(Hopefully this post comes out alright on LJ, I can never be quite certain how my Wordpress posts translate to LiveJournal style anymore)

Demon Icon

Olympians Icon #3 (Colour)

Olympians Icon #2 (Black Background)

Olympians Icon

The second image I’ve only barely finished. This again was intended to be part of my Lost Heroes RPG project. It’s meant to represent the Olympian and associated Gods. I did quite a variety of designs, finally settling this one. But I’m still not completely happy with it. In fact I did two further varianets of it, which you can see below. The first one I wanted to highlight the rose more so I used solid black for the background and tried to add texture with some hatching lines. The second one, I used colour to highlight the rose, a big departure from the previous icons I’ve done. I’d rather keep to the black and white motif (easier to print) but the colour would does look quite nice. Perhaps I should play around with using greys as well as black?

(More new art and a poll after the “link”)

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Part of the reason I enjoy doing these icons is that it helps focus my mind on the next section of writing for Lost Heroes. It drags me into it, into thinking about what is important to represent in that section. Strangely most of my work these days is focused around Lost Heroes, even that which isn’t directly intended to be part of the project. For example, despite losing some of the access to my place to write, I did manage to complete this very short story: Laura and the Stalker with the Golden Blade. While it stands alone as a piece of fiction, it is embedded very much in the mythos and setting of Lost Heroes displaying many of the themes I want to put into the project.

So when I started just drawing for the sake of it, I came up with this on the right. Again the iconography and themes of the art is all Lost Heroes. I like the composition of the piece though I think it might have worked a lot better using ink instead of pencil/charcoal. Though charcoal is fun to use, dirty and messy and getting your hands into the piece. This piece on the right shows a much earlier incarnation of the same idea. I don’t know if I have “improved” since then, but I do enjoy more.

I also did one final image. It was sorta rushed but I did it on the wave of the previous piece. It’s a scene I keep imagining in my head (again, based off Lost Heroes). This rendering doesn’t do it justice, but the composition and layout of elements is there. Again done with the messy pencil and charcoal, though I think it would really work with striking black and greys.

I also did some new ones, continuing to base them on my “secret” project L___ H_____:

I also pulled out my charcoal and pencil again, concentrating on contrast, making sure my pencil lines are right (kind of taking my tips from my ink work). I like what I produced, though I feel should have placed it in a background. I’m also getting a bit annoyed about the scanning process, it always seems to take from my pencil work. I should really look into improving it.

The first was a design I had been doodling for while, an icon for this website in fact, I like it so it may be appearing soon as a part of this website design!

This second one, was something more of a experiment with shapes and I liked what emerged. It’s very, em, primordial I guess.

I then decided to try and do an Icon for my L___ H_____ RPG project:

I really like it. It might even work on the front cover of a book, maybe. So I ended up trying to do a few for the different types of Gods in L___ H_____ RPG:

I had done a third one, but the lines came out wrong so I plan to redo it. The second one here also is unintentionally phallic so I think a redesign is in order. The first one works though and it’s quite cool too because you can turn it upside down and it still works!

I’ll probably do more, it’s sort of enjoyable way of design and drawing: methodical, creative and surprising. However, seeing them on the computer screen does change them a bit. If you like them, drop me a comment!

So my first effort with charcoal was this (click on it to see the bigger version):

It was done as quick experiment on my sketchbook (across two pages) of a twig. I did the outline in ink. However you can see where the charcoal smudged accidentally. I liked it, it was much easier and faster to pull out the change in tones using the charcoal than with pencil like in the tonal study I did first. But a lot messier and prone to accidents.

I then went out and found something to really try the charcoal out on. In Chargey, where we were on holidays, there is lots of really old lovely things. There was this “saint” statue on the side of the old house, worn by weather, it had long lost its head. I love the fact that it was just a lump of rock but somehow you were able to perceive that it was once a detailed statue (again Wordpress has cropped the thumbnail, I’ll have to find a fix for that):

The first one was done with pencil and charcoal. I didn’t do any of the background which I think distracts from the picture, loses it’s context, but I also found the final work messy and, well, a bit random. The second study, I outlined in ink first, including the background and then tried to capture the tone of the stone statue with charcoal. I think the second one is better but loses the feel of the statue. Everyone who saw the actual drawings preferred the first one, because the contrast between ink and charcoal was much more noticeable than the digital copies here.

There was a second statue, much bigger than this one but also very similar. This time I tried toned paper (i.e. not white):

The first thing that hit was the effect of the grade of paper. My light pencil marks were not working, so I dove straight in with the charcoal but I couldn’t make any tone… just black and a tiny smudge. The effort was a bit, well shite. If you knew the statue in the house, you’d recognise it, but I think it failed to capture anything else.

What this highlighted for me was the effect of the type of paper on my drawing, in particular with charcoal. On my notebook (the twig) I was able to get a really good strength and contrast of tone, but on my A4 sketch pad, the paper is thinner. It has a different effect, harder to generate really deep tones. But the coloured paper was the thickest of them all but it’s texture made it impossible to create contrast in tones at all. I’ve always known that paper makes a difference, but it was always negligible for me. With ink, I would place a spare page underneath thin paper so it’d soak up ink that leaked through. Also the way my coloured  markers’ ink spread, was really affected by the thickness of the paper.

So my first thoughts on charcoal is that it’s cool. I like what I can produce with it, but it does require further playing with it. And I love its messiness.

I didn’t do an inch of coding while on holidays and I’m all the better for it, loads of family time, sunny weather, no stress, no work and I even got to do some writing (for my “secret project” L___ H_____) and drawing (I’ll put up scans later). I’m hoping to keep the momentum up for writing, at least until work has worn me out a bit. I’m afraid this doesn’t mean more blogging but I’ll try and keep regular updates going.

The one on the left was what I was working for, however the second one (on the right) came out really well, if not better. I did these ones the same way I did the recent work, tracing major elements from a photo and adding to the image.

I was inspired by the recent War of the Worlds posts on lategaming.com and a recent post about these excellent autochrome photos from the turn of the 20th Century. You can see how I used the source image by looking at my first attempt:

It took a bit of messing around to find a design that worked for the tripod and I think I found a good one. So here are my early sketchs showing the progress.

I had a great vision of how the tripod moved and attacked. The heat ray would be static on the bottom of the tripod and the tripod would rear up to aim the deadly beam. The legs would be like Doctor Octopus’ tentacles but were spiked at the end (with a heavy weight) so they could dig into the ground to support the great weight of the tripod and also be used as weapons.