Kis Kis Kis

Previously - I was somewhat surprised to learn that there isn't a suitable word in English for what my new hobby means in my native language. After some searching online and otherwise, "Fitness Boxing" is the best I can come up with. It's like boxing, but without actual bouts with another person. It's mostly about exercising one's muscles. Even though my arms feel like lead bars after a short while after each session, surprisingly the feeling doesn't last long. It's said that the impact from punching the sack relaxes the muscles, thus leaving less strain to deal with later.

Good God, has it really been this long since my last post? Tempus Fugit and all that, I suppose. Work and holidays have been taking up my time, not to mention vidya games (but that's pretty much a given in my case). This is the final entry for the sketch-stretch. I won't give any clues for this one, suffice to say that it doesn't directly refer to what it portrays.

It took me ages to complete the damn picture. It was my first encounter in drawing fur, and it was far more time-consuming than I anticipated. In fact, I hadn't really considered the ordeal at all; I think I was focused so much on the line-art (in my usual fashion) and thought that the fur was simply a coat of colour. To make matters worse, I had a moment with where I was satisfied with the work so far, but I had to go and make a little tweak here, a little correction there, and soon found myself sinking easily over a double amount of time into the drawing. I honestly lost count on how may hours I spent on it, but let's say around eight.

So, enjoy the thing I guess. I still think it looks like a damn mutant, but by God I wasted too many hours of my life on it not to showcase it. At the very least, I can leave it here as a warning as to how not to draw fur / animals / similar themes. That being said, I think I might switch to vector-art for a while, as I promised a few posts back. Let's see how that goes, shall we?

Sketch-Stretch 5

Spaaace!

Previously - My thesis work has kept me pretty busy for these past four months. So much so that I've neglected all other studies excluding it. It's taken me roughly a year to finish, due to work getting in the way. With a total length of 65 pages, it's now awaiting review. I hope to have it out of the way by the summer of this year.

This pic was drawn (or micromanaged into life..) with vectors. As previously advertised, it was made with Inkscape. I primarily used the straight-and-bezier-line-tool  (or whatever it's actually called) to draw a lot of the shapes, occasionally cheating by making shapes out of various fonts. A lot of gradients went into this one. I'm worrying that I'm overdoing it with them however, as I'm not too good with subtlety. I used two filters - one on the main ship body and one on the lights attached to it. Filters drastically slow down any operations within Inkscape, so I use them sparingly. The starry background was made in Photoshop, as adding noise is apparently a raster technique. It took me roughly four to six hours to finish. Much of this time was spent fiddling with filters, gradients and such, rather than creating shapes.

Sketch-Stretch 2

Pulling a fast one

Haven't continued along the angelic-drawing-route at all. Instead, I've updated my profile picture. I'm also going to shamelessly distract everyone with a few cute animal doodles. You should be able to identify a rabbit, a seal, a dog and a cat. I really need to start drawing bigger pictures. I had to enlarge this picture by 20% to make it at least a little bit more readable. I tend to start with really small drawing sizes, like 100 - 200px, when I could easily draw larger pictures and just adjust my brush size accordingly. I guess I subconsciously dislike the notion of having to scroll around the drawing, but that's just an issue I can simply tackle with the all-powerful zoom tool. The animals are drawn to over-emphasize their supposed cuteness, as my more realistic trials would probably yield something horrific as opposed to aww-inspiring ...

Animals 2

Barely there

Another 30 minutes or so and I'd have missed my blog-updating-schedule... *Phew* That said, it's not as easy to have a weekly update routine going, lax as though it might seem. This week's picture is an attempt at a baby seal, chilling on an iceberg (pun intended). I wanted to finally do something futuristic or weaponish, but maybe I can do that next week. I set out to do a comic-styled seal, as I can exaggerate the cuteness-factor more than I could if I'd have tried a more realistic approach. It would have also taken a lot more time, and I want to keep these attempts relatively short at the beginning (e.g. 1-3 hours or so per piece).

Animals 1