I did draw something during January though! And here it is:
I’ve been exited for the new Zelda game, Breath of the Wild. So I decided to draw an alternative Zelda design. It was fun! I might do some more in the future, either of Zelda or maybe other characters from the series. :)
I did record drawing this, so I should have a video out soon.
Also, I plan to make a new post/art/video combo still to come out for February. Just because this one is late doesn’t mean I’m going to give up! Nope. I’m going to keep pushing forward to trying to get out regular content.
Making games and working a day job keeps me busy, but I still want to do this. I want to make fun art and videos for people to enjoy! So I’ll keep going until I finally manage to get it right. :D
I checked, and the last time I posted a video was in March… and it’s late December now! But I should be back on track. I’ve previously set ‘upload goals’ for myself, such as once a week, but this time I’m going to take it easy and try to get least get one video out a month. I know that if I jumped right into once a week again, I’d probably burn out. Plus, I’m still learning the best way to manage all my responsibilities, so this is a great way to ease into everything. This blog post got pushed back a bit due to my birthday and Christmas, but it is still December, so it still counts. :P
Now, on to the art!
To be honest, I struggled with this piece. I had setup my drawing area for recording, and pencilled then lined my drawing with fineliner. Everything was going well! I decided that I wanted to test out my watercolour pencils on the drawing. I was really pleased with how the linework turned out but I was nervous that I would screw it up with the watercolours! I’m very new to using them.
There was about a month in between when I coloured the background and started using the watercolour pencils to colour in the girl. It was a mixture of feeling rusty in recording videos and a fear of using something new, stirred with a generous portion of too much other things that needed doing.
The background was made with the dried pan kind of watercolours. It was just a cheap paint set that you can get from a grocery store for kids. I also used those watercolours to do some touch ups after I had finished using the watercolour pencils.
The watercolour pencils weren’t the expensive kind either, just a Faber-Castell box of 24 watercolour pencils. They’re good, but I would have tried to get an even cheaper kind if I had found any. I went to a trip to the art store for that one.
What was the reason for using cheap art supplies?
I’m just learning! I am a complete beginner to watercolours, and especially watercolour pencils. I don’t want to worry about wasting or ruining expensive art supplies. It really takes the pressure off and let’s me experiment! I can always upgrade my supplies once I feel more confident.
If I’m trying out a new medium, I do prefer to start out with cheaper supplies until I get the hang of it. I just try to be aware of what the difference is between the different qualities. With the watercolours, for example, I knew that with a higher quality art supply I could get richer pigments out of the paints. I was also told by the art supply store attendant that the watercolour pencils of the more expensive variety are often a bit smoother and nicer to use as well. But, the fundamental techniques to using them would remain the same, so the cheaper products fit what I needed.
After all, you don’t want to spend a lot of money on a fancy watercolour set only to find out that you really hate watercolours. But so far I seem to be enjoying my early experiments!
Please let me know if you liked the video! I’m still figuring out the best way to edit them, even after all this time. So any feedback really helps! I was thinking that I might start uploading a second version of my art videos, longer ones that are (or close to) real time. That way people can choose if they want to see the general process of it sped up, or if they want to see in detail of how the art was made.
I’m curious though.. If you’re the artist type, let me know if you prefer to use a cheaper version of an art medium before going into the expensive stuff, if you dive right in, or if you try to go somewhere in the middle? :D
I’m going to be posting at least once a month, but sometimes more frequently if I have more to say. By the time this post goes live, hopefully I’ll already have another post or two ready to go. The plan is to stay prepared and ahead of schedule… But, we’ll see how that goes! My hope is that once I start using this website again, I’ll have an excuse to give it a make-over. I liked it several years ago, but it’s a bit stale now.
So, I wanted to briefly touch on what’s been going on lately. And I do mean quite briefly, I’m sorry if I rush through it a bit:
About one year ago we moved into our own house (renting). This was a fun, exciting and scary thing! It has taken us a while to settle in and get into the groove of things.
If you’re not aware, I make games with Alex over at Redefinition Games. There have been game development stresses, and some health issues related to stress. But, as a result of cutting back and changing the way we do things, we feel more confident in what we’ve been doing.
It’s been an interesting year. Instead of waiting for a New Year resolution to start afresh, my start begins NOW! Yay!
I have a YouTube drawing video coming up soon as well. It was a watercolour experiment that I think turned out well, if I do say so myself. :) I hope you’ll like it! There should be a blog post for it soon as well. :)
Since the last update post we released The Maze Keeper of Doom quietly into the world, then began on a revamp of The Very Organized Thief. With all the busy busy-ness, I sort of fell off the internet for a while. Since the re-release of TVOThief seems right around the corner (and maybe a Kickstarter), it’s high time I climbed back on! Check out the developer diaries for TVOThief if you want to know more about that. :)
I guess I didn’t fall all the way off the internet, because I have been posting some random sketches on my Tumblr. Here’s an example! :D
These two Post It note sketches were made in some spare moments at work, like while I’m waiting on hold over the phone. It’s Kim’s Minecraft character from the Yogscast and a ‘Honeydew Melon’ ;). I hope I can create little sketches like this regularly, because it helps me feel like I’m not letting my drawing skills go rusty while I’m doing my ‘day job.’ I leave them stuck up on the wall next to my desk at work. :D Livens the place up.
Also posted to Tumblr was a ‘Lava, in the Drum’ sketch with DJH3Max from HatFilms. It is in the process of being turned into a proper drawing right now! Yaay!
In other news, Alex has been fixing up our websites. He’s designed a new layout for mine. I’m pretty excited for it! Not sure when it will go live, but hopefully soonish. :)
Another thing that Alex helped me add to my website was some auto sharing stuff for my social media. Posts I make to my website should share to my Tumblr and twitter and G+ I think. Hopefully that works well! :D This post will be the first time I test it out, so if anything seems wonky, sorry about that.
Anyway I think that’s enough of an update for now. I’ll try to do these more regularly! I figured out how to write these on my phone once again, so that should speed things up. :P We’ll see how I go. Hopefully they’ll also get more interesting!
The main things that have been taking up our time have been the new game release around the corner (more info on that when we release it! ;D ), and the crowdfund for The Very Organised Thief around the corner. Everything is just around the corner! So close! So terrifying! But also really, really exciting. If you want to know more about all of our game making shenanigans, please check out our website: http://www.redefinitiongames.com/
In YouTube news, I have about two videos that are half done. They’ve been put on hold while all this craziness goes on, but I’m hoping I can find a few spare hours to finish putting them together. I need to upload SOMETHING to YouTube… I feel really sad when I’m unable to put a video up for this long! I wanted to start posting to a regular schedule, as I mentioned previously, but busy-ness got in the way. Hopefully when things start calming down I can get back to the original plan!
Anyway, that’s it. Just a quick update post to let people know I’m not dead and that I haven’t forgotten you! I’ve just been super busy. XD
So I just wanted to write a blog post talking a bit more about what’s going on lately.
In the last blog post I mentioned that I got a new job. It’s not game or art related, just some data entry and talking on the phone type stuff. It’s a nice job but nothing fancy. :)
I was hoping that I’d still be able to do two videos a month, but that’s proving difficult at the current quality level I’m trying to work at. Those extra days taken up by my new job really slow things down, as you’d expect. It’s taking me longer to adjust than I thought! Oh well. D:
I’ll try to make ONE really good artwork where I push myself to make it really awesome, but also do a few quick ones that only take me a day or two to finish up. Kinda still in the thought phase of how this will all go, so I’m just thinking out loud, really. :P Just wanted to post it to try and motivate myself to actually DO it!
In addition to that, as I’ve mentioned here and there, I want to do some Lets Play stuff. I’ve done a few before, where I was recording multiplayer games with my friends. If I don’t try and get too fancy with the editing, those shouldn’t take too long to make. In theory. Again, thinking out loud here. If you have suggestions I’d love to hear them. :D
At least I’m posting on the blog more often! Yay!
To end this blog post, here’s the April Update video I made! It includes a sneak peek at the next art piece I’m working on:
So since the last blog post was last year, I thought I’d kind of quickly summarise everything that has happened so far this year.
I’ve released two drawing videos (greatly improved in quality, I think, but tell me what you think?), gotten a part time job (data entry), helped Alex with making our next game (almost done!), aaand… yeah, I think that’s about everything super important. Small list, I suppose, but they’re big things.
Here are the two arty doo-dads!
The last drawing video in particular I am very proud of. I put in some extra time to learn Adobe After Effects and created an animation from the art. I definitely want to do more of that!
The last few weeks have been a bit all over the place as I adjust to my new job, but I should still have enough time to do everything I usually do. I just have to work a bit harder. :D Or well, be more organised anyway. :P
There is something I’m hoping to start up again, and that is ‘let’s play’ style videos. Usually after work I don’t feel like doing much of anything except play some games and go to bed, so maybe I can utilise that time by recording as I play too! Maybe do some co-op gameplay with Alex. Then I can edit the footage on my days off, after I do my usual art and game dev stuff.
I’m not expecting these to be super popular, but I think it will be fun to try. :D
Our game, The Very Organised Thief, was released at the beginning-ish of last month. It’s now December, and we’ve had such an amazing response to our game!
The Very Organised Thief got lots of plays, Let’s Play videos (including a few big YouTubers), some cool reviews, a high rating on indieDB, a feature on GameJolt and lots and lots of awesome feedback!
It’s not life changing, but it’s more than we were expecting for sure! We weren’t sure what to expect… but we’re super grateful that everyone liked the game. :D We’re also super excited to begin our next game! We’ve been talking about the next game for a while now, and I’ve started on the art assets already. Yaay!
So that will be happening all December for us. Oh, we did take the time to make a fun Christmas themed version of The Very Organised Thief though! That was fun. :) It should only be available every December. :P
Something else I wanted to try and do this month was to release a new video every week. That um, almost happened. XD My average has been about two a month previously, so I’ll at least try for three a month. If I CAN keep to a drawing video a week, maybe I’ll do a bit of vlogging or something in addition to that… not sure if people would be interested in that, but it’s worth a try anywho! I’ll also try and do some more game vids, cause those are fun. :)
In other related news I might start livestreaming… I’m not sure if it will work on our current Internet speed though. I’m going to do some tests, haha. If it works out, I want to start doing drawing requests over livestream. That would be fun! :) Worse case is I have to wait on that dream until we can get really good Internet (which is probably the case). xD
Anyway that’s enough rambling. :)
Have an awesome Christmas/Holidays and a cool New Year, woo!
We’ve been working on a small game for about a week, and it’s basically finished now. Just got to get some friends to play test it for bugs and fiddle with some more sounds.
Alex did all the programming, and we both did some art. It’s in 3D and is super low poly and simple in its art style, because we wanted to simulate the feeling of older games.
It was super fun to do and we’re planning to do some more like it! We have a lot of big game ideas that we really want to do but tackling them head on hasn’t been easy (since it’s just the two of us usually), so we think working towards them through these smaller ideas is the best way to go about it.
I’ve drawn a bit of concept/promotional art for the game, with my usual speed art video to accompany it. So expect to both the game and my arty thing soon. :D
Also, I’m getting myself more scheduled and organised now. So hopefully I can create more art and more blog posts and what not… more regularly. :P
The website has been updated a bit visually (thanks Alex), and I added a couple of new pages: Contact Me and Commissions. I’m working on an About page as well… or I might just add that as a widget on the side bar. Something like that.
Lately I’ve been working on a small post back log so it’ll be easier to update regularly. I’ve been trying to do the same for my drawings and videos, but that hasn’t been working too well… yet! Time to put on my super motivation hat!
In other news: we were working on a point and click game (that I posted about here) for one of my stories, but that got put on the back burner for one of my older ideas… which I hope to be putting up drawings for soon. :) It’s a fun little side scrolly game, reminiscent of Space Invaders. Should be good. :D