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.

The Mimeoplasm

Hard to believe it's been a year since I started this blog. This one I finished during the holidays and was supposed to be the one-year anniversary post which I didn't realize was on the 2nd. In addition to this cardback I also got to work on some other drawing endeavors which I'll be posting in the next week or so. Hopefully then I'll have a bit more to talk about as my school schedule settles and I start to find out what this next quarter is going to be like. 

Here's where I'd like to talk about The Mimeoplasm and my take on the deck but to be honest, I've barely played any Magic in the last six (or so) months so I'm at a bit of a loss. That's not the worst thing in the world though since this means I can keep this post short and get it out there. As usual, here's the PDF version. 

The ooze has always been. The ooze will always be.

Rise From the Grave

So... yeah... over six months without an update.

As you can see things for this blog haven't exactly gone as planned. Just when I was starting to think that maybe I could keep up a bi-weekly schedule I completely fell off the horse. Since I'm hoping to be posting some stuff in the near future (more on that in a bit) I thought it would be a good time to talk a bit about I've been doing during this absence.

Now the initial reason content for this blog stopped was that I was taking a painting class during the winter. This was the first time I had ever taken a painting class and I was eager to do well. What things ended up coming down to was deciding if I was going to spend my spare time working on art for this blog or focus on the work I was paying someone to get graded on. Unfortunately for anyone reading this was a pretty easy decision. I did take photos of the stuff I did in that class so I'll share my favorite of the bunch.

In addition to that I've since decided that I'm going to try and shoot for a computer science major so trying to do well in the prerequisites for that program has taking a lot of my time. 

Lastly, and possibly most relevant to this blog, I was able to get an old tablet I had lying around working so I've been trying to move away from Adobe Illustrator (where I produced everything you've seen up until this point) and into Photoshop. While Illustrator was nice in that allowed me to work with just a mouse the results were rather simple. While that's not necessarily a bad thing I'd like to be able to more than that. So once again I find myself in the dilemma of making content or practicing. 

1st attempt painting from a reference in Photoshop.

With that out of the way it's time to focus on some new stuff. PAX Prime is just a two days away and I'm very excited to be attending for my 8th year. One of my goals each year is to try and get more involved, this also happens to be the first year I'll be attending since owning a camera. Given that I thought it might be fun to try and do a write up of my experiences at the event. I know I'll be attending both the Magic party and the world building panel so stay tuned if you're inter either of those. If everything goes according to plan I'll start uploading that next week. This will also be my second year doing Buttoneering so if you happen to run into me feel free to ask for either of these two buttons that I'll be giving away.

Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker

So for the second update we have Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker. Anyone who's played with me before might recognize I'm starting this blog out with the generals I personally play. I think the best part about having a Shirei deck is it allows you to get excited over the cards nobody would normally care about, such as Fume Spitter, Liliana's Shade, Skirsdag High Preist, or Blood Artist (although people eventually caught on to this one).

Here's the printable PDF in case you want to print this one out.

Little agonies pave the way to greater power.

Sharuum the Hegemon

So here's the first of what will, hopefully be many of these Commander "card backs" I plan on uploading. I figure the best place to start will be with my first and favorite general, Sharuum the Hegemon. A bit of a background, I started playing during the first Mirrodin block, quit right before Champions of Kamigawa when my friends at the time lost interest, and started back up again right before Worldwake. Since Zendikar block was right in-between Shards of Alara and Scars of Mirrodin I naturally accumulated a lot of artifact cards. So when it came time to choose a commander the decision wasn't very difficult. Although Sharuum gets a bad rep for all the combos she can generate I still believe she's more than capable of being both fair and fun.

As for these card backs, I mentioned my idea was that they would be something you could print out and put behind your commander in a clear sleeve. Like so,

To that end, here's a printable PDF if you want to print one out look classy in your own commander games. Until next time.

"Soon I will sleep, eyes closing to a world tarnished with flesh, and then wake to a polished vision." 

-Sharuum

Introduction

Hello Internet, welcome to my art blog! I'm very much an amature at this sort of thing so my aim is that this blog will be a source of motivation and an opportunity to practice. I plan to focus mostly on the game Magic: The Gathering and furthermore, the EDH/Commander format as its my favorite way to play the game. Those of you in the Magic community likely have no idea who I am (which is understandable) although if you do, it would be as Ian who made the CommanderCast logo that was featured in the 2012 Gifts Given Charity.

I should have some content up within the week so, until then!