Summer II will be over tomorrow. Thank goodness. That leaves me about a week or so to finish up commissions, get some spriting done and rest before I have to get back to work again.

I’ve mostly been working on sprites for the creator of Dream-knight.com, both designing monsters and drawing sprites of people.

I’m proud of the way these monster sprites came out, but my use of black outlines is still jarring to some.

I’ve finished the remainder of the $10 commissions I had in my queue, but the people who commissioned them have yet to respond to me.

I’ve been doing a bit of experimentation lately, especially now that I’m able to navigate Pixiv a bit more skillfully. I recently uploaded an old oekaki of Rabid I drew, back in 06 or something… the really creepy one where she looks like she was ripped off the cover of a creepy manga, and of course, people actually noticed it there. By request of an old friend, I drew Darling in a somewhat similar fashion, but the result is mediocre. I simply can’t be bothered to draw with Tegaki for more than a few hours. That program needs a flood fill tool, and bad.

My friend, Jennifer, and I were discussing some of the oekakis that some of the game artists do; specifically discussing the way the official Megaman artist does it, and the discussion made me realize that I’ve always wanted to draw an oekaki like that, but without the anime look. To emulate the style I’d like to try, I’d have to start using thin lines in my MS paints, and I don’t quite feel like doing that, so I won’t.

To those who have commissioned me, I haven’t forgotton you. If the Summer II semester was a person, I’d be in jail for breaking its jaw right now.

Somehow, I ended up forgetting to publish this update when I first made it. No matter; there isn’t much here in terms of art. I drew a bunch of stuff, but didn’t finish. School keeps me busy, yadda yadda yadda. I went with Jim to a Pokemon tournament. It was a little refreshing to be around people that are at least two nerd tiers above me, but at the same time a little disconcerting. The whole time, I couldn’t help but think “so, this is how people see me…” The event didn’t go as Jim planned, but turned out well in the end.

I’m getting complacent again. Gotta branch out. After this queue, commissions will be closed for a while. I should probably get over my nervousness towards showing my original art - this place will remain a ghost town until I do…

I got a new tablet recently, and used it to draw several pictures. Commissions were completed, pictures were colored and everything is fine now.

I’ve decided to post some quick renders of one of the models I made to help me make sprites. The model was made a few months ago, but I only just learned how to rig things in Maya. It’s nothing professional looking or pretty, but it’s only a reference model, so it does its job.

Summer II is beginning now. I should be asleep.

My wacom tablet is dead. Upon further inspection, it seems that the flatwire that is attached to the metal sheet inside was torn asunder somehow. The commissions I was working on for Justin Evans and several Furaffinity members will need to be put on hold until I replace it. Well, maybe not Justin’s, as I already had the lineart and colors done and don’t have much more left to do for it, but everyone else will have to wait.

It’s unfortunate that this happens just as I was getting really into spriting…

Here, have some creepy mouse drawing.

If the school’s scanner is working, I guess I’ll scan that Contra 4 comic I did a while back or something.

OH MAN! I have a Wacom. I’ve waited for this day for longer then I can remember and its just as good as I expected. Actually this happened a few days ago but I’ve decided to say something about it now.

-Vincent

I intended to make this update weeks ago, back when I finished writing the new theme that the site is using, but attempting to wait for something derailed those plans. Even so, I still don’t have much art for this update - I started my summer classes already and I’ve been hard at work studying and all that. I’ve uploaded a sketch I drew with sketchbook Pro 2008 and a few sprites, but they aren’t very good looking.

Oh right, I did do one more thing recently; I drew this picture on that Nintendo hentai oekaki recently. I’m trying to keep the number of times I draw there down to once per month to avoid getting anyone angry.

The reason the text looks so precisely rendered is because I intended this piece to be pixel art. I eventually abandoned that plan because of how time consuming it would be.
My entries haven’t been very productive here; I talk too much and don’t draw enough. Most of what I do draw is pixel art I can’t show here, but at least that’s coming along nicely. I had to redo a large chunk of animations after they were lost to a drive crash a while back, but the result is much nicer looking than what I had before. Jim has seen most of those already, and I’m proud of where things are going.

I think I’ll get a hang of this gallery system soon.

I’ve been on a soundtrack downloading fix again lately, grabbing as many soundtracks as I could for as many games as I could think of, and many I’ve never heard of. I love game soundtracks, filling my Zune with them almost exclusively.

Some of my favorite games to play were only pursued because I found a track from the game that I really enjoyed, or the entire soundtrack stood out, and some games were avoided altogether initially for an offensive or boring soundtrack. The World Ends With You has been out for a little while now, and people seem to be rushing to download its soundtrack, but I personally found its generic J-Pop and crazy… I guess it would be considered something hip-hop like? I’m not sure how to categorize it, so I’ll just file that one under “I’ll Pass.”

Arkanoid DS however, has several amazing songs that I wasn’t expecting from the game, with superb sound quality to boot. I’ve been indulging in the likes of the soundtracks of German Shmup DoveZ by Boris Nonte and my old favorite arrangement of Iridion 2 and 3D’s soundtrack by Manfred Linzner. While I primarily lean towards energetic, electronic style music, I’m a sucker for Yoko Shimomura’s earlier works and loads of Uematsu’s works. Then again, everybody likes Uematsu…

I’m a huge fan of remix soundtracks, but for some reason I don’t find most of Overclocked Remix’s archives entertaining. Remixes from the likes of Mintjam and Levo Lution tend to feel more, I dunno, lively without being the aural equivalent of lens flares and motion blurs everywhere. SSH has some cool stuff going as well, but a lot of their work seems very MIDI-like in nature, and he overdoes the distortion guitar.

Sonic games are usually guaranteed to have a great soundtrack, but lately the music has been as bad as the games themselves, with the exception of the instrumental version of Sonic ’06’s His World and Sonic Rush Adventure’s soundtrack. The Mana and SaGa series both seem to have musical quality that is inversely proportional to the quality or at least the popularity of their respective games. That said, I can’t get enough of Unlimited SaGa and Saga Frontier 2’s music, and Children of Mana has a fairly catchy set of tunes. In my searches for new music to listen to, I don’t know how I managed to overlook Rayman’s soundtrack. Rayman 2 had a mostly ambient type of music going for it, but Rayman’s soundtrack is superb.

Hm. I probably should have prepared a drawing for this post or something. Unfortunately, school is still going, and I’ve gotta get back to work. This is my first entry using the Windows Live Writer that has been on my computer gathering dust for all this time- if nothing goes wrong, Live Writer is going to be my method of choice for updates.

I made it through my VB final project nearly flawlessly yesterday, with the only hitch being that I neglected to make and use an inherited class. That last part was optional, however, so it’s no big deal. I got the highest possible score without performing any optional tasks, so I’d call that a win in my book. I’m going to do a bit of tweaking on this program before I hand it off to Jim, but it should prove to be a nice little widget for keeping the enemy listing up to date relatively painlessly.

The new skin for the site is still coming along; I’m going to end up retrofitting the skin I wrote for a handwritten section of the site I used to challenge my web design course so I can use it here with Wordpress. I’ve been keeping poor Andrew waiting all this time with all this school stuff I’m doing all the time! School will be out for me next week, and I’ll have to go back on the 27th for my Summer I session.
I haven’t had much time to color more of those enemy drawings I did, but I do have a new one here:

Coloring these has been quite enjoyable. I recently decided it would be a good idea to whip out Camtasia studio and record myself drawing this stuff and make a habit of doing so. That way, if I draw something that is actually worth seeing my process, I’ll have the video available to show. Who knows, I may eventually become an artist that can really draw something special. The tutorials I wrote for my web design challenge will probably find their way here after some editing. They were all for beginners, so a lot of the information included may seem rudimentary at best.

I still have a few commissions to finish up before the end of the month. If you commissioned me, please be patient; school’s not out for me yet. The S5 commission deal went swimmingly, but there’s no way I’m going to wait long enough to gain enough money for a new Zune and I’m going back to my normal prices. The new program and firmware updates at least made my current Zune tolerable in its current state, but I crave squircle action like an addict. If you’re wondering, I still don’t do animation or adult commissions. Sorry!