I'm finally starting to warm up to my tablet, after years of neglect! Though I still haven't quite adjusted to creating line-work (I'm still scanning hand-drawn works) I've started to color some drawings here and there to practice developing color palettes and digital painting. It's been fun!
These works aren't for anything in particular, but I hope you like them. In the case of the two scenic drawings, I tried to think of visual scenes I would love to encounter during a game of some sort. As for the Naked Fruit Dance, well, I was naked and I wanted fruit and that was that.
That's right everybuddies, over last weekend and after work this week I've been trying to shake myself up and start drawing again. I can't promise that this will be a lasting trend in the next months (I've got some big stuff coming up, like moving into a new apartment and all), but I'm trying!
Shown above is "A+ Chili Dog". I'm a lover of chili dogs, and this is a drawing of my favorite one from Pete's Tavern (though I heard they only serve 'kraut dogs now, boo). Thinking about maybe doing a series of all the dogs I've eaten. Could be fun.
Other than that dog, I did a few drawings of cats, things, ghosts, cloud monsters. You know, the usual. Oh, and then I made this LOST/Insane Clown Possee funny two nights ago, if those are two things that pertain to your interests.
Holy crap it's been way too long since I've drawn enough to make one of these posts. Last week was loaded with stress bombs, so I took advantage of the weekend to sit in the sun, draw, and watch lots and lots of Mad Men. One could argue that I'm not going anywhere new with these puppies (and I should really start to push myself to color them), but after two or three months of not drawing I'm just getting my groove back, so to speak.
The last few months I've been spending some solid time with my pretty medical blue DSi. I've been feeding it treats like Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box and the recently released Scribbelnauts, but I have to admit that playing around with FlipNote Studios has been the most rewarding experience for me so far.
Free to download, the app is a handy and totally capable mini-animation studio. With features such as layers, onion skinning, and movie editing options, you can create terrific little moving moments with ease (do see "The Sandwich Twins" or this Mario animation for reference).
What I really love about FlipNote is that the tools make me play around and draw like I did back in ye olde days of KidPix (a serious creative tool in the Chow family household). Plus, the oh-so-Hypercard limitation of dithered fills just makes me all nostalgia-gasmic.
Here are a few of my favorites animations (converted to .gifs since I couldn't connect my DSi to the Flipnote Hatena network :<):
...and while this is Steph's own creation, I had to share because it's too good:
Last night my friend Ben and I were brainstorming about a super-great game concept we have. If it goes anywhere I'll be sure to report our progress here, but for now we're just in the research stage. We kicked things off last night by romping around the YouTubes in search of game art inspriation, my first contribution being a few clips from the claymation PlayStation platformer Skullmonkeys (which has an incredible soundtrack if you haven't heard it yet.)
Ben followed up with two games which may be familiar to some of you but were entirely new to me. The first was Flashback, which he played on the Sega Genesis. I was absolutely taken aback by the opening animation and the stunning detail that appears during small moments in the gameplay. The intro video is shown above and the style is simply breathtaking.
On the flipside, Ben showed me Night Trap, a Sega CD videogame released in 1992 that allegedly brewed lots of controversy in its time due to some offensive scenes of vulnerable women coming to violent ends. After viewing a few of these scenes it's all very reminiscent of a tacky horror film about sexy co-eds, and at times seems to be understandably offensive. That being said, the "Party Scene" is pretty cheesy funny, especially with all that FMV paired alongside that corny user interface.
Are we having fun yet?
Anyway, if any of you all have other quirky games to look at in terms of style, I'd love some suggestions!
