Zero

Title pulled from Bump of Chicken's "Zero," the theme for Final Fantasy Type-Zero.
(EDIT: Aaaawrgh. The video got taken down.)

It's been a loooong, looooong time, hasn't it?
Well, no need to talk about why I haven't been drawing.

That said, I'm filling up my sketchbook faster than I have before, though. On one hand - more drawings! On the other hand - more drawings I could be scanning in!

But I'm only scanning in a few of them.

So I was drawing with some friends over webcam, via Skype. The "theme for the day" happened to be "generic RPG characters." With that in mind, I started drawing a swordsman and a mage, but didn't get around to showing them what I'd drawn.

Well. Maybe this fixes that.

After I drew those two, I just went off and started drawing more in theme with the "generic RPG character" concept. This produced the dragon you see here. The only thing that bothers me about this guy is...his wing on the left side. I think it looks kind of scrunched.

Playing with proportions and disregarding them. I toyed with the idea for a villain and came up with this evil old man.

With this guy, Troy, I had an urge to make someone really tall. Someone lanky, tall and thin like a spear or lance. Too bad his outfit's sort of mismatched...

I took a break from drawing up characters and started drawing from photos off of flickr. It's fun to see what comes up if you search "bar" and "drinks." The parrot, sadly, was not a result of this search.

I learned that it's a pain to draw ice floating in liquid of various colors.

Then I drew up an apple from Google Images. A braeburn apple, I think. It was the first time in years that I'd drawn anything without relying on an outline. That's done all in colored pencil. I'd had a bad night after drawing the hamster, and that manifested in the monster you see there.

Then I returned to drawing more characters shortly after that. With the concept of an "elegant but powerful" prince, I created Lucas. I try to think that he doesn't resemble Cloud Strife in terms of hairstyle.

Now, with Lydia here, I'd first drawn her as the super-deformed, jellybean-shaped tiny witch you see in the bottom-left. But I "expanded" her into a more proportionate design, as seen on the right side. I blame Halloween coming up influencing me.

And then, I wanted to redesign the "RPG Hero" I concepted earlier. The swordsman I'd drawn up days ago I refined into Rudy. He looks...a little less generic. I think I should have put armor on both of his arms instead of just his left.

What bothers me is that, as I was uploading images to the blog, I noticed that the back of Rudy's head and the back of Lucas' head are similar.

And then, after redesigning the swordsman, I redesigned the Mage and produced Salena.

Salena is awesome.

Sky's the Limit

Update title pulled from what is presumably the opening for the anime adaption of Persona 4.

Anyway. I have no excuses. I haven't been drawing as much as I should be, so I don't have much to show for the extended period of no updates to this blog. However, I've scanned and collected what I've drawn between now and the last update, save for some trivial sketches and some...dirtier drawings. (Hahaaaaaaaa.)

WELL. UPDATE ROUTINE SET. EXECUTE:
This cross between My Little Pony and Tales of Legendia was drawn as a present for my girlfriend. The linework turned out quite nicely. And, well, even though I missed some details on Chloe's outfit (the girl sitting on the barrel), I think the picture's quite adorable.

Haha, although...I'm not sure if it's quite as entertaining to those who haven't been exposed to either of these franchises.


This sketch of Janus was sitting in pencil form for about a month before I added some ink to it, then I finally finished it up tonight - you can see some lines where I used sharpie for his linework. I think he looks pretty nice, although his arms seem a little long. And he does look...a bit plain.

Now, I'm posting some stuff here out of order, but...one night, when I was getting frustrated with drawing, I just grabbed a sharpie and started drawing things. Among the things I drew were Snake and Ocelot from Metal Gear Solid 4. I also started using my rollerball pen for small details and shading more loosely, here.

Then I snapped.

And I balled up all of my frustration into this...terrible farce of a comic page. I used the sharpie for most of the linework, then just used the rollerball for details. It was about after this that I figured I could use the sharpie a bit more frequently in my work.

This was...I forget when I drew this, but before tonight, only the top portion was filled with material - the primary cast of Atlus' latest release, Catherine, with sheep bodies. Don't ask or think too much.

I filled the bottom portion with me conversing with a gentlemanly alpaca, influenced by a real life event from yesterday at the Clark County Fair where an alpaca and I made noises back and forth to each other. Alpacas hold a special place in my heart.

Rose Hero's female cast, drawn up on July 20th. I doodled this while tinychatting with my friends, and was fairly revitalized by how nicely a lot of the drawings had turned out. In particular, Aruna in the top-left, and Sarah in the bottom-right. This drawing predates the sharpie ones.

This drawing of the faces/heads of Rose Hero's main cast predates the My Little Pony and Tales of Legendia crossover fanart at the beginning of the post. I enjoyed how these turned out. The facial features seem at least...slightly differentiated from one another.


Then this was more recent. Until tonight, this drawing of a new design of Red Adonis was just pencil. So I took my rollerball and sharpie to it, and...well, I got this. Nothing in this really bothers me except for the drawing in the bottom-right, where I think the torso is a little long...

Some few weeks ago, I got an idea for a story that incorporated RPG archetypes and concepts into its universe. This is me taking some of the ideas for characters and drawing them out. This was also the first time I tried using the sharpie instead of my brush pen to get some line variation into my drawings.

That said, the sharpie lines seem kind of jarring here.


This one turned out much better, I think. For Rudy, a tenative main character who would draw on stereotypical Japanese RPG protagonist concepts, spiky hair was a must...and let me say right now that trying to figure out how to draw spiky anime hair from the side (when it points up and juts out to the side) is really difficult for me to try and visualize spatially. But in the end, this turned out nicely.

And in closing, there was this. A long time ago, I would just listen to music and draw whatever images came to my mind as I listened to a song. This was the result of listening to "sister" by Jpop group plane. I enjoyed interspersing sharpie lines and rollerball lines in this one.

I can feel the snow in it.



That said, I feel a bit refreshed in the drawing department after tonight. Let's see what happens.