Double art post! There was a little over a month’s gap between them but here’s some art of my and Robert’s WoW mains.
Also here’s some process videos:
Posts Tagged ‘instant ramen’
(Instant Ramen) Siblings in War
Friday, June 2nd, 2017Procreate bows to ME now
Tuesday, August 2nd, 2016
A recent patch in Procreate (one of the major drawing apps on the iPad) fixed one of, if not my biggest gripe with the app– the eyedrop tool was too fickle in how it triggered. Now it’s mapped to a separate button that triggers when held down. YES. This thing was the biggest dealbreaker for a long time, and I can’t believe that it being fixed was what finally made the app not only usable, but pretty freaking awesome for me.
As you can tell, art happened!
I had attempted to do “native” (as in, done 100% in Procreate) pieces in the past but would hit a fatal roadblock, specifically in regards to coloring, because I am heavily dependent on eyedrop sampling for when I blend. It always ended with me having to export to Blastoise to finish in Painter (which presented an annoying, but not fatal issue, in that he would “break” my colors because he deemed the iPad color palette inferior and I’d have to go through all the color layers and tweak them to get them back to where they should be. It’s NOT an issue with my monitor, the colors are changed enough for me to know it’s not my monitor being improperly calibrated).
Exporting to Blastoise is okay, and expected for super-high-detail work where I specifically want to take advantage of Painter’s brushes, but I want to be able to do more casual material 100% on the iPad. For one thing, with my iPad I can do this from bed, which is much more comfortable than a crappy sinking office chair. Also, I am not super-confined to having my canvas oriented in one direction, I can spin it non-destructively so I can better work specific places.
I’ve gotten pretty used to the way Procreate handles and I’m really happy with the two things I’ve made so far (Hikaru’s FFXIV incarnation and Numair with Dragonite & Dratini), and they didn’t take me very long to do, so THEORETICALLY this should facilitate a lot more casual art posts.
Also, another awesome part about Procreate? Native support for video exporting! It basically does all the work for me in terms of generating a process/speedpaint video (shows the completed image first, then fades to the start of a timelapse) that I can instantly plop on YouTube! How it manages to track everything I do without lagging me horribly, I don’t know because capturing this shit on Blastoise isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world (I have to basically redo my OBS settings every time to make sure everything gets included) but having this available on the iPad is pretty freaking sweet, and I’m definitely going to export video for all the casual art I do going forward.
In fact, here’s the capture of the above-two pieces:
I COULD throw them into iMovie and drop music in, but I’m just too lazy for that nonsense.
The one feature I want to see in Procreate is better support for importing PSD files. You can KINDA do it now, but it’s super-clunky and only a handful of dimensions are supported, making it useless to me. I want better PSD importing so I can truly pingpong between Blastoise and my iPad, because right now it’s kind of a one-way thing.
Gotta get out of this artist rut
Wednesday, November 18th, 2015I’ve been in a slump for a long, long time, art-wise. It’s at the point where I’m lucky if I can eke out a couple things a year, now I don’t even have time to go to the vape trade show that I like so much.
And, frankly, that’s really terrible. Like, TRULY terrible. I tout myself as a painter as part of my personal identity, and yet in recent years I have so little to show for it. (Aside from commissions, which I don’t really count because money is involved, this is about art I do for me.)
Tonight, in trying to jumpstart my inspiration (since holiday season is fast approaching, as well as the day I get my Apple Pencil to complete my iPad Pro), I went diving through my Snowschemes– holiday art for Ragnarok TWILIGHT, a mega-AU for the MMORPG Ragnarok Online. Piles and piles of art JUST for the Christmas subplot. At least 3-4 pieces a year, and those were done solely within the month of December!
The last Snowscheme was 2 years ago. Only one. ONLY ONE. Disgraceful.
I can explain it away all I want: getting older, being distracted by other games/hobbies, depression/anxiety sapping my energy, focus and creativity, being more easily tired because of disability… but those are explanations, not solutions. I need to pry myself out of this pit of despair if I want to continue to identify as a painter. I know that having my iPad Pro+Pencil will better facilitate more art, but that’s really only part of the solution, because I do know that whatever I do there needs to get sent up to Blastoise for final polishing.
And equally as important is consistency. It has to be a regular thing. And I think I have a workable, viable and not-too-tedious solution for that: Twitch recently added their Creative aspect, which essentially reinstates streaming access for artists and such. I already have the software in place to do it (OBS), and as of this writing, Mondays are completely open– no raids or other commitments around the 5pm Pacific timeslot. I can do that, I can stream for a few hours. Even if nobody shows up to watch (though it would be nice if a few did). All I have to do is at least start with a wireframe, else I’ll be spending half the time putzing around on a blank canvas and making an idiot of myself. If I start from a wireframe, odds are it will stick and you can see some actual progression on the stream.
It’s Wednesday night, so I have until next Monday to hype myself up and get a wireframe in place.
Please watch my Twitter/Facebook for details about upcoming streams!
(Instant Ramen Sketchbook) Shit my Raid Says #1
Wednesday, August 5th, 2015Yes, this is a couple weeks behind, but eh.
Not that kind of Yoshi!
Welcome to a new subfeature of the art posts, which is supposed to get me to draw more often based on the shenanigans in my Horde guild’s raids. These are meant to value speed and punchline over being finely polished, so, uh, yeah.
While we were piling into Hellfire Citadel and preparing to pull the trash mobs, Sarahtonim (that cute green goblin girl riding on Koyoshial) talks about an egg that she’s waiting on to hatch as it has a mount she wants (a raptor). Now, these raptors have been nicknamed Yoshis. I knew she PROBABLY wasn’t talking about me, but when she said she wanted a “yellow Yoshi” (a yellow raptor), I was all “but… you already have a Yoshi, although there’s no mechanic for me to carry you on my back.”
Needless to say, this gets the gears turning and the next day I’m all “oh my god I need to draw this before the raid continuation” and, like, one hour before it’s time to log in, I’m furiously scribbling in Painter. Since the punchline takes priority, I just put us in plainclothes. :P (Future “Shit My Raid Says” art posts might be a little more polished since I would like to think I’d be doing them a little earlier than an hour before raid time, but, again, PUNCHLINE.)
Also: I WISH Blood Elves could wear glasses. Seriously, why are glasses not a thing in WoW? Does everyone have perfect vision because of magic/fel juice/troll mojo? WTF, game!
Instant Ramen Sketchbook – Field Marshal Kiros
Tuesday, May 12th, 2015
Well that finished up quickly. Look at this badass. :D
As I said before, I threw out his current transmog and just played with the design. The shoulders are a simplified recolor of the ones Admiral Taylor’s packing (which I believe are themselves a tweak of the Hunter PVP shoulders?), but I more or less just invented the rest. The exceptions are the sword and shield, which are clearly the Grand Marshal’s Longsword and the Royal Crest of Lordaeron.
As for the video render, that will take at least a day or so to put together. Basically, Blastoise has to render one big video of all the capture sessions at its original length (over 10 hours!) before he can squish it down. The software I’m using won’t let me pre-squish the individual capture sessions, so that’s how it has to be.
After the initial export is done, I’ll do the commentary track and lop off the taskbar (it’s a little distracting in preview, since Blastoise has rotating wallpapers and his taskbar is transparent) and punt the whole thing to YouTube.