Digital

I forgot to post these earlier, but I did some more drawings of my coworkers for the more recent hires. :)

Spur-of-the-moment idea...

YO HO HO.

cafepress 10 pk

Another Warcraft comic. This one was actually easier than the last, despite its more polished look and greater complexity. I think the figures turned out nicely, especially the girls. And I love the expressions. The close-up is all Tank Girl-y and wonderful!

Technical Details:

I did all the images as 4" pencil sketches. For the repeat images, I just sketched the bit that was different and pasted it over once it was scanned in.

I smoothed the sketches out in Photoshop. Top layer: I took the scan and gaussian blurred it twice at 2.0 and set the layer to multiply at 50%. That kinda blurred out the roughness in the middle layer. Middle layer: I did a color-range select on black with 150 fuzziness on the original scan and then pasted that in a new layer, and locked transparency (this layer was used to create the colored lines). Bottom layer: I just filled in the other colors underneath the other two and I was done. Note: this only worked because I started with such a relatively large sketch and shrunk it down after (something like 400%).

In Illustrator, I added all the text bubbles, which I made with a slightly stylized rectangle (rounded corners filter and a bit of stetching to make it look more interesting). I added the little swoopy pointers and bubble joins by simply creating another filled object, grouping it with the rounded rectangle, then using the Add filter, then flatten transparency. There may be a better way to do this, but those steps work fine for me.

It took me about three to four days, start to finish, but most of that was in figuring out the best techniques to get it done. I'm normally more obsessive and spend way too long making sure I color within the lines, but this time I really got sloppy because I knew it wouldn't really show.




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07/16/2007 - Yay! I got an honorable mention from Blizzard! [link]

I had a few humorous WoW sketches lying about, and I thought I should finally get around to finishing one. This one started out as a 5-panel comic, but this was the funny bit so I just cut out the extraneous four other panels.

You'll need to fullview to actually see the details (sorry).

It was just sketched out in pencil and colored in photoshop. I'm not so great with colors, and they didn't come through too well in the web version anyway. But it was nice to be working with Photoshop again - it's been a long time.

There are a few tiny funny things in the picture that I thought I'd call to your attention. On the left in the gift shelves are fire demon and hound stuffed animals, as well as a snow globe (or fire globe, really). And the female night elf is waiting in the men's room line... haha. Some people didn't get that one right off.

Afterwards I joked that there should be more restrooms - you know, one for monsters, one for undead, one for demons, one for giants.

Update 2008-06-08:
I just finished reading the first collection of The Order of The Stick... and, yeah, so he beat me to this idea. :P Meh, great minds and all...

This is the old menu for my portfolio section. It was a sliding javascript box with little mouseover links.

Here are two menus from my old site design. I was trying to create a "home" theme, with each section being a room.