Sometimes, just sometimes

Sometimes, it's nice to stare at things in the distance.
Extremely far away things like clouds are a tad boring, they have no detail.
Coming a bit closer, like the objects at the end of a road, are rather more pleasant as you can start to make out the definite shapes of trees and homes.
Perhaps 30 meters away? I can see all the individual leaves on a tree. I can't make out the finer details, but compared to the green blob that forms when I remove my glasses, it's surprising pleasant.
Now, 10 to 15 meters away is probably my favorite distance. I can see pretty much all the details of leaves, can follow the path of small insects flying around the bushes and plants, and I can see my cat clearly escaping out the house and across the road.
Around 1 to 2 meters away, it starts feeling...Well, it starts feeling like work. I can take in almost every minute detail of my Alienware backpack on the floor nearby, every piece of dust on the alien skull and see where the light is more heavily reflecting off the heavy duty fabric up to my eyes.
And then we get to 30 centimeters away, approximately the distance the monitor is away from my face. This is the distance my eyes are focusing at for around 90% of my waking day, sometimes more, rarely less.
Then I remove my glasses, and around 5 inches away from my face is the sweet spot. Where my vision begins to blur.

Project Harmony

[Click for full view]

Was out an about all today I'm afraid, first with volunteering at my local Citizens Advice Bureau, followed by cooking tea (steak!), then The Best Friend came over, I ~attempted~ to dye her hair (aiming for a blonde streak, went light brown) then going to McDonalds (to spend a few hours drinking a hot chocolate!) then, well, getting home late and scrabbling around creating this!

It's created in a great little online project called Project Harmony, where you can easily kill a few hours playing with all the different pen types!

I used this to create something a little more formally for a competition a while ago:

This piece actually came third in an online contest! It's certainly a lovely tool for making interesting looking pieces with a cute variety of pens.

The first-person biography.

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[Click for full size: 2560x1440]

 

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[Blarg version]

Well, it's a massive image today! Still not quite the finished state, but much closer than it was yesterday, and I rather enjoyed doing the overhanging grass. 

 

As for the filtered version, weeeeell... I much prefer the original, I'll leave it at that!

As I mentioned yesterday, I'll be adding characters to it tomorrow, plus some..rocks? I think rocks. To force the perspective more. I rather wanted to add a funky tree, but I don't think it'd really fit with the style of the scene.

 

It also looks like I may just be getting a Cintiq and new monitor 

Also, on a side note I'm graduating with a first-class degree next Wednesday! And went to an interview today which I'm pretty sure I aced, as I'm doing a follow-up-interview-slash-2-hour-on-the-job-trial sometime either late this week or next week. Everything's looking up!

Seeing The Best Friend tonight!

As such, don't have as much time as I'd like for trying to steam ahead and finish this picture tonight, so it should be done by tomorrow instead! As such, I'll show you what I've got done so far instead!

(I've reduced the size of this one, though I'm working on it at 2560x1440)

It's a fantasy landscape which will eventually have a selection of characters on it~ I've been trying to get back into doing large images for a while now, and I think I've broken through the artists block on that front!

On a side note, I've been chatting to people in forums about keeping up with daily art blogs and challenges, and it's reassuring to be given support and know that other people are doing similar projects to this, and rather amazing to see the progress other people have made in the process!

That's all for today, I'm off to a BBQ followed by sitting in McDonalds for hours, only ordering coffee!

60 seconds

Restricted myself to 60 seconds per 'scene' here, which is damningly hard!
I went into this with some general ideas, blue = water or sky, green = forest, etc. but when you've been madly trying to cram all your ideas in as fast as you can it's hard to change your frame of mind so quickly to another type of scene.

To help get through the process, I began with just using the rule of thirds and later decided doing a general shape and sticking with it was the way to go. This is most noticeable on yellow through to dark blue, with a straight line -> circle -> 'S' curve -> circle -> triangle being most prominent on these.

The width and thickness of line were generally used here to denote depth, though sometimes used to exaggerate features within the image.

That's all for today! Though as an added extra, I've compiled my favorite dragons into a single image!

A little bit of everything

Killer concubine's with killing nails.
Well, I wanted to do some clothing design, some "creature" design and work on outlines.

As I may of mentioned before, the outline of a character is incredibly important. There's a large amount of biological reasoning behind this, which I won't go into here but generally comes down to humans (and animals!) percieving certain shapes and movements as a threat, with the essence of the threat being based on the, well, shape and movement.

Personally, I'm terrified of spiders. Their little spawns of satan who scare me more than anything else I've met so far on this planet. I literally cry and leave the room. And it's part of this which inspired me! Oddly enough~

You see, I've always been of the firm belief that the reason spiders scare me so much is that their legs reach me before their body does. Sounds...odd and a little mental, I know, but it's true. It doesn't help that I don't see the leg as an extension of the being, to me that leg is a weapon to touch me and make me cry. And no matter what I do to the leg, it won't hurt the main threat, the spider itself. Nonsense, but that's the feeling. I have a similar reasoning as to why I find people with swords scarier than people with badass kung-fu skills. At least when people come at me, arms flailing, I know if I was covered in spikes (this is actually how my mind works) I'd be fine. A sword/halberd/morning star/etc? Jokes on me.

So! I took this idea and extended it into killer-sharp nails on a concubine, adding the layer of fear in that a concubine is a woman who you will usually be alone and intimate with. Much like the FEAR franchise, along with Alice: Madness Returns, Naughty Bear and many others, we're taking the idea of something deemed safe and making it threatening. Another reason why the outline is so important in this piece.

To sum up? First glance: Lovely lady in a pretty dress, with flashing eyes and an 'interesting' headpiece. But then you wonder about the nails-on-a-chalkboard sound you can hear. As soon as you notice her fingernails dragging across the floor the image takes on a whole new shape, one by which you need to get close to the opponent in order to attack it that, while somehow staying out of reach of the "claws".

Very much a Dante's Inferno encounter, as opposed to Warcraft. A lot of the fear is taken away when you stand in the hitbox and hammer 2, as per usual.

Just a quickie

 

I won't be around my tablet nor laptop this evening so, to ensure I get SOMETHING posted today, have quickly mocked this up before I go out.

Asking The Boy what I should draw today, he replied in his effervescent wisdom ' a dude wielding a massive sword to cut his sandwich in half'. This rather sums up where I think I've been going wrong with my images recently: Nothing HAPPENS in them, they're static pieces showing a use of a particular style without ever telling a story. I think I need to start drawing more action, dynamic images if I want to continue improving, and this seems like a good place to start!

As such, here I tried to play with weight, perspective (heavy lines implying objects closer to the viewer), pose and other such buzz words!

(And yes, this image is portraying a now elderly, let-himself-go Superman)