NSFW Larfleeze meets Natu

Larfleeze meets Natu

It's nsfw because there is a nipple. I find it irritating when I see boob flesh and there is no nipple where there should be one. BUT because Deviant Art can't handle nipples a lot of the time, I removed it for them. This is the REAL version.

Summer Commissions Ahoy

I know many people don't read this blog, so announcing that I'm doing summer commissions is pretty much pointless. However, I am going to put a paypal "buy" button here, so people can buy commissions from me right away.

EDIT: THE COMMISSIONS ARE NOW OVER!

Here are some examples of what people have commissioned.

Lightwave Reboot part 1

Recently, I've decided that I need to refresh my skills in Lightwave 3D. Back in the day, I used to use Lightwave 3.0 on the old Amiga Toaster 4000 to make reallly bad models and animation, but I excused alot of my crappiness because it was such a primitive program. Even so, I loved the program, and to this day have yet to be impressed by any other, Maya and 3DS Max included.

I stopped for two reasons. That Amiga broke down (which really didn't matter because I was able to get Lightwave 7.0 for my senior project in highschool) and (more importantly) I was informed by some artists far greater than myself that learning to draw is far more important than learning software. Once I was told this I began my journey learning how to draw in order to become better at making things in 3D. This was around 2003.

Along that path, I became distracted and I learned that I would never master traditional ideas completely but my effort had a more tangible result. Thus, I pretty much abandoned 3D.

However, every medium that I want to have a career in requires some knowledge of a 3D program and more and more I'm beginning to appreciate 3D programs as a kind of painting tool. Competent use of a 3D program requires the same knowledge I use in my painting, and while I may not be an expert in painting, I still want to see what I can create with these tools. So, I've decided to make making 3D models and scenes in to a hobby similar to my digital painting. A realm where I will continually try to make good looking images and animation.

I was an expert in Lightwave 3.0, but there have been quite a few changes over the years. They are all the way up to 9.0 I think. Well, I can't afford 9.0, but I still have my 7.0 copy and inside lightwave 7.0 by dan ablan. 7.0 has more than enough capabilities to cut my teeth on. However, even between 3.0 and 7.0 there are some major differences.

Thanks to those differences, I'm going to go through Inside Lightwave 7 a chapter a day. I'll do the tutorials and read all of the little things to make sure that I understand what I'm doing. I'm going to chronicle my journey here.

By the end of this summer, I plan to have at least two pieces of art created with Lightwave.\

Anyway, on to

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 was an introduction to Layout and Modeler. Most of it I already knew. The whole thing about how the hub connects Layout and Modeler is fucking awesome tho. That wasn't in 3.0. I also like the "hide the tool bar, and use shift+ctrl+ mouse click to access tool bars" I think that'll really streamline my process.

No projects though

Chapter 2

All about the surface menu. Functionality is pretty much the same since lightwave 3.0, but once again there are a few new features that are really cool. The whole thing about being able to use layers and layers of textures and being able to mix and match them in a manner similar to how photoshop uses layers just adds a whole new layer of depth.

I have to admit that the projects were a little boring, but gave a great introduction to the surfacing process. I know that the book gets in to UV mapping and THAT is what I'm really looking forward to.

Tutorial 1 taught how to add a basic texture, and some of the properties of color, gloss, and basic shit like that.

This tutorial taught how to use and edit images and create bump and specular maps.

This tutorial used the same process as the last one, but added the extra texture layer of a procedural and a gradient to give the surface a dirt swept look.

This shit is so basic it hurts, but I don't want to jump ahead to where I think I should be at, just incase I miss something or am totally wrong about where I should be at

Thumnail Sketches

Yes, another Kukaku piece. This is based on a panel I saw in the Manga. I saw it and thought "how the hell does she tie her top?" So even though I haven't drawn in the hand, that's what she'll be doing. (Plus this view helped me realize why I like Kukaku's outfit.... "easy access.")
This is just a cool image idea that I have no idea where I'm going with. I'm not sure if I'm going to make the figure on the horse a naked female, or an Atreyu looking guy (if you don't know who Atreyu is, stop being so young.) I'm not sure if I want to make the harpies chasing him in to full fledged harpies, or in to something tongue in cheek like flying evil bankers. (I'm also not sure about the anatomy on the horse because I did it from memory. I'll have to get some references, you can't fuck around when it comes to drawing horses.)
This for a painting based on the Dark Tower series. It's from the second book when the gunslinger is in the mind of mort, he's in new york, has just stolen two guns from some local cops, and is headed to get some keflex. Goddamn, that whole sequence where Roland was in Mort was fucking awesome.

I'm not sure which one to do first.

Bleach - Show me your resolve

In your sword, all I see is "Fear."

When you're dodging, you're "afraid of getting hit."
When you're attacking, you're "afraid of hitting me."
When you're protecting someone, you're "afraid of them dying."

Your sword is filled with fear. It's pathetic! You can't give in to fear in a fight, it won't help you at all!

When you're dodging, think "I won't let you hit me!"
When you're protecting someone think "I won't let you die!"
When you're attacking think "I'm going to cut you!"

This painting is loosely based on one of my favorite scenes in Bleach. (Though, granted, I stopped watching the show a long long time ago.) I decided to make Ichigo a little more nekked and a little more battle damaged, because I thought it looked bad ass and for no other reason.

At the risk of sounding full of myself, I have to admit that I am astounded at how well this turned out. I had to edit it a couple times on DA, but I got it to a place that I like. I am a huge fan of Bleach.

Though, I have to say, Bleach is dumb as fuck. It's mindless, but god damn, is it fun. There are great breasts galore (mmm Kukaku, Orihime, Rangiku, Halibel, and Nell) and just fighting and blood. I'm tired of my anime being psuedo intellectual quasi existential bullshit. Why does everything have to be so fucking deep? (And half the time, it's just a repetitive kind of deep)

Bleach is just stupid fun and that's why it's good.

oh, and since I need to start including things to bring people to my blog. The sketch of this piece of art. I wish I had the rough thumbnail to show you, so you could see how far it came from concept to finish.

Temptation

Here is my depiction of the serpent offering eve the fruit of knowledge. I have a lot to say about this and I may jump around.

First, in regards to the subject matter, I find religion to be a great source of material. I consider most of it to be metaphor. I think any one, religious or non-religious, who takes religious writing literally is a full fledged moron. For the sake of argument, lets say god is real and he relayed the story of the bible verbatim. How the fuck would a person over 2000 years ago begin to be able to comprehend things like...the big bang or evolution? If you were god, you'd have to simplify it so that your moron children would be able to kind of comprehend the basics of what you were saying. Ofcourse, these moron children can't get past the idea of a metaphor and instead of getting the basic message, which is "be a good person" it's "WE TAKE THIS LITERALLY AND IF YOU DON'T YOU'RE GOING TO HELL."

In keeping with my idea of metaphor, I've always thought that it was odd that a snake could convince a woman to eat something. I don't think the snake was a literal snake, but a metaphoric one. An asshole with a shit eating grin... like this motherfucker.

When it comes to the rendering of the figure. I have this general policy of treating men and women the same. I draw women with huge tats and round asses, but I also draw men with 0% body fat who are fucking ripped. I do this for two reasons. To make sure that you can tell the sex of what you are looking at. Many people go on about how comic books and fictional characters set unrealistic standards and expectations for the young. I say, it's merely a symbolic representation of the sexes that is a reflection of societies expectations. I also think both sexes drool over certain archetypes of the opposite sex. Certainly, most leading men are handsome and attractive.

I mean I don't fit this physical archetype. I wish I did. In fact I've been trying to take care of myself more, and I've been slowly easing myself in to eating better and exercising more. While the health benfits are certainly the best long term reason to do such a thing. The fact of the matter is, I want to look better too.

So there are social pressures upon all of us, and to be fair I choose to represent figures equally. If I'm going to be drawing hot girls, I have to draw hot guys too.

Kei Costumes

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Out with the Old

Those who have been following me on Deviant Art knows that I've deleted a good 70% of my gallery. I got rid of the really really bad art that I started out with. However, I am aware that each person's tastes are certainly their own. So here is a megaupload link to my old work.

OLD STUFF

There are a couple of duplicates, but not many. Now, if you look at this crap and don't see improvement, then I can't say much about your reasoning faculties. (Long hand for "yer a tard")

My opinion about art is this. "You may never be a master, but you can always improve. Improvement is about self awareness and intelligent practice. It is not about critiques, or anatomy measuring. Focusing on these things will only hinder you. Try your hardest and please yourself first and foremost"

Kukaku Shiba

Kukaku is my favorite Bleach lady. Not only is she the most well endowed, but I genuinely like her character. She's confident, knowledgable, relaxed and definitely tsundere. On top of being one of the more unique bleach girls, she's also one of the most underused. I'm not sure if she even appears in the series anymore. As such, there isn't much fan art of her and I felt obliged to correct that.

I'll be updating with a little tutorial on how I did this in a couple of days.

Kuta for Cheeks

Kuta is a character created by Cheeks-74 on DA. He's holding an art contest for the statue he made of the character. Now, here's my track record with contests and competition. Failure failure failure. Maybe a little recognition, but mostly failure. I enter contests as often as I can cuz you never know when you're going to succeed.

Much like pavlov's dog, I've been conditioned to expect failure. So what do I do? I make images that I like. I never try to out do anyone I just make something that looks right to me. Is this good or bad? I don't truthfully know.

Samus Painting

Samus is more often than not portrayed as a pin up girl. She's a generic blonde with a nice ass, and nerds have been fawning over that for a while. I've always thought that her sex was irrelevant, but nowadays it seems to be the major selling point on the character.

That bugs me. Now, I'm the first to sexualize something. The toph images are perfect evidence of that. However, Samus has become too far sexualized. I think its important to remind ourselves why she's so beloved, and no it's not for her spectacular ass.

Toph Crawling

Once again, I make an attempt at drawing and painting a sexy adult Toph. Once again, I feel really creepy doing so. Just so you guys know, she is covered up down there by a material similar to what makes up her "boulder holders." I didn't render it because everytime I did it looked either like a piece of poo... literally, or a penis. I'd rather some people think that she's totally exposed down there, than think she's shitting herself or that she has a penis.

Unfortunately, I can't claim that this was a speed painting. I worked most of the night on it and it still feels like it is below par. However, the reason why I took so long, and why it didn't turn out great was because I practicing things I'm weak in.

First, the pose. I've come to realize that alot of my skill in regards to poses always involves the figure standing upright in some basic way and I never deal with perspective in any way. There are two reasons for this. Most of the books I study, in terms of anatomy, have just plain standing poses. The other reason is that most of the poses that I get in life drawing are either standing or sitting, and I rarely put myself in a position and the model rarely poses in a way that allows me to practice foreshortening in a really detailed way. I mean, it's understandable, the model needs to find a pose that's comfortable to hold for 30 minutes at a time. But still, I need to practice it. So I challenged myself with the perspective and the pose.

Second, the painting style. Once again I'm trying really really hard to be clean. I mean, I loved the Ken - Shoryuken piece because the general style of that game, well the opening, is very messy and sketchy. That's right up my ally. But clean is what people respond to

Third, color practice. I made it a point to only use colors I could use while painting in real life. I avoided using levels, brightness/contrast, and adjustments. This was so I could remain as honest as possible. I often get the feeling that I use those adjustment abilities of photoshop as a crutch and I need to get out of the habit of doing that.

Finally, I was trying to create a connection between Older Toph's Boulder Holders


I posted this earlier. I went back and redid some things and that's now at the top. If I make any more significant changes that will end up at the bottom as well.

Indestructible

God damn, that Street Fighter IV opening is catchy. As I mentioned before. Ken is one of my fav characters. He's an american version of Ryu, who has a way more awesome shoryuken. The shoryuken is one of my favorite moves because you always get these motherfuckers who are like, "yea, I'm going to jump at you." and the Shoryuken puts a stop to it but quick.

I finished this mostly because I had the opening to SFIV stuck in my head. Here let me spread the love.

To Boldly Go

This was a 45 minute speed painting. I'm gettin better at speed painting, now if I could only get better at slow painting. Getting detail in there is tough, a good first impression I can do.

Star Trek was really well done and Ryan Church's distinctive visual aesthetic certainly brought a lot to the film visually. I know a little bit about how Ryan Church does his images, so I took some queues from him.

I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of Nero's ship design. I understand wanting to visually connect it with a space monster and all of the connotations that is, but still, it bugged me. The ship didn't strike me as romulan.

Even in the kobeyashi maru the Klingon vessels looked the same and I could tell that they were klingons. But Nero's ship design just came out of fucking left field, didn't it?

Thumbnails of May 10th

So, I have my final final tomorrow for this semester. Well, it's at 4:30pm today technically. I should probably get some sleep but I can't. I'm excited and nervous all at once and I'm celebrating my freedom by starting (and hopefully finishing) a whole bunch of new arts. I came up with all of these thumbnails tonight. Thumbnails aren't even sketches, and I draw them at like 20% in painter just to get basic stuff in there. They sort of chronicle what's been going on, so lets get to em.



Good luck deciphering this thumbnail. I'm so bad at drawing technical stuff. Anyway, it's supposed to be the enterprise standing off against that vulcan ship. This is a really quick 30 second sketch to start off a speed painting I'm going to do tomorrow for my Star Trek Art Jam.

Star Trek was fucking amazing, but it implies so many changes in the series that followed. I find myself wondering about Tuvok, and about how Spock dies and is ressurected. I hope the TNG crew's history wasn't fucked with too much, because Picard > Kirk as far as I'm concerned.


The main game I've been playing this weekend is Street Fighter IV. It is fucking amazing. I took a little more time with this thumbnail because the pose was key in this. Hopefully it's obvious that it's Ken doing the shoryuken. Ken and Chun Li are my fav Street Fighter characters.
I was watching this thing on meteors on the history channel. One of the scientists on it were like "movies have given us this false hope of being able to divert a meteor. The truth of the matter is, if it's going to hit us, it's going to hit us, and there's nothing we can do about it." So I had this idea of a character I created using his powers to stop a meteor that couldn't be stopped.

Yes, more Older Toph. However, I'm trying to actually hold back a little bit, at least in comparison to other Toph sketches I've done. I also recently did this piece of art that had Soranik Natu crawling on all fours, and I wasn't satisfied with it. I'm trying to get the perspective of that pose right, and this is half the reason why I made this. Finally, I found my old Older Toph's Boulder Holders sketch. It's interesting to compare how it started with where it wound up.

N. E. WAY... I need to sleep

Final Self Portrait Sculpture

We started by modeling the head. I didn't take many pictures when I first started out. This is the oldest picture I have of the modeling process taken just before spring break.

After about two weeks of work, I wound up here.

From there I made a mold, and put paper mache in the mold.


I used the same process to create the fire, and attach it.

And this brings us to the present. These last 13 something posts was everything I did this semester. As you can see, you didn't miss out on much. From now on, I plan to update this blog regularly. I'll rant often, but I'll have some art to go along with it.

Soranik Natu Art Jam

So, after the 14-bis art jam, I decided to start doing my own. I don't expect many to participate. I can't offer any kind of exposure to people at all and I pick farely obscure character that the denizens of dA aren't inclined to want to draw.

Raven Art Jam

Raven was the subject of an art jam hosted by 14-Bis. Now I'm not a fan of 14-bis. I think his work misses when it comes to the basics, but exceeds in terms of polish. It irritates me that I see all of these formal errors in his drawings, and yet he has people fawning over him for three reasons. He sexualizes cartoons in a generally competent way and does it in a cosistent manner. He knows how to polish up his work and make it very neat. He know what his audience wants. It has nothing to do with actually being a good artist.

I mean, I've seen people with almost no popularity get totally ignored or treated like dirt who can draw and paint 10,000 times better than 14-bis and it pisses me off. If you're going to treat someone differently because they are popular, you are a sicophant.

I entered this Jam to expose my work to more people. I used his popularity to get my work out there, and I really don't feel bad about it in the slightest. The fact of the matter is, that's why most people entered it and I would totally ignore anyone that says otherwise. Having your work on 14-bis' journal guaranteed more favs than normal.

If I had posted these on their own, they would've gone totally ignored.

Panda Carmen Maria Delgado

The new Body Bags was surprisingly good and got me to make my first. I've been wanting to draw some Panda art since... forever. What's not to love about her? Honestly. This is probably one of the very few girls that I've probably under-endowed in comparison to their creator's rendition.

But this is the closest I've come to good Panda art.

Raven in Lowcut Jeans Redux

Occasionally I get the urge to go back and redo an old piece of work.