Happy May, everybody!

It's been three months?  Really?  Time's blazed by, as usual.  Let's hope I can keep this going for at least another month...I'm going to lose my scanner capabilities, soon. :(

Anyway, this week's picture isn't very good.  In the spring gallery, I think Jun and Dusk are the best.  Jei and Jäne aren't too bad.  I think the major problem this week is that I had a really horrible time with proportions.  I sat down today and practiced my proportions so next week's will be good!  I promise!  Don't forget to see it!

Terry was done completely in pencil.  I didn't erase very much but I certainly sketched everything out very roughly.  The lines are brownish because I used a light brown overlay.  I played with the idea of digitally shortening her neck but I don't think that will help any.  Oh, well.  I have to step back and examine the proportions before I think of scanning it.  It's just that the only time I can really see everything in perspective is when I have it scanned and on the screen.  By that time, it's too late. :(

Recently, I've been toying with which direction Terry's shoulder belt goes.  I originally drew the belt going over her right shoulder.  Then, I remembered she's left-handed.  Hmm.  Oops.  The problem with having the belt go over the left is that it may cover up the T insignia.  Here, I managed to make it visible.  If that's where it's supposed to go, then there's no problem.

I almost coloured her eyes blue!  Luckily, I checked my Character Sheet first.  (Well, technically, they are blue with yellow but let's not get into that.)

Just to the right of the big curvy part of her hair, you can see the faint shadow of where I previously had it.  At least I fixed that!  So, what, the head and body are in proportion, just not with each other? :|

Well...

Today's thousandth was caused by:
Creating this new Page Notes page (and everything related to that).
Adding a link to the World Wide WonderHam Page.
The disclaimer.

I've gotta learn how to draw... 

5/8/98
Ah, a good picture.  I like it.

The picture you see is actually 30% of the size I have.  Unfortunately, it's also an annoying 28.2MB!  I've been trimming down on file size but this one just got out of hand.  Perhaps it's because the picture is 8.5" x 11".  I should have noticed something was up when the greyscale scan was a 2.85MB tiff...

This was an interesting picture to do.  When I drew it, I only inked Alex and her bag.  The rest was left as pencil.  When I scanned it in, I got Alex as a B/W tiff so I could have clean lines.  The whole picture was scanned in greyscale, as well.
After the scanning was done, I took the clean copy of Alex's lines and used Painter 5 to colour the coat.  I made the paper texture very large, so you can still see it.  I think it looks great!  For the bag, I used a different paper texture.  It's not as good as the coat because I'd need to shift the paper texture to get the proper perspectives but it's still nicer than Photoshop.  It only took about 10 minutes to colour the coat and bag.  Doing everything else took around two hours!  Photoshop is horribly slow.
After that, Alex's clean coloured layer was positioned over the greyscale layer and the greyscale layer was hastily coloured.  The two clashing styles add interest to the picture.  They really draw the viewer's eyes to her, which is the point. :)

Um, those bricks are a little big, aren't they? <Sweatdrop>

If I knew better, I'd have cut off the top bricks to trim the file size down.  But I kind of like it as it is.

Unfortunately, I'm short of time nowadays, so the next pictures are definitely not going to be as good.  I'm not saying they're going to be horrible, just not as good.  Sigh.

I'm also working on a new banner and Title.  Maybe in two or three weeks...

5/15/98

I'm not late; it's just the time zone shifted on me.  Yeah, that's it.

Anyway...this week's quite a disappointment to me.  I was trying to do a perspective and was going for an action pose.  But then, I thought I didn't want Will to be grimacing, so I redid his face (sorta) and ran out of time for pencilling and had to skip to inking.
Oof.

So...you're probably wondering what did I do in Painter?  The staff is coloured via Painter.  I didn't think I could attempt wood in Photoshop.  As for the colour selections...geez, they looked fine on the Mac!  (Maybe I went temporarily colourblind?)

Let's hope next week's is better.  You can look forward to a new banner and new Title when the next gallery comes out! 

5/22/98
Ooh, ah.  It's WonderHam and Cheese this week!  If you don't know who they are, you naughty person, you haven't looked at the WWWH pages!  (They're not up for MY benefit, you know. :) )
This picture is one of the typical "WonderHam gets in trouble, asks Cheese for help, Cheese smarts off"-type situations.  I've gotten smarter; this is 100% of its working size. :)

The links are rechecked and that's where our thousandth came from.

Well, gotta run!  My Sega Saturn is still on... 

5/29/98
Oops.  Last week, I forgot to mention, I added a counter.  Well, you're a smart visitor; you figured it out.  I also changed the colour for the WHaC picture's table; it was wrong.

Anyway, this is the last picture in this gallery!  According to my calculations, I can stretch this page out until 7/17/98.  How exciting.  I'm afraid the quality of the pictures is never quite as good as I'd like it to be...but we all knew that.  I'll try to be a better artist by the time we return in the fall.

Anyway, enough gloom and doom:  This week's picture was done very much with the help of my Macintosh friend.  The lines of Michelle's flannel shirt follow much the same pattern as a green one I happen to have. :) The picture is, of course, very simplified.  Those lines were done via the computer and the Stamp tool (to copy).

I tried for weeks to draw Janet Hruza, then gave up and tried for weeks to draw Michelle.  This is the best picture out of the lot.  For some reason, I have a hard time drawing any of the people from Howdy Arabia.  They tend to be a little older, that's all.  I also had problems coming up with good skin tones, as we can see again. :(

And for those of you who are wondering why on Howdy Arabia anyone on Howdy Arabia would wear a flannel, it's because the Ky-meis are originally from a warmer planet.  Yikes!

Again, this is a 100% size picture!  Yay!  The only problem was that I forgot to erase the space for the whites of her eyes, so I had to do it at home on (argh!) MSPaint.

Well, next week will be slightly more complicated.  This week is an example of my usual "lining" for shirts.  That means that I keep the lines all perpendicular, which is very easy to do.  Next week... 

6/5/98
Who would have imagined I'd sneak in time to do so many pictures during my gruelling school-schedule?  While we know the quality isn't always up to scratch, I have managed to create all of these pictures using pieces of spare time.  There will be better art during the next school year, promise!

The hundredth was caused by the index page's new look and the new, nearly completely illegible banner!

The old title has been thrown into the new gallery (but doesn't count towards a version number change) and is nice and clear.  It's also 40% of its original size!

The new banner:  Um, it's fuzzy.  It looked nicer at a larger size...Also, I'm not sure why Dawn is on it instead of Dusk. :}

Atéo's picture is 50% of its working size.  However, I've decided to be clever and shave the file size down farther than my previous "target" of 100Kb.  His sketch was a lot nicer but when I finalized my pencils, it seems he was smaller than I had originally imagined.  So, his pose is kinda ugly...Also, when I was inking his sleeves, some stupid force seized me to draw his bindings nearly straight!  Ack...I also skimped on his hands. :( Seriously not a good picture.

Better next time.  Really.

6/12/98
Not too bad, eh?  Alicia was originally done in marker and coloured with the airbrush tool.  I particularly like the skirt's colouring.

I wish I had planned this update better but I'm out of time again...

Please excuse my stupidity, I updated my local copies but due to interruptions, forgot to upload them...So, I'm a little late. 

6/19/98
It's not a particularly bad picture but not the best...Um, I spent a lot of time doing her hair, so I'm proud of that.  I did this pic last month and at the time, I thought it was nice. :} She doesn't quite look like that though; I didn't have my new CD (character design) with me at that time and I rushed it more than I'd have liked. :(

This is 47% of the original size.

Next time:  I try to do something new (and don't quite succeed). 

6/26/98
Well, in case you were wondering about the quality of the pictures (as in the art, not the file compression), it certainly suffered from a shortening of my schedules.  The first few galleries had pictures that I used about a week for each picture.  The last few and the next few were done hastily so as to finish before finals crunch time and to give me a small stock-pile.  As such, they tend to be at least 3/week!
That's quite a difference.

Why don't I just stop for a while, instead of putting up sub-standard art?  Well...I dunno.  I suppose I want to have ONE page that I update regularly...the WWWH is stagnant because I can't figure out anything to do with the page layout and the CFHP won't be changed until I work through Cosmic Fantasy (1).  Just so you know.

Anyway, this week's is of Amethyst, Dawn's mother.  The picture is 80% of the size I coloured it at and with that, my lines look blockier. :\

Amethyst is a few hundred years old and is one of the elves I have multiple uniforms for, to correspond with her ageing.  I dug both out one day and drew this pic, nearly to scale!  One of the major problems I didn't realize I was going to have was that I didn't have a colouring chart for her.  (Either one!) So, half of my time was spent coming up with passable colours.  I think the pants are OK but the yellow or purple?  Ugh...

In case anyone was wondering what's been going on with me, I've been hard at work, working.  As such, all projects have been slowed but not put on hold.  I'm currently working on a semi-collaborative story and am pleased to say it's actually progressing.

I also installed 64MB of RAM into the computer recently, which helps when I'm JPGing my PSD files.

Next week:  nothing else exciting in the form of a quick sketch.  Maybe I'll update the links? 

7/3/98
No...I decided not to put the sketch up because I felt bad about the quality.  Of course, the last few haven't been my best work either but at least I put time into those.  The sketch took me about 4 minutes.

Well, it may seem like the site is falling the way of the other sites, seemingly ignored but it's because of a) work and b) lack of access to scanner.  If either/both went away, I might be able to do something!

As for the links, I'm hoping to expand my collection soon.

Poor Kain.  She really wanted to do this week's CG but I wasn't planning far enough ahead, weeks ago.

7/10/98
Sigh...everything seems to be on hold, due to work.

I'm working on improving my art skills but so far, since I don't have access to a scanner, I think my colouring skills will still be dreadful.  This week's displays particularly poor colour choices on my part, I think.  Turquoise, yellow, and red?  Who puts those together?

At least I figured out why my monitor seems so dark!

No's picture includes some of my best pencil lines and a lot of my dirtiest, worst pencil lines.  They fit together to make a truly average picture.  There was a conscious effort to create a more dynamic pose but his left arm is entirely wrong.  I've had some complaints about hands, so we should all be very glad to know I've been studying my hands.

Well...if I have any time left after playing Panzer Dragoon Saga for the Sega Saturn (which I tend to do in my brief moments of spare time, when I should be updating or playing Cosmic Fantasy...), I'll get to work on my Link Project.  But gosh, that's a big one!

NEXT WEEK:  This may be my last week unless I can find a scanner ultra-fast.  I will return in the fall and probably keep writing notes to maintain this site while I work on my work.

Is No the penultimate picture?!  Will you like next week's, which I spent at least 4 hours on?!  Find out next week (or possibly, the week after).

7/17/98
This picture is one I'm particularly proud of.  The character is Julie, from an unfinished story by a friend of mine, Jason Robert Stone.  He asked me to illustrate it about 6 years ago (Yikes!  That long ago?)  Sadly, he lost interest in the project and as a result, I have taken over ownership of certain characters.  Perhaps I should tell him. :)

There is only one other finished picture of Julie in existence, the others are either sketches or attempts at creating a CD.  That picture was another picture I was highly proud of (and now that I look at it, it's rather awful).  Fortunately, you, my visitor, will never see the picture.  Well, that is unless you happen to be Mike Koos.

You see, I was so proud of the picture that I sent a copy to him and he in turn, redrew it and sent it back to me.  This caused me to become depressed/awed/determined and I spent some time on and off trying to redraw the picture, to no avail.

Then, one day in early 1998, I sat down, pulled out her last 3-4 sketches and decided to construct a new CD.  (At this point, I was attempting to revise all my CDs again...4th try, Nick.)  I drew her face out, liked what I did, and thought I might as well try doing a whole picture.  So, I did.  And this picture is the result.

In case you're really interested in that first picture, you shouldn't be.  There.  Well...okay, fine.  It was set in the same room as this picture but from a different camera angle.  It faced more towards the front of the table.  Julie was pouring some chemical into some other chemical and that was about it.

So...enough of the history behind this picture.  About it itself:

Everything was originally drawn out.  However, when I scanned it in and had to colour the table, I decided to try something new.  I made a new layer and used the rectangular shape tool to create a um...rectangle.  Then, I used the airbrush tool and selected some brown (which I have written down somewhere...) and then drew a wood-type pattern on it.  Then, I copied it and skewed it into
the shape needed.  I repeated this for the sides of the tabletop as well as the front of the table.  As I did so, I became amazed at how long it was taking me to do it.

The chair (the curvy bit by the table) was done with the same wood pattern.  In fact, everything wooden was done with the same pattern.  I then decided to look at the angles of the shelves and noticed they were all very close but if you looked directly at them, you could tell they weren't right.  So, I made the bookshelf out of the wood pattern, too, correcting the wrong angles in the
process.

All of this polygon work was not particularly fun to do.  (Of course, working with Adobe Photoshop never is.)  But it was much easier than erasing the pen lines afterwards.  (Since the pattern had been made with the airbrush, it was translucent.)  After all the wood was done, I erased the wood that overlapped anything that was supposed to be in front of it...and that's pretty much it.  (The shadows are my usual cheats.)  I wanted to do the window and shelf, too but I ran out of time.  Time restraints also caused the books to be pretty flat airbrush work.  Well, well.  I'll have to pace myself better next time.

So...you're possibly wondering when the next time will be.  Depending on how you feel about my art and potential, I either have good news or bad news. :} I have acquired Metacreations' Painter Classic, with which, I will be able to continue updating steadily.  And when I go back to school, I can take the program to school too because the CD is a hybrid Mac/PC one!  What a deal!  (Except, there's a lot cut from Painter 5...)

So, we'll see if I can use a PC to create decent CG.

As for the links, I said I was hoping for something big and I've come up with an idea for Fred Duck's Blind Links (tentative title).  The design and implementation are very complicated.  (Well, no, not really.  Just time-consuming.  It will be selected links from my bookmarks.htm file with
descriptions, kinda line a larger version of the current links.htm page.)  Therefore, it should be up in October.  In the meantime, I will get around to the WWWHpages and the CFHP.

Sometime.

My current project is Project:  Miracle, which has a target finishing date of August '98.  (Sorry, Mike...)  It's called Project:  Miracle partially because if I ever finish it, it'll be a miracle. ;)

And on a final note, no one has ever e-mailed me about my art.  (Possibly a good thing.)  I assume someone's looked at it because I haven't loaded this page enough times for the counter to go up that high. 

7/24/98
What a hectic week!  After planing to draw the CG on Wednesday, I suddenly had to work late.  Thursday, I was so tired, I just fell asleep and today, I also had to work late!  I wondered if I'd ever get a chance to finish poor Hikaru's picture.

Well, I got a few small hours and managed to entirely create this picture digitally.  Forgive my roughness again, this is new-ish for me.  You see, I have created small CG pics in Painter before but Painter Classic is a somewhat leaner beast.  Fighting the lack of floaters was particularly hard but I think I'll manage, somehow.

It's another simple picture, this time of Hikaru Hoshino.  It's based off a Character Sheet Mike gave me and I think it's one of my better completely CG pics.  Well, I think I'd better get some shut-eye so I can stop complaining about how tired I am. :)

I should improve next week.  (Assuming I don't have to work late two days again...)

7/31/98
(Well, it's actually August 1 but who's really keeping track?  According to my counter, no one is.)

So...this week's wasn't too bad, eh?  I whipped it up in roughly 4 hours.  However, I have to admit, it wasn't completely hand-drawn this week.  The original picture was pencilled and inked 7/3/97.  After that, I used a fax machine to fax it to my computer and coloured it via Paint.  That was all last year.

Then, today (yesterday), I took the picture, opened it in Painter, opened a new picture, and traced the lines, pretty much.  In certain areas, I felt I should fix the lines, so I did.  Then, the whole thing was coloured with the watercolour brushes.

It should be noted that in the original picture, Opal's Tranchant Knife is drawn by her hand.  That was not included in this version to help with file size and because I was too lazy. :)

That's it for this week...must sleep.  (People dropped by unexpectedly, to further delay this picture.) 

8/7/98
Well, it's that time of year again:  August.  School is just around the corner and vacations are coming to an end.  Sigh.

This picture was drawn on graph paper in ~40 minutes of spare time at work.  The resulting picture has lots of nice, small details.  These are not included in the picture for a very simple reason:  it wasn't scanned.

So, how did this picture get here?  Well, I took the picture and fed it into the copying machine, enlarging it 122% and transferring it to a sheet of clear plastic.  Then, I took the sheet and stuck it to the monitor.  Next, I closed or covered my left eye and traced all the lines (the larger ones, anyway) into Painter Classic.  Finally, I painted the colours on and created this picture, ta-da!  Not bad, eh?

For (ahem) those of you who couldn't tell, Crys is a girl.  This picture is much nicer than the old one.  Oddly, looking at that, I notice her glove is fingerless.  It's not supposed to be!  (Oops.)

Hopefully, I'll get to a scanner for next week's and we can see what the detail is supposed to look like.

Zzzz. 

8/14/98
Eventually, chances are, I'll get ahold of a scanner...sometime...

Yeah, this week's is late again because it was done in the same way as last week's, only in less time and the friend who came over Friday stayed slightly less late but I paid more attention to him.  Ack!  Thud.

The pages will be undergoing some changes next week.  The rest of the Nest needs a sprucing, which will also happen next week.  But right now, I'm about to fall over from exhaustion, so to the people expecting e-mail from me, it'll be out just a bit late, is all.

These backwardly-transferred pictures will eventually be scanned.  I just know it. 

8/21/98
We had intended to spruce the Nest but instead are moving bits of it over from place to place.  So...no updates on the rest of the nest yet, surprise, surprise. :( This was caused in part by an actual sprucing of my actual Nest. :}

So...what's new about the picture this week?  Well, my focus has shifted.  With Crys, I was working on her jacket and hands.  For Jäne, I also worked on hands, as well as trying to see if I could draw crossed legs.

Opal was done in an attempt to be more dynamic with posing. This was done via the ingenious method of playing with MetaCreations' Poser 1.0 in order to come up with a female model in an action-type pose. The camera was played around with until it faced the figure much as my picture's camera does now. Then, using the Poser picture as a reference, I created this picture, fixing size and proportion problems along the way.  (For those of us who have seen the default Poser models, we know they are NOT very realistic. :) )

Unfortunately, I messed up rather badly on her right hand, more than any other particular part. :( At least I'm keeping the pictures small, eh?

Well, time for bed, again.  Please visit again! 

8/28/98
Ooh.  This week, there's a thousandth!  This was caused by the addition of a new, unscheduled gallery.

Ah, I'm actually working on CGA before 10p.  What's going on here?! :) As of this writing, 7:09p, FTP access is currently unavailable, just my luck.  So...I get to write better page notes.

In the future, you can expect to see the notes upside-down.  Ie, the new stuff will be on the top.  Next month, we'll also have a new Title and banner (hopefully!)

Work has started on the Links Project and so far, nothing interesting has happened.  My MS work has ground to a halt as I work on my various Pages.  For those of you who think MS stands for microsoft, you haven't been reading the clues randomly spread about this site.

Okay...a bit about the picture.  Why Equinox?  Well, I noticed that I've just been doing too many girls in the gallery.  So, last night, I sat around and looked though the Character Designs I happened to have nearby and came across Equinox's from '96.  He is male, so I thought it might be a good idea to draw him as the CG this week.  So, I did.  Afterwards, I noticed I've been doing an excessive amount of elves.  Oops. :}

As I sat down to draw a picture, I said to myself, "I want to do a more action-full pose."  I know that's not proper grammar but after seeing the word "Action-full" in a Studio Proteus release of Appleseed, I found I liked it. :}Anyway, I then proceeded to sketch what I'd hoped would be a dynamic fighting pose.  Unfortunately, I didn't do too well and was tired, so it ended up being a semi-dynamic running pose.  That's what we have here.  So, I said something resigned and inked the thing.  Yes, the end result isn't all that pretty.

I have also been looking at other, much better CG artists and noticed that most times, you don't include the whole body.  This is something that I'd been foolishly trying to do most of the time and that's where I get into a lot of trouble with regards to stiffness of the bodies.  So...I intentionally cut off the picture just a bit below the waist.  Good idea, eh?

Then, today, I found access to a scanner and scanned it up.  The picture didn't look any better.  I then decided that I'd better fix up parts of the picture.  So, I threw it into Painter Classic (on a Mac that I'd also found access to. :) ) (Side note:  the Painter Classic CD contains both the PC AND Mac versions!) and, roughly, traced it.  I say roughly because if you look at the two pictures, you can see many small changes that result in what I feel is a superior picture.  As I finished inking, I thought that his waist was very peculiar in that the shirt tucked straight into the pants.  I don't know what type of pants they are because back in 1996, I wasn't concerned with pants-type.  So, I threw a belt on him.

The colouring went much smoother than the pain and sorrow that is Adobe photoshop.  This allowed me to colour in about half an hour, rather than the excessively long amounts I usually spent in photoshop.  As I watercoloured his skin tone, I thought it looked too dark, so I dabbed white on it.  This was a bad move.  I didn't notice until many strokes later that his skin colour had become blocky.  In order to remedy this, I freaked out and then dried the Wet Paint.  Then, I used Pure Water to smear the the blocky skin tone smooth.  Cool, huh?  I won't try to cheat on skin colour again.  I still haven't found a good one but I'm still learning, right? :}

A word about the colours:  I don't know what to do about colour schemes.  Recently, I've been using whatever I come up with first, due to time restraints.  However, for Equinox, I walked around all day trying to think of something good.  I knew I wanted light blue for the jacket but didn't know anything else.  (Yeah, I asked myself what guy would wear light blue...)  I tossed around the idea of dark green for perhaps the shirt but decided that wouldn't look good with light blue.  So, I went with super-faint yellow.  However, I kept layering it, so it's at least visible now. :}

Well, that's about if for the exciting world of CG this week.  Next week, I hope to remember not to use two spaces in HTML documents. (I hope the FTP works...)

(8/30/98) Oh, no!!!! I was so tired for the last two days that I didn't notice I hadn't typed the full server name in!  Argh...