This Might Sound Familiar...

'Hi, I made this new blog as a clean slate.  I'm going to update regularly!'

*couple months of silence later*

...Dammit!

I seriously need to make updating a habit.  So!  After handing in a very un-academic sounding dissertation on webcomics, I'm almost free of college forever!  One final handin for the project realisation, and I'll be done.  It's a shame that after having such a great foundation year doing actual animation this year's been tons and tons of writing, and I can't say I've enjoyed it all that much.  The course seems rigged in such a way that your  actual artstuff doesn't matter - just so long as you happen to be good at writing, you'll be fine.  Doesn't seem right to me.

Had a fun time staying at my friend's house for the last couple days, and though we tried to work, we mostly ended up glued to the Xbox playing Portal 2 and the most addictive sheep game - the bloody thing suits its name.  I declared war on one of the final levels in super sheep mode, but now I'll have to forever live in shame knowing I couldn't even come close to beating it.

My webcomic's still been coming along fairly nicely, though I obviously stopped posting about it here.  I blame that very same friend - she's nervous about copyright and she set me off being nervous.  Curse you!  I don't really think that (especially at this point) my artstuff's even worth stealing, but when you love something, you can never be too careful.  Right..?

I do have a new webcomic to recommend, actually.  I've gotten quite attached to this one!

The fantasy adventure comic 'Leylines' by Robin Dempsey (see the first page here!:  http://leylinescomic.com/archive/cover-everything-is-fine/ )

At first I wasn't all too sure about this one; the art style didn't initially mesh with me, but it's really grown on me since.  It has an odd elegance to it, particularly in later pages where the line art becomes heavier.  It almost reminds me of the art style used in 'The Prince of Egypt', the Dreamworks film.  (It's a brilliant film.  See it if you can!)

The artist has put an absolute ton of work into the story, characters and worldbuilding.  I think that was probably one of the biggest hooks for me - it's hard not to like how much passion is going into it.  She's recorded vocals for the characters names and speech, songs, she's done their cultural dances, the world map, religions, just a ton.  I guess I find it inspiring.
The story follows three royal siblings as they try to unravel the conspiracy that took their mother's life, and now threatens their lives.  The first is Tama, a kind hearted joker who's also (unfortunately?) faced with being the heir to the throne.  Then there's Mizha, Tama's biological sister, who's struggling to come to terms with her mother's death (and who also possesses some brilliant dream magic) and last but not least is Zhiro, their adopted sibling, who's a shadow monk serving the dark god Dream Eater.  And Dream Eater is a badass.

Uh... okay, I'll go find something nice to wear.  Will this be a flowers-and-cake type wedding, or a darkness-and-chanting type?  Because that's a whole 'nother outfit...

(Mini-note!  Not entirely sure if I'm allowed to put that up here... should probably ask about that... but if I need to take it down, I will do!)

I'm sure I had more to blabber about, but I just got caught up having to put stuff on eBay and it's drained my brain with the sheer boredom.  That, and having the person I was helping shouting at me for ages - it's not my fault that when you sell a vehicle you have a lot of fields to fill in, okay?  OH MAH GAWD, STUP SHOUTIN AT THE BACK OF ME HEAD.

Until next time, whichever month/year/decade that may be!

Older than ever!

Or should that be 'older THEN ever'...?  I don't know.

It's my birthday!  Shame I've had to spend it at college oogling at my laptop's screen.  Though yeah, it has been a productive day - I almost completed a whole country and got the design for an entire world map down - after my friend Ashleigh went home and left me on my bill, it did become muuuuuuuch more boring... but I couldn't leave since I had a 7:15pm tutorial booked.  The tutorial was more than a little pointless as I had nothing much to talk about besides my request for my tutor Cynthia to look over my last essay and see if I'd improved much, but she refused, so...

Eventually got home at about 9pm, with cousins coming over to visit, so I didn't really have time to do anything much.  I still enjoy seeing everyone, though, and we're planning on going on holiday to Centre Parcs in Whinfell forest.  It's a tad expensive but seeing as I've not had a proper holiday in years now, I'm happy to splash out a little.

Tessereil's magic system is coming along nicely.  The document I'm using for my own reference is almost the same length as the dissertation I'll have to start writing soon... if only actual essays were that easy!

Hello Again and Happy New Year!

Happy new year!  It's been an odd christmas and bad new year, so I'm just gonna ignore it and jump straight past to the good stuff.

Lots of little victories I suppose; I've done a character lineup I'm fairly happy with, but I won't be posting it for a while.  I've also done a nice document on a magic system that I think is fairly interesting; and with it I shouldn't be able to make any really silly mistakes.

As far as college itself goes, I have a literature review to write, my ol' dissertation looming and most worryingly for me at least, this collaborative project I'm doing to create an animated backdrop for a show... true, it's only 13 minutes of animation, but I'm nervous at having never done one before.  Still, it'll get done!

Wish I had more to talk about, but without anything to actually post, it's kinda hard.  Ah well.  I leave you with this!

Fixing my Doodle

Well I forgot to colour one of the character's heads correctly in my previous post and went back to fix it, and thought I might as well break it down a little and look at my very flawed workflow.

First Sketch

So firstly I just sketch really, really roughly - the characters don't have distinguishing features at this point, so I just label them by name so I don't get mixed up.  I often just have all my sketchy characters on one layer and my background on another, unless I do a bit I really like and want to keep safe, in which case I'll sometimes just duplicate the layer so I can't mess up.

Second Sketch

My second character sketch layer's just to sort out the lines a little and add a bit of character to the characters; here I've changed Lilac's pose a little since I wanted her to look more relaxed.  I changed her wing position from the extreme of a flap to a sort of glide where she's adjusting her positioning, but just a little.  Scarlet's also been moved slightly so that she's not standing solidly on the roof, but she's half-perched, with her left foot ready to push her off into the air.

Third Sketch

Just meant to be a little cleaner than the second, with a touch more detail in places.  Reeeally minor adjustments to Jay and Lilac's face.  I'd usually do a lineart layer after this sketch, but since I'm lazy, I just did my best not to sketch too messily and coloured these lines instead.  The background's the same, with a little abuse of the shift key for the buildings in the back (it makes the paintbrush tool stick to straight lines, horizontally or vertically).

Background Colours and a Smidge of Gradient

Just dull flats on a new layer below the background's line layer (always keep backgrounds and characters separate, it helps a lot!).  I used a circular gradient to add a bit of light.

Character Flats

Next, I shamelessly steal my own friend's drawings.  Mwahaha!  I put the references just behind what I'm working on so that it's easy to check and make sure I'm not making horrendously stupid mistakes.  On a new layer below my characters lineart layer(s) - I had a separate one for Jay but since the others barely overlap, and I'm lazy, they share a layer - and use the eyedropper tool to take colours from the shamelessly stolen artwork.  Then, it's colouring in time, since my linework was too godawful to let me use the paint bucket tool, and I'm not bright enough to figure out a clever way around that.

This is the layer I jumped back to in order to fix Pink's head colour.  Always keep an original .PSD file! :)

Flats Combined

And here's what I end up with.  Look at Tweak's face, he has absolutely no idea where he's going or if there's a bird of prey eyeing him up at this very minute.  Bless his sockless feet.

Bricks, Shading, Highlights, and Lighting

I add a new layer above each of the character flats layers and use Ctrl + Alt + G (I think it might be Command + alt + G on a Mac, but don't hold me to that), and this locks anything I draw on this new layer to only occupy space that's not transparent on the layer below.  Cool, eh?  It means that I can just lazily scrawl shading on without having to worry about keeping to any of the outer lines.  Same is true for the highlights, which I add on top of the shadow layer.  It's nice to alter the colour of the shadows depending upon the colour and surface of the object your shading, but in this case I just used a nice solid black with a brush with 100% opacity and 0% hardness.  Same for the highlights, using a slightly paler colour from the sky.

Then I added another circular gradient, much narrower than the first, to give a bit of a lens flare look.  While I think it makes the colours too strong (especially on poor Tweak, who looks like someone tried to kill him with a dodge tool) it was a little experimental, as I've never used the gradient tool for lighting before this.

The texture I borrowed from cgtextures.com I added to a new layer above the background flats and used Ctrl+alt+G to lock them to the contents of the flats layer.  I changed their layer type to overlay, reduced the layer opacity to about 35% and then trimmed away at any problem areas.  I know the textures are a bit badly placed, too.  XD

Final Edits

Here's the finished one, with a few edits from the one in my last post (corrected Pink, sharper and whiter sun, less yellow overlay, bluer sky).  :)

Quick, I need a Youtube video.  Uhm... uh...

Save me, Dragonzball P!

Wait, this isn't Dragonzball P...

Sleepless Nights and Doodles

Well, I can't sleep.  I had a relatively good streak of nights where I could sleep at a reasonable time, and then the streak ended.  So here I am!  Between staring at a blank Openoffice document in a doomed attempt to work and running around aimlessly in Guild Wars 2, I have actually managed to be a bit constructive and sketch up this!

Please don't look too closely at it, it's just a loosely coloured sketch.  A drawing of my friend Emma's pigeon characters in flight!  Almost the entire released cast as of 14/12/2012.  From left to right is Pink, Jay, Green, Blue and Tweak (upper brown one), Lilac, then that's Scarlet perched on the roof there, and finally Hope to the lower right.  Flap, Green, flap!  One, two, one, two, you can do it!

I wanted to include Ginger too (plus I sort of get the feeling I've forgotten someone...) but couldn't fit him in convincingly.

I borrowed the brick textures from http://www.cgtextures.com/ because I'm just that lazy.

Anyway, onto some actual work now.  I should be absolutely knackered come tonight (tomorrow night?) and hopefully will have no trouble sleeping.  Now for the mandatory end-of-post random Youtube video!




Sweet nightmares!

Tessereil Bits and Bobs

A little more about my project, now with more sense and less rambling.  This'll just help any reflection I do on development to actually be kinda coherent.

So, Tessereil's my hopefully-webcomic-to-be, as I mentioned last time.  It has an odd name that I'm really bipolar about - on one hand, I like it.  But I don't think the spelling would allow it to be pronounced the way I say it and I'm afraid people might not guess the spelling from that pronunciation, which could be trouble.  So it's mostly a working title.

It's a high fantasy story, is intended to be fairly long but not stretched-out, and has a lot of
worldbuilding-i-ness that affects the plot.  I think that summarises more or less any information that's needed to make sense of my pictures today.

First up, my story is largely nonhumans, but some of them are very human-like, like Lerra, below.  I'm really bad at drawing humans... I don't think it's a bad thing, because I'll keep at it until I'm happy with the style I'm using, but just please bare with me on this one.

Sketchy, unfinished turnaround of what is just concept stuff at the minute.  Also, my women always look really manly...

I also have a couple of attempts of doing skies with supernatural looks to them.  The first one used a lot of cloud brushes, the second one was just horrible abuse of filters in Photoshop.

Other than that, it's been seemingly endless sessions of boredly typing away, trying to iron out the backstory for the world, etc.  Oh, that reminds me - look here for some great advice from a woman called Limyaael, who did a series of rants about things that irritate her in books she read.  No one knows where she is now, but her rants are hosted here:

http://curiosityquills.com/limyaaels-rants/

I can't get enough of them; there's a lot of things to think about when worldbuilding especially.

Found this Dragonball Z video; I think it's the opening for one of the games.  I just like it.  XD

A New Blog!

If I don't know you, well hai, my name's Rachel, Lady of Questionably Awful Doodles, Mistress of Dying Horribly in First Person Shooters, Queen of Pointless, Incessant Rambling.

Side effects of continuing to read may include headaches, nausea, swearing, confusion, lowering of IQ, eye pain, uncontrollable rage, stomach aches, stubbed toes, the urge to troll, amnesia and toothache.  The blogger does not claim to have royal blood from any family or be in a sexual relationship with a married man, but is in fact female.

If I do know you, it's probably because you've been looking at my previous blog in which case
You Are Awesome <3.

Anyhow, enough of that.  I've decided that since I have a bit of a rubbish track record keeping my old blog updated and tended to go on rambling whingefests on it, it would be nice to start fresh and organise myself.  And be happy! Pretend to be happy *sob*! ;_;    XD  And also stop abusing the text sizes.

With all that said, onto my real rambling.  I'm going to put it under little subtitles now, too  :D

'Tessereil' Webcomic Project Incessant Ramble

It's year 3 of college; the first 2 years covered a whole slew of smaller projects during which I was assigned briefs and guided by my two kind and fantastically sarcastic teachers.  Then year 3 happened, and No One Can Hear You Scream.  I talked all about my lack of ideas and my expertise in the complex art of Headdesking in my previous blog, but with a little help from my good friend Emma (if you don't know her, go find her here --> http://emmafriel.blogspot.co.uk  <--  and make your life complete) I have an idea now!

My original ideas I batted around were 1) Continue with my previous animation, 'Feathers of the Roc' and 2) Remake my old, incomplete animation which was just nicknamed 'Nidhogg and the Eagle'.  In digital 3D!  While I'm working on Feathers of the Roc anyway, I decided against the Nidhogg animation idea for various reasons... doesn't help that I'm not very experienced with 3D... but then found out that Emma was using 'Crumbs', the webcomic she's developing, as her project.

I guess I'd never really given it much thought, but now it really does make me feel stupid.  This isn't 'Animation' we're studying, this is 'Creative Practice'.  So why the hell not!  I've dabbled in comics for years but never stuck with them - I need a solid plan to continue a project over a long period of time and I never made one for these previous comics - but the idea seemed right.  I've got my 'personal work' that's been sitting on the back burner for years and has always been separate from my 'other work'.  I'd always wanted to DO something with it, but I've always worried about what kind of icy reception it could get.  The sad truth is, it's my baby.  I've grown to be precious with this personal project - and that is BAD.  It's bad because I know that I'll keep on fussing and tweaking it until the day I die and never get to do anything with it.  So, I've decided to be a bit rough with myself and do a webcomic out of it too - I get one more chance to finalise it, and then it's out.  If it works, great!  If it doesn't, well, tough cookies.

I've given it the working name Tessereil (working because I'm not sure how easily people would be able to spell it.  If I said Tess-eh-rale, would you come to that spelling easily or no?) and I'll be blabbering more about it later.  Run, run for the hills!

Eyeboggle Treat!

Just something I've found that I think should be shared!

The fantasy webcomic 'Strays' ( find it here! -->   http://www.straysonline.com   ).  I've really been enjoying this one.  Strays is a joint project of Samantha Whitten and Stacey Pefferkorn, who both write and draw it.  It follows the experiences of a young mysterious young girl called Meela, who meets a bounty hunter called Feral and tags along with him.  The story has a healthy blend of serious drama and lighthearted comedic moments, and both are handled very well.  As the story progresses a lot of elements of mystery come into play, even with our protagonist Meela.  The story proceeds at a brisk pace (maybe a little too fast, in my opinion, but that's only because I want to see more of the loveable characters) and has very few slow or dull moments.  The characters I find are all very likeable, even those who are close to the archetypes I usually dislike.  'Spunky, cheeky young child looking for company and tagging along with the badass' is usually annoying for me, but Meela is well characterised and stays far from this; I think it's probably because the writers aren't trying too hard to make her sympathetic, and she reacts in the way a child actually would.  She isn't overplayed for gags or made to be a solid recurring hindrance, and seems to suffer logical consequences of her actions, good and bad.  

The artwork is gorgeous.  It's drawn and coloured consistently great, characters are always posed interestingly, panel layouts and text arrangements are always clear and very easy on the eyes.  The thing I love about this comic the most is the characters' expressions - the expressions!  They're just so.  Insanely.  Good.  Have a flick through some pages and see.  Strays very, very rarely if ever resorts to the typical manga expressions to convey emotion in its characters (here's an example):

Now just let me say firstly that I just whipped this up from Google; it's a little page of very well drawn (and adorable) faces, and the expressions are cute.  The problem I find is that when people use these sort of expressions, individualism of the character can easily go clean out the window.  It's kind of boiling emotions down to simple cues like these takes away the complexity of the emotion you can convey using the character's actual face.  I like to see a character's actual face showing me emotion; using these expressions kind of feels like you're sticking this familiar manga face that doesn't quite belong to any character in particular over it.  Just my opinion, of course, but Strays gets big points from me for largely staying away from this approach.

Give it a look!

Youtube Favourites

This video's a little old now, but I recently rediscovered it and had to put it up here.  Everyone loves Richard!

...unless you're someone from that village...

PS. Read Looking For Group!