Strago Magus

In a rare turn of events, I'm doing an art post two days in a row; and not only that, it's another piece of Fan Art!  I don't know why I resisted fan art for so many years.  It's a lot of fun to draw when the character is already designed for you.

This is Strago Magus, who is my favorite character in my favorite Final Fantasy game.  Final Fantasy VI had the best character designs, in my opinion.  It represents the last of Amano's great Final Fantasy work, before part VII and Nomura ushered in an era of belts and spiky hair.  Puffy pants, curly-toed shoes, ornate capes and the all-important muscle shirt complete Strago's look. He looks spry for a blue mage of 70 years of age.

I also attempted a faux-watercolor look in photoshop, which was a lot of fun to do.  I hope to do more Final Fantasy VI art using this style in the future!

The Duel

I drew some arts.  I will color it and add a background at some point.  I was inspired to draw a duel between Harry Potter and Voldemort.

The last of the Harry Potter movies comes out this week.  I'm a huge fan of the books, and the last few movies have been extremely good.  It'll be sad to see the saga come to a close, but I hope this really is it.  I don't want to see "Hogwarts High", a teen drama about magically inclined teenagers dealing with the most mysterious magic of all: Love.  Seriously, no.

Goodnight, sweet prince.

The Enemy's Gate is Down

The above "fan art" depicts a very iconic scene from the book Ender's Game. Six hours in photoshop.  Once Again I leave backgrounds for hte last, and it shows.  But I always imagined this room/scene being very very sparse - just Ender, a holographic console and a terminal.

I'm a huge fan of the book Ender's Game. I didn't read it until I was 25, and i was immediately drawn into the visceral action, the intrigue and suspense that culminates in the twist toward the end of the book.  If you like sci-fi and are even moderately interested in reading Ender's Game, go read it now.  If you don't care about Sci Fi, just quit reading this post since I'm going to nerd out for the rest of it.

I just finished Children of the Mind, which is the latest book, chronoligically, taking place 3,000 years after the original book.  What's interesting is it took me 5 years to get into the mindset to enjoy the original sequels to Ender's Game, which, starting with Speaker for the Dead, take a decidedly philosophical turn; a definite contrast to the action and intrigue of Ender's Game.

For the past six months I've been listening to the entire series via Audible.  It made trips to the gym, doing dishes and folding laundry that much more enjoyable.  The Ender books are the best produced audio books I've ever listened to, and I really recommend them.  It's the next best thing to a movie, with different characters voiced by different narrators (really "actors" is the better term) at times.

In addition to the original four Ender books released from 1985-1996, there are five full novels in the Enderverse released in the last 10 years.  The took place between the original Ender's game and Speaker for the Dead.  I had the ability to read them all in chronological order, so I did.  Consult wikipedia if you want to do the same.

The last chronological book (the one I just recently finished), Children of the Mind, was a very good read/listen.  The plot took a very interesting turn and presents -- and attempts to answer -- interesting questions, such as whether Artificial Intelligence is life, what it is to have a "soul", what happens when you die, etc.  That's quite a philosophical arc, going from a little boy in a battle school to a story about the very nature of the universe.

The author, Orson Scott Card, has political views that I vehemently disagree with, and he tends to get a little preachy in his storytelling, but I did genuinely enjoy them for their imagination and the very thoroughly realized characters.  And for getting through the sluggish parts (some of them tend to drag on with pages and pages of dialog), listening is the way to go.

I'm not sure, but I think seeing the story unfold this way (chronoligical rather than the order in which they were written) made it much more enjoyable, and I hope this will especially be true when Card releases the book that ties the Shadow Series and the Ender series together and ties the loose threads.

When I finished up Children of the Mind this past weekend, I got inspired to create the art you see above.

Son of a Brain

Samus Aran fighting the mysterious Mother Brain.Taking a break from the usual photography on my blog, here is a digital painting I've been working on for the past week or so. I really like how it turned out, very close to what I imagined in my head. Of course I know I have a lot of things I could have improved on, and there are lots of things I could have done if I took more time on it. But, at about 16 hours of work, I was just about tired of this piece by the time I called it finished.

This is another Fan Art for Metroid. I did another hi-res interpretation of Samus Aran a couple of years ago, and this is my attempt at a more complicated scene featuring the sci-fi bounty-huntress battling Mother Brain.

This is the climactic battle of the NES game, Metroid. It's fun trying to interpret 8-bit art, since there is usually so much left to the imagination. This is the best screenshot I could find that closely matches the battle I depict above:

There are things I'm always trying to improve on with digital painting, I know I'm an novice. Obviousy, I take a cartoony style and apply semi-realistic lighting to it, but I still struggle with finding a nice balance between cartoony and realistic, especially when it comes to the lighting. Either my line art falls flat or my coloring and shading doesn't read as three dimensional.

However, I think I am getting better at minimizing my brushstrokes and I am very pleased with how Samus and Mother Brain turned out, as seen in these 100% detail cutouts: