilliant!

I don't have any photos of the regular one, but here's a couple of shots of his Dolls-house aflame, with the various Lego firefighting kits he had along with them. I have to admit I'm including the second one because it makes me laugh.

Update: My wife managed to dig out this slightly blurry shot of both flames from Christmas morning. Bless her.

"Droideka" Destroyer Droid
"Daddy," came the question, "Can you make a Destroyer Droid out of Lego?"

I have no idea what a Destroyer Droid is, so I look it up online. Oooh, it's a Droideka from the Star Wars prequels. I've never heard of them referred to as Destroyer Droids before (but then I avoid as much to do with the prequels as possible - apparently he saw one in a library book, and of course they're in the Lego Star Wars videogames).

I agree, and set to work. I spent ages on it, over thought it, made it far too complicated. I got fed up, finished it, hated it, went to bed.

He woke up, saw it, loved it. Kids eh?

But I could do better - if I cheated! I would look it up online to see if anyone else had made one. I would copy their design and, like the very best supervillains, claim it for my own! (Only to my son you understand, I was planning to be very honest about the whole thing to anyone to whom hero worship wasn't on the line).

I found the plans, I stole them, cackling and grimacing with glee. I finished it, loved it, went to bed.

He woke up, saw it, went and played with the original! I fessed up after that.
"It's not as good as yours Daddy." Kids, melt your heart so they do.

Here they both are - The one on the white background is mine, the other you can find all over the net. Yes, I think theirs is better, my son doesn't, so neeer.

Jack Skellington
I've been messing around with a piece of Software called Sculptris. For 3D Artsy folk it's a bit like Z-Brush for morons, for everyone else it's a bit like sculpting clay, but on the PC. It's free for download (currently) so go search for it if you're interested.

Anyway, my son had seen me flailing around with it and asked if I could make a head (which was what I had been doing - badly). I hummed and hawed and eventually asked who's head he wanted me to make. The reply, as you may have surmised, was Jack Skellington; the Pumpkin King.

OK, that should be easy, he's just a ball with some skull details in. And it wasn't to bad, right up until I had to add the inside of the mouth. This did not go so well, as you can probably see from the image. Not very exciting, but he liked it, so that'll work.

Interesting side story - he loves Jack Skellington because he's heard and loved the soundtrack to A Nightmare Before Christmas and seen pictures. He'd never actually seen the film. We decided to rectify that, since it's Halloween and all.

He got through 20 minutes of it, hiding under my arm for the first 10, and my wife's for the second 10 before we had to turn it off because he was shaking. After he went to bed he woke up from nightmares on a few occasions, one of which memorably began with him screaming "But I just wanted to watch Cars!" Parents of the year here... "Children's film" my arse.

C-3PO (on acid)
"Daddy," came the question, in the now instantly recognizable cadence, "Can you draw C-3PO?"
For once this would be easy! I could do that! It's C-3PO! How naive I was!

I knew things were not going well when he handed me my designated drawing materials: My newsprint sketchbook, a broken red pencil and yellow and black felt-tip pens (running out). I asked if I could at least use my pencil as well, and he said OK (Phew). That's really all there is to it, I was quite pleased with getting orange by blending the two felts and the red pencil together, but other thand that it didn't go well (and scanned even worse) - here's the result.

Link's Hero Shield (and a sword) from Windwaker
Link is the hero of the Legend of Zelda series of games, and Windwaker is a cartoon styled Zelda game that my son happens to love. He's never played the others as he's seen shots and had deemed them "Too skeerwy". He wanted to be Link this Halloween.

My wife took on the task of making his costume, while I was left with making the sword and shield. The sword was easy - he had a foam buccaneer sword from a while back that had broken, I just chopped up the handle and cut it down to size, glueing the end onto a part further down the shaft. It's not a very authentic Link sword, but it's the right length and looked cool.

The shield was a bit trickier. I wanted to make it out of polystyrene and then glue foam to the outside to colour it and give it a nice texture. The problem was that foam and polystyrene don't have many compatable glues that'll actually hold anything. I tried a few tests - Super Glue? Nada. Gorilla Glue? Nope. Foam Glue? Zip. Polystyrene Cement? Hahaha!

Eventually my wife took pity on me and suggested a hot glue gun. I ignored her, convinced that the hot glue would damage the polystyrene (and also secretly thinking that I knew better, what with helping Santa out with that flame idea last Christmas), but in the end I tried it out on a bit and it worked brilliantly. Rule of thumb: always listen to the wife!

After that it was just a case of cutting the bits and gluing them on (and gluing various bits of myself to both the shield and other bits of myself). I wish I'd bought more foam as I could have done the front surround in one piece if I had, but without it I still managed, with some unsightly seams here and there. I also had trouble attaching the sides to the front, so there's a gap there too. Hindsight is always 20/20 and so on, but the wife joked they were the lines from the cel shading (look it up if that meant nothing to you).

After that the only problem was attaching the straps (which were strips of elastic), but eventually the hot glue gun came to the rescue again, this time in a number of layers - one holding the elastic to a layer of foam, one holding a pin that went through the elastic and foam to the polystyrene backing, and one final layer holding the foam to the polystyrene very securely in those contact points. It held up pretty well.

I though the result was a bit crap, but it was all I could do without buying more stuff. He, on the other hand, thought it was the schizzle. Even better his costume in general, and his shield in specific, got quite a few compliments throughout the day, and savvy gamers were even able to identify him as being from Celda (as Windwaker is occasionally referred to. So, chuffed parents are we. It almost made up for the Nightmare Before Christmas fiasco. Almost.

Here he is in his full garb. The wife was especially proud of finding those boots, which were pretty much perfect, and his hat.  You can't really tell in this photo, but the shield is curved ever so slightly - I was quite pleased with that.

All Work and No Play... (RFA Part 3)

Wow, what a long month! It seems like an age since I last posted, though it was only 19 days ago. Madness! (No, Sparta!). It's been a strange month too; usually I fill maybe 5 pages or so of my sketchbook and then condense that down to share the best and the worst with you lot (all three of you). This month - 13 pages. 13! Madness! (No, increasingly annoying tendency to shout Sparta!). But I can go on about that more next time. This time It's the grand finale of the work I'm going to share with you from Red Faction: Armageddon.

So this will actually be a pretty short entry - there are only three of my pieces left to show, and they all have the distinction of being cut from the game. Actually they do appear, but not in the condition I made them - they were changed from vehicles (which use a special vehicle system), to environment props (which use a different system) and have to be optimized for use as such. My friend Angela did the conversion from vehicles to props, so I can't take full credit for what's actually in the game. Yeah, yeah, I get it, you just want to see pictures. OK, here's a few (Click em to make me embigerize)...

Civilian Transport (C-Tran) #1 "Grub"
Art Directed by Chad Greene & Susan Cenci. Concept by Steve Holt

Don't you love that name. Why "Grub"? Well, the arm rests with the headlights look like grubs, at least to me. I've only got the game engine renders of this one for some reason. I did have some nice renders of the high-poly mesh too, but I appear to have lost them (In case you'd forgotten, or I never got around to mentioning, this is for a technique where you model or sculpt a very high detail model and then a low detail version of the same - you then create a 'normal map' texture from the differences between the two models and apply that to the low detail version which makes it appear very similar to the high detail version. Yes, it hurts my head too, and I do it on a regular basis).

This had the triple distinction of being my first vehicle made for the game, my first ever high-poly model and also it was the first vehicle to be cut. Wheee!

Not much more to say about it - it did appear clearly in the game, but only the rear of it, and it was in bright orange rather than blue - it's the truck Kara is loading when Darius gets useful with the lightning gun.

Civilian Bulldozer "Frog"
Art Directed by Chad Greene & Susan Cenci. Concept by Steve Holt

Why "Frog"? Because it looks like a really happy one. No, really, seen from the right angle it looks so much like one that I traced a picture of it, painted the resulting line-art green and stuck it inside as a Frog decal (you can sort of see it in the thumbnail to this very post. Don't look to hard for it because once you've seen it you can't unsee it, and that would be sad.

I was really pleased with this one, and pretty sad it got cut, but other than that, not much to say. You can see it in the game when you first descend into the pit in the Mining Exo right near the start of the game. It appears elsewhere, but that's the most obvious place.

Red Faction Battle Tank
Art Directed by Chad Greene & Susan Cenci. From a concept by Wingking

If the tank ever had a name I'm afraid I've forgotten it. The poor thing was cut almost as soon as I finished it, so I didn't spend any time thinking up a name for it. It should have been called the "Tarantula," since all the vehicles were named for wildlife, and this has a big spider type shape to it. Again these screenshots are all I have available; and the treads are missing - sorry; they look pretty cool when it has them.

It looks very similar to the original concept (Which I don't have to show you), except I made it a little more practical for the sort of terrain it could be navigating and redesigned the turret so it could actually rotate (The original concept was that the whole tank would rotate, which didn't seem to serve any need since all the stuff needed to have a fully functioning tank was already available).

I didn't like it when I was building it, but I do in retrospect - it's an interesting mashup of Tron and Batmobile styling.

It appeared as being under repair in the actual game, and then you got to drive it in the downloadable content; something I only realized today as somehow I missed that it had been released back in August (it may have been while I was away, which would explain my missing it).

And that's it. I have other, older games I can cover if I get around to it, and we have a new game coming out on November 15th; you may have heard of it - Saints Row the Third? I only did two vehicles for it, but I also did some ships... We'll get to that eventually no doubt.

is there any objective type questions in math board exam?or purely computation?how about GEAS,COMMS,ELEX?

There is objective type in math, around 4 to 7 questions out of the total 50 questions. There is computation in GEAS, EST, ELECS but it is formula-based (plug in) for around 20-50 questions out of 100. There are too many formulas and many of them will be very difficult to remember when you're stressed/in panic.

Ask me anything, I will answer it.

i failed in the the ece board 3 times.what will i do now?

Did you try enrolling in review centers? they are a big help. I suggest you take it until you pass but you have to start working since you cant be idle for too long (companies dont like that). The ECE license is seldom used since companies that require them (Smart, Globe) pays very little (small salary). The IT field is the most popular nowadays because of big salary and large demand even overseas. However, you will never know when you will need the license. You can't take the board when you're really old since your learning capability will diminish. So I suggest you take it until you pass. I know it will be difficult, but I think its worth it.

Ask me anything, I will answer it.

in geas, ano mas maraming question objectives or problem solving

objectives but for problem solving all you need is the formula. be careful since wrong answers (wrong plug-in) is in the choices.

Ask me anything, I will answer it.

answer to synchro gyro, and micro

it is uploaded. it is found in our neets page.

Ask me anything, I will answer it.

may reviewer po ba kyo ng pang ECT board exams?

Please provide topics/subjects so we can upload them in the website.

Ask me anything, I will answer it.

The Best and Worst Sketching of September

You may be wondering why it's more than a third of the way through October and I'm only now posting about September.  For once it's not because of the effort involved in getting all the images together nicely - nope, finished that on the 2nd.  It's because I was monumental depressed (as you may have gathered in the last post) and just couldn't be bothered.  Couldn't be bothered to speedpaint either, or paint anything else for that matter.  I did sketch a lot though - most of it was dreadful, but you'll get to see that next month.
Odd thing though, today I feel much better.  I felt much better when I got up, I felt even better when the thing I've been working on at work started to come together, and pretty awesome when I won a raffle for a set of snazzy Saints Row the Third headphones (oh, that's the Saints Row the Third I worked on by the way - check it out next month when it hits the stores... if you're old enough).  So, here we are all happy and jolly; better write a blog post while it lasts - hey, I'm placing you lot above painting again, be thankful! ;)

The Best

 

Now I know this isn't exactly da Vinci, it's not even Rolf Harris (who's awesome by the way, I don't care what you think - did I mention I met him?  Oh, yeah, I did didn't I...), but I'm still really pleased with some of these.
Bloke looking all sheepish top left - reminds me of young Rutger Hauer for some reason.  Doesn't look like him, but reminding me is enough, plus I like his expression (I gotta work on those, and, y'know, everything else).
Middle top, I love - The universe needs more badass Black Elves with awesome Afros.
Repairman Joe on the right there looks grumpy, but I think that's the first time I've ever drawn headgear nicely without reference. Pretty much nailed it too.
The figure lower left is far from perfect, but shows progression on trunk anatomy (I still suck, and you'll not the lack of arms and legs - yeaaaah).
Small figure next to her just looks cute (if inaccurate), and over from her is someone looking rather angry - best angry face I've drawn without reference).
Yes, that man looks like he's reaching for the toilet paper... maybe he is, but he was supposed to be pointing, and then I hit the edge of the sketchbook ;).
The face below that is the only one from reference - National Geographic.
The scribbled one may make you wonder why it's there - well it's part of my new 'scribble drive' to rapidly get ideas on paper (without worrying about quality) it works maybe 50% of the time and mostly aren't worth showing even when they do.  That particular one was drawn with my left hand - yeah, I'm not exactly ambidextrous.

The Worst

Oh gosh, do I have to talk about these?  Really?  Well, I refuse, I'm in a good mood and you're not going to ruin it for me.  Suffice to say that as ghastly as these eyesores are they're far better than the worst batches from a year ago (I hope), so at least I'm showing some improvement on the bottom end, not just the top (horray).

Now, hopefully I'll have enough material to do another post before the end of the month after that dry spell, but if not rest assured I'm working on it and there'll be plenty to post come November (when I'll be to busy playing Saints Row to bother ;)).  Oh, actually I've still got some RFA stuff to post - win!

3 WEEKS TO GO BEFORE THE BOARD EXAMS!!!

Social Profiling № 6: Four's a Crowd

It's funny, it's been three weeks since I've posted anything, yet it seems much, much longer.  3 weeks isn't bad going in the grand scheme of things, right?  Truth is I don't know what I've been up to to fill those three weeks so full that it seems like a lot longer, but it has.  One thing I know is I've been unusually negative about my stuff of late (and if you know me much you'll know that that's pretty darn negative).  I've not been happy with much I've produced (with the exception of two sketches you'll see soon), and this is stuff I've been openly complimented on.  I take the compliment ('thanks!' I say) but I don't fully understand why I deserve to receive them. This is at work as well as at home.  But you didn't come here to read my moaning, you came here to look at pictures (I hope), so we'll pick this up later...  If you want to get up to speed on the Social Profiling story so far you can start here and work backwards.

Terry

Me and Terry go way back.  Waaaaaay back, not as far as Stu, but I've known him for at least a decade.  Terry was with me the day I bought my first Wacom tablet back in 2000 (though I doubt he remembers) and it just so happens that tablet is still working just fine, so it's somewhat fitting that I painted his portrait with it.  Terry has a daughter now who's somewhat younger than the tablet, and he asked me to paint this particular picture (after I complained I didn't like any of the ones he had on facebook).  I don't usually do specific requests, but since I've known him so long, and since he actually gave me the actual photograph to work from I felt it would be rather mean to say no.

As usual you can click the images for largoramavision.

So, I don't think I did as nice a job on his daughter as I would have liked, but she is recognizable, as is Terry.  I think I went most awry with he mouth (I think it's a bit small) and her ear (it's a bit big).  The lighting worked out quite well though, and I think I did a really good job on Terry's right eye (left on the picture) and forehead.  The picture took quite a while longer than most of these since I was painting two people rather than one, which also means I have more step by step images than usual:

Kelly

So Kelly is a very close friend of my wife's.  I also happen to work with her husband (though not alongside him, just in the same building) and her Son and Daughter are (usually) good friends with my Son.  She's good people, really that's all you need to know.  This picture doesn't do her any justice by the way, but is obviously Kelly if you know her.

So, not a great deal to say about the picture.  The turquoise in the background was added because it's her favourite colour, and also because the picture needed a little something to make it pop.

Elizabeth

You've seen Elizabeth before if you're a regular follower of the blog, she was in the UDraw event post from last year. This one is (I think) a much better picture, but oddly looks less like her. No point prattling on about her here when you could go and read that :)

Not happy with lots of things about this picture, but I was trying a new technique; using pretty much just the new features of the pallete knife tool in the latest ArtRage update.  The exception was for the jellyfish behind her which was done over the oils using a wet marker pen.  Worked out OK, but her hairline is all wrong (I really have to work on hair, I'm rubbish at painting it without spending far longer on it than the rest of the picture ;)  Why Jelly fish?  She studied to become a marine biologist, loves sea life and had a picture of her taken in front of a tank filled with them. Obvious really, right?  You'll note in the progression below that I started from a pencil sketch, rather than a digital one as I normally would.

So, now those are out of the way, back to moaning...  except I won't, because mere seconds after I wrote my moan at the top I saw the following pop up on facebook (and thanks to Marcus for bringing it to my attention, and Ira for saying it).  It pretty much puts me in my place ;)

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

 ― Ira Glass