Another Here

Blah, blah, blah.

This week I talk about this week in The Month of Tasty Treats, this week’s drawing and why I even bother, and impressions of the Requiem: Bloodymare open beta.

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Links for this episode:

• This is the omelette recipe I used for Saturday’s breakfast
• I didn’t know the chocolate milk kid had so many clone brothers, but there’s no other way to explain general chat in Requiem

Very little about this week didn’t suck. Fuck this week. Fuck it up its stupid ass.

This week, I talk about The Month of Tasty Treats, this week’s infuriating drawing, my Return to Middle-Earth, GTA IV, I get around, and I muse on the future of the podcast and the blog.

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Links for this episode:

• The deviantArt page for the Dofus/Wakfu character artist
• A couple other awesome deviantArt pages: Cushart, radicalstab, lian-blackdream, and janaschi

Never again.

This is exactly what I don’t want to do when I’m drawing. All told, this took around 10.5 hours, and because I was so pissed off by the end of it, most of it is way below what it should be.

This is one of my characters from City of Villains. I did a portrait of her almost two years ago for an ArtRage review I did for the FT podcast, and I felt like going back and doing another one.

This thing just got to be more and more of a problem as it went on, and it pretty much consumed every evening from Tuesday through Friday. The initial sketch took slightly longer than it should have, but it was looking promising. Then I got it in to Photoshop and it all went downhill from there. I think I mentioned on last week’s podcast that last week’s drawing was the minimal-shading extreme. Well, this is the maximum-shading extreme – and it’s not even complete – and it’s much, much worse. Not as an image, but as something I’m willing to inflict on myself on a regular basis.

I worked at way too high a resolution for this image – the final is 6000×6000, and about 150 MB. The only part with any detail at all is the face, so the rest is just wasted space. It also caused Photoshop to chug more than I’m willing to tolerate. In the future, I’ll probably limit my images to around 3000 pixels on a side, unless I have a good reason to go above that.

I think I said that maybe I should embrace the super-tight style, since it’s what I seem to keep doing. No. This is what happens when I do it: it takes forever, makes me really, really mad, and doesn’t give me results I’m satisfied with. In terms of technique, this image is pretty similar to the huntress image I did for the first weekly drawing. There’s just a lot more of this image, so it took a lot longer.

Of the past few weeks’ drawings, I think I’m happiest with the “War” image so far. “Faito” was silly, but at least it was fun and not too onerous to do, and could conceivably get much faster. “Huntress” and “Myrta” are OK, but took way too much effort and don’t have any life or energy at all. I liked “Sunset” the least, because even though the sky turned out all right, the rest of it was really lame and reminded me more than anything else of doing FT characters.

Starting next week, I’m imposing a four-hour limit on these drawings. If I hit four hours and they aren’t done, I’m just posting what I have.

Sat down last night to play a little PGR4 before deciding whether to trade it in to GameFly.

Well, that answers that. Guess it also decides for me which version of GTA IV I’ll get with the gift card I received the other day.

I’m just surprised it didn’t happen sooner. I wonder if there’s some time frame within which I have to call and have them send out the box to get it repaired? Maybe I should wait until after I’m back from vacation.

No tasty treats to report about today either. I got home and just had enough time to heat left-overs before I had to record a new episode of Witty Ranter. Then after I got showered and settled in for the night, I had a few minutes to play PGR4 – or not, as it happened – then had to study French, write this post, and work more on this week’s drawing, which I already spent an hour and a half on while recording the podcast. Hopefully I’ll be able to put something tasty together tonight and post about it tomorrow, but who knows at this point. I’m out of leftovers, so I don’t have much choice.

As I write this – before I start working on it some more – I’ve already spent six and a half hours on this drawing. And it’s not the end-all-be-all it ought to be. I think I’ll be lucky if I finish it in under ten hours. This is exactly what I want to never do again. Shit shouldn’t take this long.

And I still haven’t gotten to play any LOTRO yet, so I’ve missed nearly the entire first free day.

I’d just like to say, on behalf of me, fuck this week.

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