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I'm a freelance 2d artist; My portfolio can be seen here.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
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  Canadianarama + Sundry | 
Posted - 3/27/2008 12:24:02 AM | Canadianarama
I finally got permanent residency in Canada yesterday, woo! That's a load of stress off my back, though there's still much paperwork to wade through.
Builds character ya'know.
Freelancin'
I finally made post in Help Wanted offering my artistic services, but response has been, ah, underwhelming. I've been most successful contacting people explicitly asking for help, so far. So it goes!
(I am concocting excuses to bump my post, of course, so fear not for me.)
Isostrat 6
God help me, the strategielust is rising in me again. I'm just going to declare all my projects as active and work on them as I feel fit, because there will always be a place in my heart where a strategy game, a space game, and a sim game are simmering. Ha, simmering! Ahem.
What's got me excited again is square hexes aka squexes from ID Merlin of the Aragon Online project, which uses them. I mean, I've always recognized the elegance of hexes in that the centerpoint of adjacent hexes are equidistant from the origin hex, but I've disliked their awkward shape. The solution? Make them square! It's simply a matter of offsetting rows, like so:
Adjacency is much cleaner than on a square grid, and there are only 6 neighbors per hex intead of 8. I think I'm in love.
And now that I think of it, I've also been playing Medieval Total War 2 lately. I mean, it's kinda fun just enough to keep me playing, but it's so disappointing, ultimately, because it lacks strategic depth, the AI is braindead, and so it's just easy or tedious. (Plus it has no historical accuracy at all, heh!) My problem is that I love the game that MTW2 could be, and it's what I want to imagine I'm playing. But then I get frustrated and to thinking about how I'd make a political/economic strategy game, then I get back to Isostrat ... and here I am again.
So here I go again, this time in Pyglet, older and wiser.
Arcology
Laura's been working too hard so little progress on this. After being stuck in thinking about the graphics in terms of Simtower, I figured that it'd be fun to do the graphics sorta-isometric, like the lower right side of this image:
Just stack lots of little isometric boxes up and it'd look pretty good.
Free Graphics
Here're the skiffy-tiles at present:
I made a page with some extra Isostrat5 and Oort graphics, but I didn't like the layout much, and the content is a bit sparse so I'll put off posting it publicly for a bit.
Digital Painting
I have a difficult time drawing or appreciating "cool badass shit", if you'll pardon the colloquialisms. Like today someone posted some concept art of their project with some anime-esque cyber-knight with powered armor covered with skulls and long hair down to his knees which completely covered his face -- I mean, I understand that this is appealing on some level, but it's just too ridiculous for me to take seriously. Same for all the boob revealing fantasy armor and 5-ton shoulder pads. You know what I mean.
Has my innocence been stolen by a fine art education? I simply can't enjoy big guns, skulls, and badassness anymore without some sense of irony. It's just far, far too silly. But perhaps this is just an extension of the aesthetic of pragmatism which I've always held to some degree. What good does this do if I'm trying to do art for what is arguably an industry oriented largely toward adolescent male power fantasy?
Now there go all my clients, heh!
Why Art Contests Are Bad For Artists
I don't mean this as an attack on anyone in particular, and I'm sure that their motives are pure and in the interest of Good Fun and that they haven't thought of this criticism that I'm posing; but!-- as an artist I've become skeptical of the effect of art contests.
Think of it this way: The contest holder gets to choose from a number of entrants. Only one artist can win. Basically, the contest holder gets a bunch of artists to do work for them for free and they only have to pay the winner: Lots of artists get screwed. Contrast this to paying an artist to do the work: The artist gets paid and client and artist go through the process of creating a final product and no one gets outright screwed. Of course "it's their fault if they enter", and it's the desperate and/or amateur that do enter.
So maybe the risk is worth it for artists who aren't established (like me? -- crap! ).
[Like how I posed then undermined my own argument? That's a little dialectic for ya.]
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| Wednesday, March 19, 2008 |
| Meta, Art of many kind | |
Posted - 3/19/2008 11:50:34 PM | Meta
I realized that my journal doesn't have much focus, it kinda jumps around all over the place. What's it this week? Childhood memories? Digital painting? Game design commentary? Or, most shocking, actual coding? I'm afraid, dear reader, that you'll simply have to suffer my inconstant attentions: Truly, I'm writing in this for the sake of itself, or perhaps the sake of the content which produces the text, not for the textual product itself.
Pixel Art
Well, I can't really in good conscience post pictures of most of what I've been doing because I haven't run it by the client, but I've been doing a ton of pixel-art work lately. It started off kinda slow, and it came out decently, but then it really clicked and I got into it. If I may say so, some of the stuff I'm doing is going to look very good and I'm having fun while I'm at it. ... except the tedious bits, but it's cool once I get into it and have something ambient like Mogwai playing.
Here's some stuff I did for the free tile SF set:
Note: No flat greys or primary colors! (That's not yellow, it's amber. [But no, I take back what I said about primary colors; The walls are obviously built on a dark low-saturation red; I think what I object to is bright primary colors used uncritically, but then again I tend toward particular color palettes myself as an artist, and these tend to be 'darker' and not 'cheery'. Personal preference, I suppose; Not that I can't do bright and cheery, see Linx0r.] ) This is my thing with color again; It just seems kinda cheap when you can tell that someone used a color straight from the photoshop palette or, god forbid, the MS paint palette. And I think it can act as a bit of a strike against creativity to use default parameters without question. (Not that I have not and do not do that a ton myself, of course.)
And the character animation:
Looks a bit funny. Have to tweak it more, four frames though it may be. Human characters are the most difficult because we humans know how humans are supposed to move. Aliens and robots and monsters are -easy- because they can move in ways that are just that, alien and robotic and monstrous.
The thing with pixel art is that your resolution is limited to the grid of pixels. Obviously. When I'd draw with ballpoint pen, say, I always liked to draw tiny details to the limit of the pen -- there's a certain point at which line thickness smudges the lines together, and I always drew up to that point. Same with pencil. (It was really bad when I tried to draw with mechanical pencil, it being so much thinner. I got a little bit of the picture done, but it was way too intricate to deal with).
Going through art school fixed this impulse of mine a bit, but I've still got it. I run into it often in digital painting -- I keep drawing details down to the smallest brush, then start getting frustrated as the linework gets blurry at the smallest brushes, when manipulating raw pixels becomes more important. (I suppose I should digitally paint at the high level then pixel-push at the low level to make myself happy, but then digital paintings are a hell of a lot larger in size than pixel-art, so it'd take forever.)
What I've got to do is stop pushing digital painting to the pixel level by painting on larger resolution and consider the image from the size it is meant to be viewed at, not 800x.
I've pretty much started talking about digital painting, but here's the header anyway:
Digital Painting
After what I said about using thick black lines yesterday I decided to try embracing it and doing a woodcut/comic art sort of look.
Makes me want to do a regular comic again, but I don't think I could always find the time. Maybe if I set the update period to like one month per strip, like with Artscum, so I could always figure out when to do it way ahead of time (or, you know, right up at the deadline).
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| White boards, Free graphics, Painting | |
Posted - 3/15/2008 7:30:20 PM | White board games
I think that I realized the root of the games I love.
When I was a kid, my dad would always have a bunch of whiteboards in his home office sort of thing in the garage. My brother and I loved to draw on them, and aside from that we loved strategy board games and computer games, like civilization 1, railroad tycoon, and sim city. Naturally we brought this to the white board by making up our own sort of building game by drawing forests and mountains and cities then one or the other of us would "be the computer" and run the game. This is totally exactly what IsoStrat is, right down to the perspective.
I expanded on this idea myself with my friends. For one, I made a magic-rpg sort of 'game', where he played a wizard who explored a landscape I drew and collected mana to cast spells and defeat enemies. Another one I made involved the player being a "space pirate", so on one board I had a starmap they explored, on the other their spaceship and the 'store' where they could purchase weapons and upgrades which I'd draw onto their ship. Lots of fun was had.
And seriously I'd never heard of D&D and wouldn't really until I was a teenager. If I had been exposed to it early on I think that I would have been totally obsessed because I basically made up roleplaying games for myself and my friends without knowing it. This is probably where I get my love of making games.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
Free graphics
(And how I hate animation)
Prompted by a fellow named "Noods" posting, I had the thought that making some sets of generic free graphics for use by people making non-commercial games would be a good way to advertise myself. I mean they win because they get some graphics to play with, and I win because I get credit/word-of-mouth exposure .. which hopefully leads to people wanting to pay me to make graphics for them.
I had some spare time to work on whatever, so my first set is going to look something like this:
Here's a sketched animation for the character. I remember again why I hate walking animations so much; It's bloody difficult! I've had far too little experience in animation but this is turning out to be excellent practice.
Digital Painting
Prompted by Swattkid's comment and Boolean's drawing videos, I tried taking a video of my digital painting efforts myself and it turned out pretty poorly. I had set it to capture my entire desktop, which is huge, and at only 1 frame per second. I thought it'd play the 1 frame per second at 24 fps or something (why do I assume such silly things?), but it made a video at like 1920x1200 that played at, in fact, 1 frame per second. No one wants to see such a thing, nor could I post that on YouTube, so I'll have to experiment some more and make due with taking screenshots every so often, as I did when drawing this airship sorta thing (going to be for the Utopian Design Collective):
And here are the images at half painting size (the original is 2000x1600) :
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Looking at it after having slept on it, the perspective of the airship there just horrifies me. The far-side passenger pod and the hints of the far-side props are quite awful! It makes me wish I had a 3d modeling program so that for confusing shapes and compositions I could set up a rough 3d rendered "sketch" to build on to make a picture with accurate perspective (I read that it's what Craig Mullins does sometimes): Good perspective is much harder than it sounds, there were many classical painters who couldn't even keep things in proportion; I think at prof of mine commented on how El Greco could never paint legs and his faces all looked like the same person [probably because there were]; But I just say this to feel better about myself perhaps. The problem with open-source modeling programs is near-vertical learning curves. The problem with commercial ones is that they're so damned expensive; What's an artist to do?
Anyway, about the painting itself:
First, it's not done. But that's just an excuse for myself, again. Moving on.
Second, I really like the colors I used for the landscape behind the airship, it reminds me of driving across Nevada, Utah, and Idaho, there are beautiful landscapes all across the west of North America. The landscape rendering doesn't progress through the series of images because I pretty much did the whole background in one go. The clouds could be a bit more yellow though, and given a bit more definition (but it /is/ a sketch of a background, in any case).
Third: For reflections, I brought the blue of the sky to the top of parts of the airship and the yellow of the ground to the bottom of them. This puts the airship into the background scene and unifies the scene and all because objects are colored by reflected light from their surroundings (anyone whose tried to code a light rendering engine probably knows all about this).
Speaking of color, beware of neutral grey. It kills a painting unless you're using it intentionally. Maybe. Color is fun, it makes things alive, and if you play your colors right you can paint anything almost any color and get away with it because color is relative and dynamic.
I've had a very hard time myself un-learning the naive coloring I was so used to, and I'm still un-learning, but the results of going wild with color (well, not too wild) are a lot of fun. Not that I really did that too much here. Anyway.
Fourth: The hard black lines around objects are basically lazy painting. I won't defend it, and though it has a place in some styles of drawing, it's used as a crutch too often. I'll have to think about what the heck I'm doing with it. I mean granted it's an easy way to define an edge but in real life edges are not defined by thick black lines.
Hmm; Talking about painting is good, it makes me think about what I'm doing. I'll try to do it more.
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| Wednesday, March 12, 2008 |
| Codename: Arcology | |
Posted - 3/12/2008 10:01:29 PM | New Project
(In-progress show-off/concept painting there)
The facts are these: Laura is the coder (and shall code in Java), so I don't have to. I'm doing graphics. It's like Sim Tower but not an elevator simulator, with more focus on crazy references to skiffy and on... a smaller scale of things, but more involved, hopefully. Like a simulation on the scale of Theme Hospital with a few elements closely interacted with or something, not on that of Sim City with many, many similar elements on a large scale. You know what I mean.
I should add that this whole idea is the result of us brainstorming about making an easy 'casual game'. And as ever the idea ballooned into something that was not easy or casual, but we think it will scale naturally from simple to complex as the project goes on.
So what about Oort? I don't know; we're so bad about starting new projects all the time. I think Oort will be my project alone to do whatever I want with, therefore I can abandon as many "good practices" as possible and just work on it when I feel like coding something. I can roll with that. I'll change the header to reflect new realities.
Pixel Art
I've been doing tons of pixel art lately for a new client. It's great practice and I'm having fun, though I'm learning that my estimation for how long stuff would take is turning out to be way off -- pushin' pixels ain't easy!
Digital Painting
To remind everyone what I'm doing: In the hope of gaining skillpoints, I'm forcing myself to digitally paint (almost) every day and post the results, no matter how bad.
Been doing lots of attempts on fantasy-style portraits because I'm trying to figure out how to best make a portrait fit into 80x80 pixels for a client. Plus it's great practice.
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| Components?, Painting, Isostrat download | |
Posted - 3/5/2008 8:53:18 PM | Self Promotion
I've been putting more content into my portfolio and have added a promotional td to the top of this journal page. Once I finish filling in my portfolio I'll actually post in the forums here ... and maybe elsewhere, who knows!
I'll be getting my permanent residence this month, so we'll just have to see if I have to get a real job, heh! I wonder what sort of gig I could scam my way into, considering the people at Laura's work who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag (with a masters in CS!?).
Components in Oort
I think what is getting in my way with Oort is the bulkiness of the components as I've implemented them. My system is just not good enough. (I could go into details ... but oh, god, the pain. I know it could be done better.) I should read more about how to implement components, something that goes into detail, or even better would be to see some code. Yeah, "don't learn from code", but ... hell, there's something to be learned from seeing code that makes things happen then figuring out how that happens, like what I got from a lot of dcosborn's code -- a challenge!*
On the other hand, I may just code things ad-hoc so that I can get on with making a game rather than struggling with an engine. Hell with the consequences, I want to be blasting asteroids and collecting loot!
(And of course part of this is how I've been focusing on art rather than code in the last while. I still really enjoy coding but it isn't likely to pay the bills anytime soon. There is little professional room for artist/coders, except in tiny indie productions ... which don't have money. You see my problem here.)
Digital Painting
I'm enjoying it, and I'm learning, I think. And after seeing boolean's time-compressed digital drawing video on youtube, I've got to make one too.
Isostrat
As I said a while ago, I got together what appears to be a working .rar of Isostrat with all the code and resources open. Enjoy: download here.
Requires Python 2.5 and Pygame 1.7.1 and probably only works in Windows, considering how I handled filenames.
And I actually quite like it, playing it it again. It's quick and speedy and has a lot of promise. I find myself imagining what I'd do if I did the rendering through Pyglet; I wouldn't have to worry about limiting the pixels I push to the screen, and Pyglet has a much more forgiving text renderer I think. I'd probably want to re-think much of how I handled the GUIs interaction with the game, but ... it'd be neat.
(Restrain yourself, self! One thing at a time.)
* And I filled my dcosborn reference quota.
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