I was just at Magfest, a huge celebration of geekery, gaming and music.  Between getting my face melted off, some of the Metroid Metal forum members got together for a Secret Santa gift exchange.  For my match, I decided to get more creative.  

I created the above poster and printed it at 16x20.  It depicts the Metroid Metal band members as muppets.  I had the idea for months ahead of time, but the impending gift exchange inspired me to finish it.  It took 15-20 hours in photoshop.  The more I worked on it, the more I learned just how much in common attendees of Magfest and similar events have with the Muppets.  We're all a little weird, we're all a band of misfits.

It was a great success as a gift and as a creative excercise.  He was able to get it signed by the band and everyone loved it!

If you do not know about Metroid Metal, you are wasting time by not clicking this link.  The whole VGM scene is amazing and I was happy to celebrate being a geek with some of the coolest geeks I know.

Personally I love these shots (but I'm biased based on the subject matter).  I'm not always a fan of this coloring technique, but with the lighting and the shallow depth of field, I think it helps the images quite a bit.  I love these photos of Cleo.  You can just see her age in every white hair on her nose.

When we arrived to Clinton, Indiana, we were surrounded by a scene stuck in the 50s.  I've been in the midwest long enough to know the type of small towns that are scattered across the counties, left behind because they are just a few miles away from the Interestate.  We were greeted by the smell of marina sauce, fried snickers, and farm equipment.

Our luck could not have been better, because just as soon as we made our rounds of the artery-clogging booths and ederly arts-and-crafts vendors, we saw that they were going to start the meatball eating contest.  The children's contest was amateur hour.  What I was interested in was the Men's division.  The real olympians of gorging yourself with balls of meat.  I hope I captured "The Last Meatball Supper" adequately.

It was quite impressive to witness in person.

After we had our fill of nachos and diet soda, we headed out to find the old, forgotten, dusty roads that wound around and through some covered bridges.  I had never seen one in person, and they were kind of fun to photograph.  Christina was a little anxious driving over them, but I've seen the trucks people drive around these old dirt roads, and I knew we'd be fine.

And we were.

Well, I went a little further, and did this piece in about 2 hours with Photoshop and my Wacom tablet.  When I've been running on the treadmill I'll do some painting in my head sometimes.  Imagine new ways to show hair highlights, blend skin tones, etc.  So, I was dying to do another Horace piece in a new style.  It's obviously way more detailed than I usually do.  I was pleasantly surprised at how it turned out.

One day I'd love to write up my digital painting process.  Of course, I know I'm not nearly as good as most people that I'm drawing my inspiration from, but I'd love to know how my process stacks up to other profressional digital painters.

I've been itching to get back into drawing and sketching, and what better way to do it than with a nice pencil, in a nice sketchbook on a nice comfy couch?

This past weekend I bought a nice mechanical pencil, erasers, brush marker and watercolor set.  one of my favorite subjects has been my Swords and Wizardry (a D&D clone) character, Horace.  Now a level 2 (by accident!) Cleric, I tried to capture him here:

I have to say I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.   I think watercolors quite suit my cartooning style.  It was fun and liberating to add layers of color for shading, etc.  I plan to do many more watercolor pieces, considering how fun this one was to do!

I'm a Dragon Quest fan, and anyone who's played a DQ game all the way through knows that feeling of finding a Metal Slime.  They also know that feeling when the Metal Slime flees.  And this brings my pictures of Slimes to 2 out 34 weeks or about 6% for 2011.  How can you resist that dopey smile?

Christina gets back-to-back weeks!  In reality I've been in a photography dry spell, but I really like how this hurried and impromptu shot of Christina turned out.  God bless the 7d's ability to shoot high ISO and Lightroom's ability to turn that noise into something silky smooth.

 Click here to go to the ActionSoft website for more info and to download MM HD!

Midnight Mansion HD was released earlier this week on the Mac OS X App store.  The first Episode (we had to split it into 2 episodes) is $5, and features 5 huge mansions (including 2 brand new mansions!).  The graphics have been completely redrawn by yours truly, and it looks better than ever.

If you haven't heard of MM HD, and have been craving some good classic platformer action-adventure gaming on the Mac, go get it now!  Even if you've played the original, you haven't seen it looks as polished as it does now!  For $5 there's literally dozens of hours of gameplay.

The App Store is a savage arena where Apps battle it out, and the only key to victory is word of mouth and enough good luck to get into the top 10.  So if you are interested, buy it!  If you like it, rate it!  You are doing a service and helping my good friend Vern pay the bills so he can keep making games.

If you haven't already, meet my wife.  I rarely shoot portraits, but when Christina needed a photo taken for her work's website, I was more than happy to pull out my nifty 50mm f/1.4 and give it a shot.  I'm extremely happy with how they turned out, especially this one.

The late afternoon light was perfect, and all I did in Lightroom was a little warming up of the white balance and boosting the contrast.  It helps that the model was so good looking also.