Posts Tagged ‘loot’

BLING OR GTFO (Yoshi has a new shiny)

Friday, November 13th, 2015

Hey. Hey guys. Look. I got something neat a couple days ago.

LOOK.

IT'S SO BIG AND PURDY.

IT’S SO BIG AND PURDY.

Yes, because I am just that ridiculous, I got (read: sent my mother to acquire on my behalf) this iPad Pro here. It’s the 32GB Gold Wifi version, and basically is Dinah’s replacement body since that unfortunate thing we won’t talk about anymore.

No Apple Pencil yet (supposedly the first week of December?) but oh man, I’m getting that too. I can’t NOT get it. Dinah’s going to wreck so much face with that Pencil, so you can bet this will help a ton with art stuff. Even without the pencil, the sound and video quality are amazing! YouTube and Netflix will shine on her. :D

Also, there’s some other stuff about me having to go back to the hospital because my hernia staples were misbehaving and causing an infection, but I don’t want to think about it anymore since it’s punching me in the face with the sads. (Hospitals are terrible. Not because of the people– they’re awesome and do good work. It’s everything ELSE that is shitty.)

The Return of Blastoise, and then…

Thursday, October 16th, 2014

So, hi. Yeah. Not much to talk about lately on the art side, right? I promise it’s really not so much about World of Warcraft popping up like a fiend (hi, Warlords of Draenor) and more about the general lack of table space to fit my Intuos3 tablet on and how EXTREMELY uncomfortable it is to work with that. Ugh. It just obliterates any desire to open up Painter and go to town. I just can’t do it.

THANKFULLY within the month that’s going to be a non-issue, because after over a year of going without Blastoise, he’s finally being moved downstairs, dual monitors and all. Finally. I love my little ninja MacBook, she’s been able to handle Painter (and WoW, which is even more surprising) way better than I ever expected her to, but there’s really no comparing her to Blastoise’s epic awesomeness (16GB of RAM? Yes please). For us WoW players, it’s like comparing an iLVL 450 item from a Heroic 5-man to an iLVL 528 from Raid Finder. You just can’t do it. Too great of a difference.

But but BUT

It’s on the edge of getting better. So, so much better.

Details are forthcoming (but if you know anything about my gear and graphics stuff in general, it should be stupidly easy to figure out), but let’s just say that if all goes well, by the end of the year I will have the digital painter’s upgrade to END ALL UPGRADES, and that’s not something I throw about trivially. Seriously, this is the ultimate step up from an Intuos3, there is literally nothing out there that is better than [bleep!] that I know of. I have spent years looking at its many iterations and thinking “there’s no way I’d ever be able to get one of those” and by some twist in the cosmos, I’m about to get one. Oh man, you guys. It’s the stuff of dreams. It’s like getting a Legendary weapon in WoW. It’s like… well, if we want to go with the Pokemon metaphor (since this upgrade is going on Blastoise), it’s going from Hydro Pump to Hydro CANNON. Aah. The more I think about it, the more hyped up I get about all the stuff I’ll be able to do.

The upgrade to end all upgrades, people. Be ready. I know I am.

Heroes of the (Robot) Storm

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014

NGE 3-in-1 Vol. 1 Cover

Well that was a change of plans. Instead of getting the markers and screen protector, I ended up going on a small Kindle manga spree and (re-)bought the Neon Genesis Evangelion manga. I say “re-bought” because I actually have the print versions of vol. 1-12 but, like 80% of everything I own, they’re buried upstairs somewhere. Also, I like digital more. I mean, I’m reading just about everything else on a screen anyhow, I can’t possibly do any worse.

Now, these days Evangelion isn’t exactly the pinnacle of anime and manga storytelling, but the manga has a special place in my heart (and in the overall EVA scene, ties very closely with the Rebuild movies). Much of this is because of the artist, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. Ordinarily if you were to ask me who inspires me as an artist, I’d have a real hard time telling you because I never really (and still don’t) draw inspiration from specific places– a lot of the times the impetus is from fleeting conversations on the internet and the speculation that spawns from it (in the context of “wouldn’t it be funny if x did y,” or “how awesome would it be if y did z” and the like). Sadamoto is one of a VERY few exceptions.

I was about halfway through high school when I saw the Evangelion TV anime, and the character designs got my interest right away. Normally with anime it’s all about the extravagant hairstyles and costumes, and even though this was about kids piloting giant robots, there is something… plausible about the way everyone was drawn (well, in civilian clothes, anyway). It’s anime, but not too far-out as to be immediately dismissable for being too, I don’t know, “out-there.” There was a certain simplicity to the designs, too– not so much fussing about the folds in clothes, just enough to sell it, to name one example. I liked that. I liked it even more because, as a newbie at the time, it was something I could easily pick apart and study to possibly emulate.

And oh boy, did I try to emulate. Longtime friends who saw my early drawings will surely recall that. But as things tend to go in regards to my artistic practices, I “digested” and integrated Sadamoto’s art style into my own. Others followed. They all sort of melded together and I guess to some degree you can still KIND OF pick out what I took from Sadamoto (hint: the eyes).

It’s weird to talk about people who inspired me, perhaps because I have this irrational fear I’d venture into “copycat” territory (the fact that my primary “creative canon,” Ragnarok TWILIGHT, is essentially multi-sourced fanfiction really doesn’t help). But then I try to remember that other artists had other people who inspired them and they probably engaged in their own form of study-and-emulation.

ANYWAY.

The last volume of the manga is being released in November. FINALLY! (It’s taking everything I have to not buy vol. 13 now and wait until 14 drops, in the hope that Viz smashes the two together like they did the Omnibus versions of the other volumes.)  This is my only real complaint about the Evangelion manga, that it was so “on-again off-again” since, what, ’95? Well, it’s understandable considering it was Sadamoto’s side project while working on anime and other things, like freaking .hack. Oh man, you don’t know how happy I was when I found out he was the character designer for that franchise. I think it’s pretty fair to say that he was a large reason I got into it, especially the games. It really is too bad that Sadamoto as a manga artist is more of a second-fiddle thing, because there are no words for how AWESOME it would be if he gave the manga retelling treatment to .hack (the first-generation PS2 games, if I had to pick one). It’s not meant to say that the other manga adaptations are awful– I love XXXX (pronounced X-Force) as the next best thing to a first-gen game retelling– but I just know that a Sadamoto version would just be that epic, there are also great games as overwatch, that you can play in consoles as ps4 and you can become even better with boost as Overwatchboostpros.com.

By the way, I said that Sadamoto was one of the tiny few of people I could name as my artist inspirations. The other two are Yoji Shinkawa (Metal Gear designer and also fellow Corel Painter user! yes!) and a personal friend, Deeum.

Amazon links for the Evangelion manga, because you know you want to be cool like me and buy them (these aren’t affiliate links, though I should probably look into that at some point): Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, and Vol. 4

The “Law and Order: The Animation” piece is coming along, albeit slowly, because it’s quite uncomfortable to sit on this poorly-cushioned bed and have to keep pausing to stand up every 20 minutes because I get sore. I really wish I had an actual chair in here. *sigh*

Ink is not soup

Thursday, July 17th, 2014

With real paper! And ink!

Holy crap, you guys. How long has it been since I’ve put pen to paper for not-writing/form-filling purposes?

This hardcover sketchbook that Bren brought me while I was in the hospital has been staring at me for MONTHS, and finally I guess I cracked and opened it up. (It helps I had my favorite kind of ink pen, the almighty Uniball, on hand. Yeah, that’s it up there in the pic.) But then I stalled, because I realized this was really nice paper, and my Uniball alone wasn’t enough to do it justice.

I had wanted to play with grayscale markers for awhile, and it looks like this will be my chance. But just any old gray marker from a $10 Crayola box won’t do, this is good paper and good paper demands good marker. I’ve been looking at this 12-pack of Prismacolor Neutrals for a few days, and I might just spring for it– it’s at a pretty generous discount, and after getting an unexpected bonus from a Gourmet Ramen client, I think I can justify a little fun. If I were to order it now, it wouldn’t get here until Monday even with Prime shipping, so I’ll just wait so it will (hopefully) get lumped with the Galaxy Note 10.1 screen protector I want to get. (grumble grumble something about Amazon breaking up shipments even after telling them to hold and ship all at once)

In the meantime I did scribble something on the inside cover. It started out as an attempt to replicate this circular-linear pattern I saw in Ar Tonelico (I think it’s actually the installer port tattoo that appears on Reyvateils?) and then I started playing with extrapolating the lines and then it kinda just… went out of control. Next thing I know I’m generating new, similar patterns in varying scales. No doubt it’s going to sap this poor Uniball dry, since it’s not meant for large fills. I’m torn on whether or not to put in hexagon outlines in the background, or reserve it for when I get the markers.

IN OTHER NEWS, I grabbed the Mac retuned port of SimCity. Ordinarily it’s $20 on Steam, but Joystiq Deals had it on sale for $5. I’d missed this game so much, and because I don’t have access to Blastoise I couldn’t play it on Windows! But now I nabbed the Mac retune on the cheap (“retune” as in “updated to be compatible with the newer versions of OS X”) and, uh, I kinda burned away the past two days on that game rather than working on the Law and Order piece like I was supposed to. But, I’ll be back at the Painter thing later tonight. Why not now? Because I’ve got YouTube subscription videos to catch up on, and this ramen is probably going to put me to sleep soon after.

Lazy Bloggers

Sunday, July 6th, 2014

Okay, I am apparently all kinds of terrible at posting here. Well! That’s going to get fixed soon enough.

Hi.

What HAVE I been up to, anyway? Uhm… not a whole lot, really. Being kind of a forced shut-in has made things take a turn for the majorly-boring (and depressing, since I’m direct witness to all the parental drama). Even though I’ve regained my mobility since before I was hospitalized (and then some!), it’s been decided for me that I’m “too weak” to go out or learn to drive again, and apparently the comfort of dogs trumps my need to be able to get around the house to see my cat, of all things, so I’ve been stuck in this non-bedroom of a Birdcage. I can’t even get Blastoise moved down here because there isn’t enough room in this rathole to set him up properly, so I’ve had to use Dinah exclusively. Not having dual monitors sucks! (Dinah’s ability to output to an HDTV via HDMI doesn’t count, it’s too far away to function effectively as a second monitor.)

On the upside, I did nab a Wii U for Yoshi Day. (Wow, did THAT one pass without me even posting about it. Well, here’s why: what should have been an awesome 30th birthday got TOTALLY tainted by stupid narcissist parent drama.) Specifically, I got the Mario and Luigi bundle, the one that has New SMB U (and the Luigi DLC). Still need to loot Mario Kart 8, which I can probably afford after taking all these Gourmet Ramen commissions.

Yeah, that’s right, I’ve been painting again, primarily Gourmet Ramen stuff because, well, I really do need money! Try as mother may, getting people to believe I’m “disabled forever” is not happening and the process of getting SSI/disability approved is slower than molasses. (Though, I guess deep down, I kinda want this, because some part of me thinks that if I get disability, I’ll have “given up.” And also be “cheating” because mother wants to pass off my thyroid problems and other not-disability-worthy stuff as evidence I’m supposedly disabled, and if she gets her way I feel like I’d be taking resources away from people who are legit-disabled.) ANYWAY. Because “normal work” is a bitch to find and painting is one of the only two things I’m good at anyway– the other being PC building– I’ve been trawling Twitter and the Diamond Club community for any takers for Gourmet Ramen commissions, to some success. So far I’ve made… enough to pay up my WoW account until next year, which is a start! I need to pile up more, though, because the renewal for this site’s hosting comes up in late October.

…which leads to now.

I need to, uh, do something about the design of AP. There’s obviously some outdated widgets and side pages I need to fix up, and possibly see about a newer layout down the line. Also WOW, has this domain really been around for, what, 13-ish years? I also missed the 10-year anniversary of Instant Ramen Sketchbook (which began the day I got my first tablet, that ratty old Aiptek, bless its parts!) D’oh!

I’m no longer posting to LiveJournal, since it seems, like, nearly all of my readership from that has moved onto places like Twitter and Facebook. I’m just going to have to be more proactive about posting here directly and better integrating my social media stuff into this blog (which goes back into repairing/replacing widgets and things).

Sooo, watch this blog! Again!