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Sorry for the delay - it was a bank holiday this Monday, which led to me failing to realise the weekend had already ended, and failing to start Precession early enough...
Anyway! Long-time readers may remember me posting about this in previous years - in a couple of weeks' time, it's the 2008 MegaCycle, a relay-cycling event to raise money for ASBAH, who are a charity for people with Spina Bifida and/or Hydrocephalus. It's only a 12-hour event this year, unfortunately due to declining participation, but we're still doing it and it'll probably still tip it down with rain, so if you're feeling generous, please sponsor our crazy endeavours! Some colleagues from work and a couple of friends and I will be exhausting ourselves on the 7th of September cycling around an eight-mile circuit probably in the pouring rain and high wind, if last year was anything to go by...
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A lot of talking, today. I could break it up over more panels, but then it would take longer! So you get some figurative imagery and maps and stuff and lots of word balloons. And many thanks to Ren for helping me with the perspective on the guy to the left there, he'd have turned out pretty horribly if it weren't for her help.
I've been meaning to get back to drawing this on Sunday evenings instead of actually Mondays for a while, but yet again this weekend my intentions were thwarted, this time by a visit to Amecon. At Amecon I learned that the smoking remnants of ADV UK would definitely not be finishing the release of Red Garden, which meant they'd definitely never sell a boxed-set. I was kind of waiting for a potential boxed-set, but I was really interested by the first few episodes, so now I'm considering importing the US discs. Only I can't find anyone who can tell me whether it keeps up the pace and quality of the first few episodes; have any Precession readers watched that series all the way through?
In totally unrelated news, if any of you own XBox 360s and have carelessly connected them to the Internet one way or another, I wholly recommend you take a look at Braid on XBox Live Arcade. The nearest comparison I can make is to Portal, which everybody loved the first time through; it's a tricky and intelligent puzzle title that's compelling and immensely satisfying. It's one of those rare titles where, during development, the developer kept making terribly pretentious statements about how great the game was going to be and most people - myself included - shrugged and thought "yeah, sure, get over yourself!"... and then the game gets released and it turns out the guy spouting the pretentious lines was actually more or less entirely accurate. It's totally worth the extortionate-sounding 1200 Microsoft Points they're demanding for it.
You know, a long while ago, I came across a band named 'Fuel'. Actually, that's a lie, since they were calling themselves 'Fuel 238' at the time, but let's ignore that. And let's also ignore the fact that their new singer sucks, because their old singer was pretty awesome.
Anyway, the short version of the story - because it's late - is that they uploaded a load of their music videos to filthyYoutube a while ago and I totally didn't notice. And these three tracks are pretty cool:
Shimmer
Haemorrhage
Innocent
Also, Brett Scallions - the singer in those - has a huge mouth. I mean, huge enough to make Steve Tyler pack up and go home.
Other music which is pretty cool: The Black Mages. You should listen to some today! [1]
I should really get back to sticking little bits of art in little boxes next to these posts, but... well, not this week either. It's too late and I need to go and sleep. ;-)
Late as ever, I watched A Scanner Darkly this weekend. I think I can safely say it's the best screenplay of a Philip K Dick novel I've seen [1] - it was pretty well done. Not to mention that their crazy rotoscoped 'animation'-style graphic effect worked very well the whole way through. It's one of my favourite books, so I don't say that lightly; the trailer a couple of years back failed to convince me it would be that good, but... well, it is. And you should watch it, if you haven't already!
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Also this week, since I was sitting around with a couple of hours spare, a Hokuto no Ken pastiche, a special treat for pretend-Internet-friend Ren...
Tetsuo Hara is some kind of crazy god; there's an insane amount of tiny detail and texture and volume-shading packed into some of those images. I've only managed a pale shadow of his work and already it took me about an hour just to do the line art. Not to mention that Kenshiro has the most eighties hair ever.
 Libelle |
This week, an experiment with using Sai Paint Tool instead of OpenCanvas for colouring.
I like Sai's watercolour brush very much. It does exactly what I want it to pretty much all of the time. The rest of the package... well, it has its high points and its low points, and its strange tool omissions (no polygonal selection, no blur filter...) but the ones which work work very well.
 EMA |
I think this is the fifth time I've spent all evening drawing a cityscape for Precession and finished up swearing that I'll never do it again 'cause it's just so time-consuming. But it makes a nice scene, you know?
Also, did you see that Sega have created a 'robot girlfriend'? The first thing I thought of when I read that article was this...
I watched the whole fansubbed Red Garden, and I don't remember the pacing being much faster in th...RGE (Visitor)2008-08-17 02:43:33