Hanza sketch
As part of my efforts to get better at digital drawing, I will at times do some off the cuff sketching and coloring. Usually this goes hand in hand with my friend Amanda and our discussions on character creation, story creation, and world building, which we have been working on casually for many years. Over the years our musings expanded from three characters and one linear story, to dozens of stories set across many generations, hundreds of characters, and a universe including many cultures. It’s pretty huge, but the jist of it is, every once in a while I’ll do a little drawing (and very rarely, writing) on these characters, and this is one of the newer ones.
There’s more information, and a video of the drawing, after the break.
Posted by J under Art | Permalink | No Comments »Once again
I’ve updated the portfolio site. This time it was a pretty minor tweak, just reducing the amount of unused space at the top of the page. I’ve noticed while browsing on my netbook that the smaller screen size really hurt the design of the page, with too much of the content loading ‘below the fold’.
The actual change was easy, I loaded up photoshop and changed all of the background images, replacing the former images I had in the folder. I then went into the css and moved the navigation and content div containers up by 100 pixels. Having a single CSS file for all of the pages’ layout information is so handy for making changes and tweaks like these, as it would have taken forever to go into each individual page and change the top: setting. In other words, hooray for CSS and link=rel :)
Posted by J under Web | Permalink | No Comments »On tablets and games
I’ve had an Intuos 3 for about a year and a half, but it’s only now I’ve started to get really dedicated to learning to use it properly. It would be interesting to be able to sketch just as good digitally as I can with pencil and paper, so that’s my major goal now that I have oodles of free time. To that end, my friend and roommate Kyle is working on programming a game, so we’ve decided to collaborate, with myself on graphics and he on programming. It’s been a slow process so far, but I’ve made some preliminary, comceptual backgrounds that I’m pretty satisfied with.
Landscapes are something I’ve never really worked on either, I’ve always been more of a character artist, so this is a good exercise for me in that respect as well. The final product in the game will of course have some generated and randomized elements, and maybe a bit of movement too to make it more dynamic. Pretty exciting stuff though, and I’m happy to be working on my skills.
Posted by J under Art, Games | Permalink | No Comments »The Blog is Up
After a couple hours of installing, copying, editing, and searching, the blog is up. This is my first time working with Wordpress, but with the help of a few tutorials, I found it was pretty easy to set up and edit. The theme is one I found on http://wordpressthemesbase.com/ called “Underwater”. I really just got it for the structure, not the imagery. I modified the color pallet and imagery based on this image:
I unzipped the theme I found and got into the images folder. After some extensive photoshopping, I replaced all the jpegs I found in the original’s folder with various images taken from my source, replacing the files when I saved them. I then re-zipped the whole thing and uploaded it to WP, where I edited the stylesheet to fit the new color pallet. There are probably still some bugs to work out with the colors, but I think it worked out pretty well for my first experiment.
Posted by J under Web | Permalink | No Comments »