The Cat's Meow

Hey, look, page 9 of episode 4 of The Word Smith is online.  It may even be a thing, or whatever.  Regardless, it looks like everything is going according to plan.  Hopefully page 10 will be ready for next week, but there's a chance there might be a slight delay or an interlude instead.  I blame FASS (and so should you.)

And now, on to today's sketchbook entry:

This is a bit of a redesign of one of the characters from the occasionally mentioned Kyoujo RPG.  In particular, this is Mirayrl Aiyew Prurrj Trelarrl, who is basically a supporting, though playable, character.  I seem to have been doing some updating/redesign of some of my FR and related characters of late (especially some of the less frequently drawn ones) so there's bound to be some more of them showing up here in the future.

In other news, FASS is over, I have survived it and life returns to some semblance of normality, whatever that is.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Compost

I have decided to hold off on starting to post episode 4 of The Word Smith for a little while (hopefully not too long) so that I can get more of it done before starting and hopefully not have to pause in the middle of the episode.  Much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I know, but that's stuff for you.  (It's like stuff.)

I'm still sketching though so I'll continue to inflict my sketches upon the internets, like so:

This is a couple of variants on a design for Ellaire (or is it Elaire?  I don't remember how it's spelled...), a minor villain from the Kyoujo RPG which I have a feeling I may have mentioned in this blog once or twice.

In completely other news, I took down my balcony garden last night (/sadface).  Partly because of the storm (though we seem not to have gotten much of it, comparatively), but also because the tomatoes and basil have been looking rather sad of late.  Indeed, the wind over the last several days has stripped the basil of pretty much all of its leaves.  I did, however, harvest another seven (unripe) tomatoes of decent size before sending the plants to their doom, which will hopefully ripen in my kitchen.  I also plucked off another handful of jalapenos.  My parsley is still looking relatively lively, however, and I'm thinking of looking into freezing it or something.  As I think I mentioned in my previous post, I consider the garden experiment to have been a reasonable success, and now I have to figure out how to use up all these tomatoes and jalapenos I've got.

Well, that's all for the present.  Until next time,
Freak Out.
-TFitC

Wax Museum

Forgive me as I'm going to wax nostalgic for a moment.  I recently arrived at the end of my sketchbook and decided to commemorate the occasion.  (There are a couple other pictures at the end of the post of one wants to skip over my rambling.)

(Note:  I am not left handed, I was just drawing in front of the mirror (as usual) so it just looks like I'm left handed.  Not that there's anything wrong with being left handed and, in fact, trying to draw left handed might make for an interesting drawing exercise someday.  Anyway...)

Normally I wouldn't do anything special just for reaching the end of a sketchbook, but I thought that this one was something of a special case.  As near as I can tell, I bought the sketchbook sometime in 2008, which means that it's taken around four years to fill it up.  The thing is, approximately two-thirds of the sketchbook has been filled since my resolution on Feb 19, 2012 to start drawing regularly (about two and a half months).  And about half of what came before that was drawn since starting my Word Smith project in late winter/early spring 2011.  I seem to have done very little drawing from 2008-2010 (well, not in my sketchbook, anyway, I still doodled in various notebooks from time to time).  There were only three drawings from 2010.  And much of the 2008-2010 stuff is in an unfinished state.

So for some reason, I basically stopped drawing much, outside of the occasional doodle.  I'm not really sure why.  I drew at least semi-regularly in various sketchbooks during my undergrad and masters years, but then, for reasons lost to the mists of time, essentially stopped.  I suppose work (and other distractions) may have had something to do with it - my first job after graduating was rather soul crushing, after all - though it's also at least partly due to me just not setting aside the time.

Anywho, I'm really glad I've decided to set aside the time to start drawing again.  It's one of those things that I don't think I realized that I missed until I started getting back into it with my comic projects last year.  It's also something that I've been finding to be both enjoyable and rewarding.  And all this is why I decided to do a special commemorative sketchbook entry - it represents a revival, of sorts, of a hobby that I let fall by the wayside.  It also represents the start of a long journey to improve my skills that I've embarked upon and I'm eager to see where it leads.

Well, this is getting all sorts of long winded, so lets move on.  I decided to do another colour drawing to start of my new sketchbook (pencil crayons again) and do something of a landscape, which is also something I don`t do a whole lot of.

It is Kyoujo looking out over her home town of Numor Port.  The idea for the picture was based on an older, simpler drawing I did for the Kyoujo RPG (one of my eternally unfinished projects) which shows a younger version of Kyoujo sitting and reading under a tree, shown below.

And that is the end of this rather long post.  The next one probably won`t be quite so wordy.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Not A Yak

Once more, back to the drawing board... Starting today off with another two-point perspective piece.
This one was drawn in my small sketchbook (which I don't use often) and was faster than my previous perspective drawing, partly since there are fewer details. I ended up fudging things a bit around the vanishing points and the subway cars are too short (or too tall), meaning I should have spent a bit more time planning things out and/or establishing a scale before randomly drawing stuff. Oh well - practice!

For the next one, I decided to try drawing something else I don't draw very often: animals. And since I like cats I drew, well, a cat - not a yak.
The smaller one (not to scale) was closer to what I was actually going for.

The last drawing for today is of Mal Vandor (only his alias), the main villain from a project that I refer to as "the Kyoujo RPG".
This is, I think, only the second time I've actually drawn this character and I followed the original character design fairly closely, at least for this drawing. The main pose is a bit awkward - I think the spear should probably be held closer to his body and there's still something wrong with the back leg (I think), though it's better than the first attempt.

Anyway, that's all for now.
Freak Out,
-TFitC

Projects on the Go (With Pictures!)

So, I thought to myself, why don't I do a post about a couple of my projects I was working on this weekend, just for the heck of it! And seeing as it's my flog(*), I'll do what I want to. Narf.

First up is my graphics programming project. I was poking at the particle system stuff a bit (which is about as far as the project has gotten thus far), namely converting it to render point sprites, instead of a textured quad for each particle, which meant writing a point sprite shader (w00t). I also acquired a better test texture for particles so they look a bit snazzier now, over all. There's still some tweaking I want to do and no doubt some further optimizations, but I might leave some of that until later so that I can start working on other stuff. (I can be impatient like that.)

A short clip for the curious:



I've also been poking at my RPG Maker 2000 project, known as "The Kyoujo RPG" (working title). Specifically, I've been working on the latest dungeon, which is still in progress seems to be turning out well. As I seem to have been on a bit of an RPG Maker kick lately, I found some videos on YouTube of various RPG Maker projects which, of course, made me think it'd be cool to whip up a trailer for the Kyoujo RPG, despite the fact that it's nowhere near complete and will likely never be 100% complete, at least in its RPG Maker incarnation. Still, its fun to think about and tinker with from time to time.


And because I can:



Well, that's all for today.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

(*) Flog = Freak Log