Retro Sam - Deviant Art Part 1

First of all allow me to congratulate my brothers on passing their A2s. They both got their first choices for Uni, so well done Rob and Loz.
I still got better grades than you though ;)

I was going to post an update about colour theory/technique today, but I think I'll probably leave that until Friday or next week sometime. As I was pooling all my thoughts I sort of accidentally found my old Deviant Art profile. For some reason it is still linked on the side of this blog.

I used the site over a period of maybe my entire first year at University with a bit of a buffer of a few months on either side, which is why it says I'm 19 on my profile. (note I am now 21 woot me). I eventually checked it less and less after I came to the conclusion that I was never going to form or become an active member of an Illustration 'group' or community. Far too much of DA is amateurish teenagers posting their recent Sailor Moon fanfics and Bleach art which indulgently inserts themselves in there some how. I'm not going to link to any of it. There's no need, you can find all the anime bollocks yourself in a matter of minutes.

The few artists I found that I liked never seemed to return the favour. It occurs to me now that I was also posting reams of garbage and this may have contributed.
(click to enlarge, mostly at your peril as I never resized most of these)


Titled WoW Rush this was my first image posted. The colouring itself isn't actually quite as diabolical as I recalled. I find it hard to imagine I sat there for so long to do it (I have ADD and can't sit in any chair without fidgeting or spinning around or in regards to computers alt-tabbing to something with flashing imagery).

The blood on the swords is probably the best bit of colouring. What with the dire gradients on the hill, clouds, fire, everything else and the terrible 'rain', there isn't much competition really.

The colouring is still better than that atrocious line art. That Orc looks RUBBISH.

I'm glad I thought so at the time "It came out marginally better than I had hoped it would in the colouring stages (but still far worse than I had aspired it to)."



Can it get worse?



Yeah a little bit.

To be fair, this isn't in my proper gallery, but from my Scraps folder.
Quoting my younger self, "I think I did this for some project for school last year. I found it today and it was only half finished, so I finished it off and added a background quick. I don't really like it all that much but it has a certain specialness that I admire."

I'm not sure why I kept uploading stuff I didn't like.

It's not a bad concept for an Illustration, but that's all it is at the moment. I should have researched the crumbling buildings, landscapes, and goddamn that's not how water falls!

NEXT!



Now, this isn't actually all that bad, even though it's also in 'Scraps'.
For those of you not in the know, I agreed to draw a comic for internet buddy, Mark 'Frimkron' Frimston. 'Frisbee' is definitely the best of the bunch, with Kevin and Kat (labelled here as '?' because I couldn't be arsed to find the script apparently) needing some work on their designs.

It's a shame we never really did this project. It was supposed to be a bit like Doctor Who and seemed like fun.
Maybe one day...



Ok, I'm sort of scraping the barrel for rubbish art here as this was moved to the scraps folder FROM my gallery, as opposed to the random city and 'Kat' designs which were already in there.

I think my younger self sums it perfectly;
"UPDATE 12 Sept 2006: Why the fuck is this still in my gallery? It's awful. Awful glow from fire. Awful hair on Kurt. It looks like fucking fabric billowing in the wind. WHAT THE FUCK!"

This was for a College project. It occurs to me that my Design teacher was very patient with me.




I apologise for such a wordy post. Let me end with a collection of comics that still seem a little bit funny.

I think one of them got printed in the Uni paper. I can't remember which, the karma one maybe.