A LONG Overdue Update

Good evening everyone.

I'm finishing up the last of my 3 days off from work, and have a 'decompress' day to myself. I was able to get some laundry done, did some cleaning, installed a new weather seal on our front door, and managed to finish Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. What a fantastic game. I'm really looking forward to starting the second game in the series.

But before then I have some new demos to play.

I'm getting off the point, sorry about that. After I finished the game and some chores I realized that I have not updated anything new to this blog in quite some time. So I would like to fix that right now.

I have been doing some sketching in my laptop from time to time, though not as often as I would have liked due to continual crunching at work. But at any rate, here are some new sketches. Hope you dig em'.

Catching Up

Well, my plan to stay on track with this thing fell off the rails a bit huh?

But even though I didn't post on Thursday or Friday, that doesn't mean that there wasn't sketching being done.

I got a page of sketchbook time in on Thursday, but wasn't able to get anything done Friday. However I did get a page of drawing done today.

I'm pretty sure that it might be hard to get my sketching done this next week as work is going to keep me CRAZY busy to make up for this week of snow days. Just a warning.

So, here is content for those days, just a little late.

The Intertubes are Frozen

Hello again. Tonight is another mobile update for me. The snowfall our neck of the woods received (all day) managed to cause a power surge that killed our Internet. And our ISP is closed due to the weather.

I didn't get another sketch posted last night as our daughter kept waking up and the GF and I got sucked into the first season of Fringe.

But I did get some sketching done today. More Song of Ice and Fire character sketches.

Hope ya dig. And that you are staying warm.

Later.

Sketches of Ice and Fire

Happy New Year everyone!


Wow, I was really not very good about updating my blog last year huh? Well this year I'm going to make an effort to be better about not neglecting this thing. Granted, I'm not off to a very good start in that regards.


Work has been really good at keeping me excessively busy. And every time that I think I've got it sorted out, the monster reveals its self to be more of a hydra rather than the normal dragon that I was expecting and I get to start the chaos all over again.


I haven't been to my martial arts in a few months, and I'm not sure how this month will fare in that regard either. Probably not well.


But that being said, I am going to be trying to get back on track with my sketch a day.


To help prove that I'm not completely ignoring my sketching, I have some pictures of some sketch book pages that I was able to get done over the past few weeks.


And of course since I'm working my way through the rest of the books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series (currently into book 3), and anxiously waiting for the first season of the show (Game of Thrones) to be released from HBO, the sketches are all of characters from this series.


Hope you all dig the sketches. I'll hopefully be seeing you all again soon, with new sketches in tow.

Oops!

Darnit! I can't believe I forgot to post my sketch last night.

I started the week with another sketch based off of the book Game of Thrones. This time of the young lord(ling) Rob Stark preparing for battle.

I didn't go into very many details with this sketch as I intended it to be more of a warmup sketch than anything else. I stuck with the grey tones for two reasons.
1. Grey and black are the house colors for the Stark family.
2. The book is rarely (if ever) written in black and white. Like real life, the story is varying shades of grey.

I did do one sketch over the weekend during our D&D game on Sat. I haven't scanned it, but I will probably take a picture of it and post it later.
To make up for the missed update yesterday.

This week I will be ordering some new art related stuff using some birthday money I got from my awesome family. I'll be getting a new stylus for my Bamboo tablet as my current one is getting very worn down through me using too much pressure two years ago (instead of checking on the tablet/pen settings). And I'm pretty sure that I'll be ordering Manga Studio Debut as well. I'm liking the way that program looks and I guess I can't be happy with only having 3 drawing/sketching programs to use.
But I'm pretty excited about getting these new tools.

Anyway, I'll see you all back here later with a new sketch for today.

My how time flies

I can't believe it's Thursday night already. I'm not exactly sure where this week has gone. But I do know that our housing situation, work and the periodical distractions of D&D books have been having a greater impact on time than I originally had thought.

I do know that I managed to work on two sketches this week so far. That's not good, considering I should have had 5 by the end of the day tomorrow. I will try my best to have a third done for posting tomorrow though.

The first sketch is me working out my new character in our next gaming campaign. I will be passing off the role of Dungeon Master to another eager companion and once again will be using my dice to combat baddies, rather than playing as them.
I have decided on portraying a Bard this venture, and I have some great ideas for the character. I really wish that I was able to play him from first level on, but the requirements of the next game are dictating that I start at a higher level so as to actually have a fair chance.
Anyway, this sketch is me working out what the character could be. Both visually and in my head. Not much to look at, but hey, it was a Monday 'warm up' sketch.

The second sketch is actually one that I have been working on a little bit over the last two days. It is of the oldest Stark children from the book A Game of Thrones. Sansa, as regal as ever despite her youth. Rob with his enthusiasm and desire to be the leader he knows he can be. And their half brother Jon Snow. The bastard with his own path to walk in the cold north.

Hope you all dig. I'll be back tomorrow sometime with my final update for the week. Though it looks like I'll have a few hours to myself on Sunday so perhaps I'll work on some more sketches to make up for the poor performance this week. Or maybe I'll spend that time playing video games.

I haven't quite decided yet.

What a new year it's been.

Good afternoon everyone.

Well I managed to get a sketch done this week after all. And on Friday no less.

I haven't been able to get my sketching done on account of things being pretty busy for me this week. And I have been having some eye trouble as well, so until that was reigned back in sketching on the computer was a little agitating. But everything's on the mend and feeling better, plus I had a pretty slow day at work so I managed to put together a quick sketch.

Using a new application too. Fresh off of the newly launched Mac App Store, I found the application SketchBook Express. It is the lighter version of it's bigger brother but is pretty cool. In ways it reminds me of a mix between ArtRage (which you may remember is what I was sketching with before getting CS3) and Painter.

It has a really unique UI design that is pretty cool. And the pencil emulation is rather nice as well. I'll probably spend the rest of January playing around with this to see what all it can do for me.

So I present to you a very fast sketch of Jon Snow and his Direwolf from the book A Game of Thrones, which I am very much enjoying. This was not only an exercise in trying out a new tool, but it was also the first time I've drawn an animal in a very long time. I don't think it turned out that badly, but it really shows that I haven't been sketching much lately.

Have to fix that.

So have a great weekend all, and I'll see you back here on Monday.

I, Am, Return

Well well well, good evening everyone out there on the internet. I hope you all have been having a great holiday season and that you got everything you were hoping for.

Believe it or not, but I actually did a pencil on paper sketch last week but I haven't had time to scan it in. And just as I predicted the holidays have kept me rather busy. Well, the holidays and a cold moving through my household.

I could have done some sketching last night, but instead I ended up getting sucked into the book A Game of Thrones. It really is a wonderfully written tale and even though I'm still in the beginning, I feel like I've known these characters for a long time. I'm really excited to see how the story progresses.

And tonight I actually sat down with my laptop after my daughter and my mom both went to bed (we're visiting Grammie to give the GF some peace so she can kick the crud she came down with). The first sketch is of Miranda from Mass Effect 2.

Yes, I know I'm like a couple of years late to get on this bandwagon, but I just played through the downloadable demo that was released on PSN on Christmas (while I was home with some of the crud as well... Merry Christmas to me) and I'm really digging the game. I was completely not a fan of Dragon Age, so I was a little weary of Mass Effect as I figured it would play the same as DA. Needless to say that I was wrong, and thank goodness for that. I'll be picking the game up on PS3 as soon as it comes out. Maybe I should try to play through the first one in the meantime...

And my second sketch is inspired by the afore mentioned book, A Game of Thrones. This time of a weathered king with a heavy soul burdened by the weight of his position in the lands.

Hope you all enjoy, and I'll try to get some more sketching done during the rest of my vacation.

And if that doesn't happen, have a Happy New Year. Stay safe and I'll see you in 2011.

A Skirmish in the Snow

Good evening out there in internet land.

I told you I would be back later this evening with a new sketch.

Today's sketch is inspired by the awesome looking HBO mini-series in development right now based on the George R R Martin book, A Game of Thrones.

Honestly, I wasn't aware of this book series, or the HBO mini-series before today. But the morning stand-up meeting with my dev team ended with a very excited conversation about the show and then the books when I let everyone know that I hadn't the faintest idea what they were talking about.
Needless to say, the conversation had me go to the HBO website while I was burning a new build and I was instantly anxious to see the show. It looks awesome.

And I'm hoping to get around to reading the books sometime in the near future as well. I actually have had two or three coworkers all volunteer their copies of the book for me to read. But if I do get it, I'll probably end up getting it through the Amazon Kindle app for my iPhone (since iBooks doesn't seem to have any of George R R Martin's work yet.
Which is too bad, because I like that interface better than the Kindle app's. Oh well.

Anyway, after watching the many videos on the show's website and blog, and considering the amount of environment art I've been seeing from peers online, I decided to do another sketch with an actual background.

The result of which you see here. An exchange of words between these two men resulted in a clashing of steel, that ultimately ended in death.
I hope you all dig the sketch. I had fun doing it, even though I'm still having a hard time getting pixels to behave like paints that I'm familiar with using. But you know what they say... practice makes perfect.

Go watch the videos for Game of Thrones if you haven't already. And have a great evening.