Saint's Row 2

I've been playing Saint's Row 2 on and off recently. It's not the best example of it's genre, and not the greatest shooter or driving game, but there's something fun about it.

Being able to create my own character with his own personality and quirks helps to make it accessible. This is a drawing of my guy, and honestly, I can't even imagine it with any other character. Same as when I see people playing KoToR and they haven't picked the asian dude with the goatee.

What I'm Working On

Wacom Practice

I've been trying to work on some backgrounds for my next animation, but my skill with the Wacom tablet I have is still a bit weak. Sometimes I can't get my hand to work with my eye. It's not the same as drawing on paper, that's for sure.

So as an effort to improve I've been just straight up tracing. I've always advocated tracing and copying of images as a way to teach your hand how to draw how you want it too. You also can 'absorb' elements of another artist's style, for good or for ill.

For this attempt I tried tracing a screenshot from Warcraft. There are a lot of little details to pick up, and I always feel guilty if it's an actual piece of artwork I'm stealing from.

This is a work in progress as you can see, but I find it's already becoming a little more natural to me.

Wall of Text

Hey, I don't have anything arty to post but I don't like not updating frequently.

I got some great feedback on the animation in the last post and I'm working on another one, but I scrapped a bunch of the assets that I've put together. And my friend is being lazy and hasn't gotten round to recording his voice for one of the characters yet. But hopefully it'll be done in a few weeks.

Anyway, I wanna talk about what I've been up to.

I've been playing a few games so I thought I'd summarise how I feel about them.

Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
I never played the Xbox original, and my enthusiasm for the character meant that this was actually a pretty good buy. Butcher Bay is on here and it's a great game. There's a lot of great atmosphere and characterisation. It feels a bit like Deus Ex actually, which is a good thing. The new campaign (the Dark Athena of the title) is a bit worse. I can't really put my finger on it. Yes, the guards have worse AI (but they're meant to) but given their volume and stupidity you can really unleash on them in a way you can't in Butcher. I think in general that Athena just misses a lot of the aforementioned atmosphere and characterisation of Butcher which is something of a shame. In Short: Not a bad purchase and fun while it lasts. Which isn't long.




John Woo's Stranglehold:
Is a terrible, terrible game. It fills a void in my life every now and then where I just want to engage in mindless violence.












Diablo 2:
I've never really played it, so playing it now for the first time is a bit of an eyeopener. I can't really see all the fuss about it, but at the same time I can see where a bunch of the mechanics in WoW came from. It would probably be more fun playing with other people, rather than on my own, but I can't seem to convince anyone to do so. As it stands, on my own it's a bit, well, boring?











WoW:
I sort of have to mention warcraft given how much I've invested in it. I've been doing a bunch of the tournament dailies and am slowly getting Champion everywhere (my guild is called Crusade so it's pretty much an obligation to get the Crusader title). We're slowly pushing into Ulduar. We have 6 bosses down, but Assembly of Iron give us so much hate atmo. Maybe we'll get them this week.


I hope I've not forgotten anything. Anyway. I'll be back later hopefully with something to actually show.

100th POST!

They said it would never happen. BUT IT HAS! This is officially my 100th post. So I thought I'd celebrate by fiddling around in Flash and making something that moved. It's a bit rough, as I've never used it before. But it's a nice try. I think.

IF: Hierarchy

I was just playing around with my wacom. Still feels really weird to use. But hey ho, here we go.

Illustrator...

Is kinda awkward to use.

IF: Impossibility

Didn't really know what to do with this one.
It looks all right though.

Illustration Friday - Fleeting

Hey There,

This is my entry for this weeks Illustration Friday, the topic was 'fleeting' and at first I wasn't sure I was going to do it. I won't show you the sketches, but my first idea was a guy sitting in a coffin with a 'how the hell did this happen?' expression on his face.

It was as bad as it sounds. I decided to go with something else. So I thought, what's fleeting? Space ships? In a way, yes, but they're difficult to draw without copying someone else, so I went for time instead. (click to enlarge as always)






























Review Time
I watched Welcome to the Jungle last night. It has the Rock in it and Sean William Scott. It's pretty generic, mindless and derivative as hell, but fun while it lasts. The film is clearly a vehicle for former WWF doucebag The Rock and as a result it just glorifies him in a way that's pretty lame. For a start he wins all fights, even when he shouldn't. He doesnt use guns (but when he does he's able to hit some guy behind cover 50 yards away with a shotgun) and in order to make him seem like a 'normal' person, he also wants to be a chef. Even though you don't see him once get behind a stove.

Sean William Scott was a bit better but his character was still just another derivation of Stifler, just with a treasure hunting streak (for some reason). I've seen him act better (he was the lead in Trainwreck: My Life as an Idiot which despite the IMDB ranking was actually pretty good).

I guess what I'm trying to say is, that Welcome to the Jungle, is to cinema what McDonalds is to steak. Nice stab at it, but trying to please everyone at once and failing horribly.