More Speed Paints, Less Exciting Titles.

Given how busy I've been of late I didn't think I'd actually get another post done until next month, but here I am tapping away at my keyboard once again. As you may have gathered from the title of the post this one is another round up of speed paints, this time with an emphasis on "Speed."

You may recall some of the the Christmas Paints I did back in December that strayed over the self imposed line I had designated for Speed Painting, taking longer than an hour. Since then I've posted one more set of speed paints which varied wildly in the time taken, but did seem to hover around the 45 minute mark. Well, this time around I decided to deliberately step on the gas, and with a couple of exceptions these were knocked out intentionally faster than usual with a limit of 30 minutes. How were the results? Well, have a look and see for yourself...

Facing the Future

And here we are again with the third attempt at capturing the likeness of the woman known as Nephania.

If you're a relative newcomer to the blog you can see the previous attempts here and here. You may want to go read them for a refresher even if you've been around a while. Since you won't have bothered doing that, here's a refresher. Found a photo of Nephania and chose it to be my litmus test for how my illustration is coming along. I picked this particular image for four reasons:
It's a difficult angle to get right at the best of times.
I was previously unfamiliar with her, which removes preconceived notions of how she should look.
She's got a very distinctive profile, making it easy to judge how well I'm doing.
She's ridiculously pretty, which is harder to capture than the looks of someone like Me, or Jeremy Clarkson say.

Midweek Madsanity

It's not usual for me to post on a Tuesday, but it just so happens that tonight I came home at a reasonable time, had a Son that went straight to sleep at bed time, had practically nothing to watch on TV (watched one shortish show), and I don't fancy playing a game. This means it's not even 9PM and I find myself in front of my PC. I can't remember the last time that happened when it wasn't a weekend!

With all those stars aligning you'd expect I'd have something fantastic to show right? Sorry, out of luck today - Just some sketches from the last few weeks. I actually prepped these over the weekend (scanned, laid out uploaded etc.), but didn't get time to write the related post, so here it is.

Fireman Sack's Big Birthday Adventure

Before we begin I may as well point out that if you visit the blog for the art (You poor fools) then you might want to skip this post because there's no art in it. Well, some sort of art, but not the type you usually get. I'm not really sure why I'm even making this post - it doesn't really belong on here, but I guess it does explain part of the reduction of art output over the last two months. The rest of the reduction I've gone into before; and I've mentioned this too in passing, so you may as well see it.

Little Big Planet 2 may be the greatest time suck ever invented by man. It's a game, but unlike other time sucks such as RPG's or MMO's the actual game is really quite short. It has that in common with those FPS games with a focus on Multiplayer like Call of Duty or Homefront (Which you should totally buy...), but it's online experience isn't really the focus either, although it has 4 player co-op and verses portions. No, Little Big Planet 2 is a time suck because it allows you to make your own levels. The original LBP allowed this too, but LBP2 takes it to another level entirely (Har-Har).  My son loves the game proper, and I'm addicted to making (mostly dreadful) things.

If You Can't Draw Just Scribble

ScribblerToo is one of those web based doodling programs. It's not unique in this regard, there are rather a lot of them around. Usually the process will go something like this: Friend links to sketch program, I take a look, sketch something dreadful, decide I'd rather be doing it using something else (such as a pencil, or Artrage, or my elbow dunked in poo - which would still be preferable to some of these packages), close webpage, forget all about it.
ScribblerToo has a hook though - it does something that I'm not sure I can do in any other package. The best way to describe it is as "Painting with Cobwebs". Every time you draw a line it works out how close it is to another line you've already drawn, the closer the line the more likely it will be that it forms a "web" connection to it. The easiest way to understand is to try it yourself - Don't fret if you can't draw because it works just as well on abstract stuff. It's called ScribblerToo for a reason y'know? Well, two reasons, I'll get to the other in a moment.

And Then Two Come Along At Once!

It's been ages since I've done a speedpaint, but it's been even longer since I actually posted any. Time to make amends.

In fact I have far more to post than I thought I would. In my addled brain I was under the impression that I'd posted some at the end of January, but I didn't. Given this, and the similar comments I've made in the last two posts I have to assume I had a particularly vivid dream where I went on a posting frenzy. You know, the sort where you wake up and think it actually happened? Happened to me yesterday in fact; I dreamed it was Monday, woke up, panicked because I was late for work and then realised it was Saturday. Typical.

You Wait All Day for a Bus...

Aaaaand I'm sick again. This time it's more of an extended yuckiness than an all out explosive fluid explosion like a cold or the trots, but still. I joked with my wife about a month ago that it would be great to go a whole week without someone in the household being sick. It was a joke at the time, but now it's not so funny. Here's a rundown of the last few weeks (This isn't all about sickness by the way, just showing how events like to pile up - but feel free to skip over if you just want to see pictures).

Sketchy Von Sketcherson

I've been putting off updating the past few weeks because I didn't feel I had enough to warrant a post. Eventually, yesterday, I thought I should probably just gather what I could so it didn't look like I'd gone to Bermuda and been lost in the Triangle. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a huge amount of stuff to post. Well, alright, not huge, but far more than I've happily posted alone in the past.

A further surprise was discovering that very little of it was all out bad - this is funny because while drawing it I thought most of it was dreadful, and bemoaned losing my mojo to sickness. Perhaps I just lost my perspective... Or perhaps I've lost it now because I'm sick, again (I know, this winter's been crazy for teh sikcies). Either way, there's no good or bad this time, just "Not so bad" and "Not so good".  I'll start with some portrait sketches.

Social Profiling № 4: Annette

Up until last week I knew bugger all about She-ra. Actually, that's not entirely true; I knew that she existed (in a not existing because she's fictional kind of way), I knew roughly what she looked like, and I knew she was the Princess of Power (and Eternia) and sister of He-Man. How I knew even this is a mystery to me as I've never seen an episode of the cartoon, or seen one of the action figures (as far as I can recall). I have to wonder if she made guest appearances on He-Man and I know her from those, in much the same way as Dora the (bloody) Explorer and Go Diego Go (hell of a name that) turn up on each others shows and yell at each other for half an hour at a time while solving simple issues in the most complicated way imaginable*.

Anyway, I knew very little about her, but this is no longer the case thanks to Annette, as you will see...

Social Profiling № 3: Larry

If you've strolled into this post you can see what it's all about, and the previous related entries here (for Owain) and here (for Steve). OK, so hopefully everyone's now on the same page. Good.

I was hoping to get this posted about an hour ago, so it would count as an extra post for January, but sadly poor old January is now going to miss out on it due to a series of cockups. Actually only one cockup was responsible for the post's delay, the other two probably saved it from being even later (one was the loss of over an hours progress in New Vegas. Most upset about that I was).

Anyway, enough about all that rubbish. Hold on to your hats, it's time for Larry.