Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Turkey-Bacon anyone?

This week's COW was Clark's round for Thanksgiving (you weird Americans with your Thursday Thanksgiving in November), Turpiggen. The idea was that scientists spliced turkeys and pigs together to create some kind of ultimate thanksgiving meat-stravaganza.

I have to admit that when it comes to moderating Creature of the Week, I feel like I have a responsibility to make sure that the activity's quality does not deteriorate in any way. Now, I feel Clark and I have done a pretty good job with COW lately. We've recently experienced a spike in participation that's been quite nice. But, I always like to ensure that the level of quality of the winning entry is up to snuff. I'm a little ashamed to admit but I become kind of nervous when it's wednesday morning and I don't see any entries that I consider to be of my arbitrarily assigned "winner's quality". When I'm afraid right off the bat that this might happen, or if I feel there might not be few entries, I always make sure to try and get one in. It sounds weird or even like I'm a dick, but I kind of put myself in there as a fail-safe, at least for myself. I'm attempting to ensure that each round has at least one entry of decent quality. It sounds arrogant, but I know I'm not bad, and in some cases I know I can do much better than what is being entered. It actually happened one time that doing this was the only thing preventing there being no entries of a "winning" level in the poll, that round was (maybe you can guess) round #207: The Healer... and you may be able to guess (or remember) what happened: I won that round. It may be a stupid goal, or unfair to less experienced artists, but I do care that very high quality art is being pulled out in Creature of the Week, it encourages other higher level artists to compete which is nice. Not because I like higher level artists and don't like lower level artists, but because COW is a learning experience, and the new artists have a much harder time learning how to do it right, it they don't have good examples of how to do it right, and if they aren't getting pointers from people who can do it right.

...So in conclusion, this round I was afraid that there might not be a lot of work going into the poll, and I was worried that there may not be work of (what I consider to be) sufficient quality to shamelessly waltz into the Winners' Thread. So I busted out a sketch this weekend and threw this together in 2 hours this evening. For a piece that took a total of maybe 2 and a half hours, I think it turned out alright. Let me know what ya' think.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Another Name Game Piece

Hey guys. I'm a little busy watching the charity event Desert Bus at the moment, but I'm busy drawing at the same time. In a few days you guys will get a couple of updates on a few of my new projects. In the mean time here's a little fan art piece I did of The Escapist Magazine's Name Game webcomic. It was about a 2 hour study on this one.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Dragon of the Wastes

Hey guys. I've been busy with some art projects and with Dark Souls, lately. But I HAVE been working, dammit. I've scrapped a couple of awful sketches since my last piece, but I have something new for you today. Before I get to that, I'm proud to announce that my current project for drawing which will span the whole year will be based almost entirely in digital media. Once the project is complete I hope to have at least a small show for it, so I'll keep you posted on that. I will likely be starting up a sketchbook on ConceptArt.org to keep track of the work in that project as well as my personal work. I'll post a link when that's all ready.

Here's my latest piece. Yay, dragons! This piece is a character from my ongoing (about 3 years now, holy shit) campaign I've been running with my weekly group. In that world there are a mere 8 dragons, but each is powerful, vain and sadistic in their own way. This is Affel (nicknamed "The Storm"), who rules over the Grey Wastes. Originally I had intended her to be a little darker and a little colder in palette, but I think this works anyways. The little guys with her are her drake minions.