How to Post an Update

So I believe this is the longest I've gone without posting anything here NEW HIGH SCORE! To be honest though I was expecting it would actually be a lot longer. After a year away I decided to try and pick up oil paining again over winter break with the plan of having some work done by the end of break. Thus I'd continue my annual tradition of updating around new years and pretend to myself that that I'm going to start producing more content. I'm still working away at that project but only using the few hours I can spare on weekends so I won't be surprised if it's another couple months before those actually get published.

In the meantime I made this as part of a birthday card for a former friend and was kind of proud with how it turned out. There are a lot of revisions I'd like to make if I had to try it again, especially with the line weight. Normally line art is something I try to avoid when working digital just because it's really difficult to get clean lines on my tiny table. For this I got to use the Cintiq in the animation lab at school and holy shit does that make things easier. I also played around with using different brushes which is something I often neglect to do.

I've never actually seen this movie...

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Click for higher resolution

Originally this was only intended to be the design for the buttons I'll be handing out at PAX Prime this year but I may have gotten a little carried away. I wanted use a design that was somehow relevant this past year and the first Godzilla movie to be released in 10 years came to the top of the list (Kill la Kill was a close second). As a young'un I was obsessed with movies like Godzilla and Jurassic Park and was naturally excited for the version released this year. Fortunately this one didn't disappoint and in fact ended up on the extremely short list of movies I've seen multiple times in the theater.

Xenomorph

Two updates in one quarter? Unspeakable!

Honestly I fully expected this to not be the case. Recently I transferred to the University of Washington and overall it has been a rough transition. The material is more difficult, lectures don't cover as much, I've been losing contact with friends, and to top it off I got into a bicycle accident the week before midterms. Overall it left me feeling really depressed. After a particularly rough day I decided that I was tired of feeling shitty and took the rest of the day off to try and accomplish something.

But enough of that, H.R. Giger died recently so I figured it would be worth doing something to honor that. I'm a big fan of the Alien series but even before I ever watched them, I appreciated the Xenomorph character. I'm a sucker for bizarre, science fiction stuff and Giger's work has been a huge inspiration for the genre. I was also in need of a new profile pic so I went ahead and killed two birds with one stone.

Pokemon: Mega Mawile

Brief update since I just wanted to get this up here. Its been mostly finished for a while now I actually had it mostly finished back when I made the previous post, I just never got around to making the finishing touches and writing a post to go with it. I always thought Mawile was a neat Pokemon and now that it got not only an updated typing and a mega-evolution in this generation of games it's actually become a viable Pokemon to use.

I recently finished with my second oil painting class and ended up with a few pieces I liked. I plan on posting some of them here but one of them isn't quite done and they all need to be documented. The latter is made kind of difficult by the fact that I'm no longer a NSCC student and don't have access to the photography studio or rental cameras.

Pokemon: Malamar

For this update we have something from one of my favorite series of games. That's right, Pokemon! I wanted to try something different, both in subject matter and the style of drawing. After a whole year I'll be taking an art class again so I was looking for some projects that were a bit more manageable and could be finished  casually. The biggest barrier to my drawing outside of classes has been the amount of time and frustration involved in getting something that looks presentable. So this was my attempt at solving that problem.

It's been a long time since I've played a Pokemon game, at least not since Platinum came out in 2009.  The new X&Y games have really sucked me back in though. GameFreak made a lot of updates that took away a considerable amount of grinding that was involved with breeding and training a competitive team as well as adding better (but objectively still not great) online functionality. Of all the new Pokemon added, Malamar was definitely the one I was most excited about. I've always wanted them to make a true squid Pokemon and to make things better it was given the very cool Dark/Psychic typing. The only pitfall is Malamar's stats are pretty garbage, although that didn't prevent it from seeing a lot of play in my in-game team.

I still have a backlog of 2-3 of those Magic cardbacks that remain unfinished so I don't plan to discontinue those but after finishing that most recent one I'm putting the others on a bit of a hiatus. I've already have one other Pokemon in the works I'll decline from giving an estimate of when I'll get that published. Shot myself in the foot once to often doing that.