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.

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.

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.

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...

"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...

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.

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! ;)

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.

The Incredibly Slow Speed Paint Show!

In all honesty I ran out of great titles for speed paint posts some considerable time ago, we'll just have to live with lame ones from now on. It's been a whopping three months since the last one, surely I've managed to crank some out in that time, right?
Well, fortunately I have, or this would be a really short post; more than I thought in fact as I really though I'd posted a bunch right before I went to the UK - turns out I was merely delusional. Let's go see what we've got then shall we.

I should warn you, more experimental stuff than usual lies ahead.

The Best and Worst Sketching of August

Sometimes nothing goes according to plan. Take this last weekend for example. It was a long weekend, so plenty of time to do plenty of things, right? Wrong.
I had plans. I planned to speak to a friend in the UK, paint a couple of speed paints, paint with some real paint, finish the book I was reading, play video games and some traditional games with my son, make burgers on the grill/barbecue, go for pizza as a treat for the kid and so on. Almost none of this came to pass. It wasn't that anything major went wrong, but a few little things did, like my Son had a tantrum and injured my thumb with an unintentionally well aimed kick, reducing my gaming time (it hurt) and sketching/painting time (it hurt) and so on. It wasn't a bad weekend, just unproductive. I did get everything setup for a blog post though, but it hurt too much to type for long, so here it is today.