Teapot for Grandma

This was made for my grandmother. This counts as my thing of the month, and so I put it on DeviantArt as usual.

Here's the teapot that I used as a base. My POV was a bit higher than this, though.

And here's the finished image. It was framed shortly after. Tomorrow, it'll be hanging in my grandma's room.

Mirrored Hand

I also put this on my DeviantArt page, in case anyone's curious. Also, please excuse the silly URL. I forgot to give this post a title before I published it.

More charcoal drawings I forgot to upload.

04-30-2012 

The left side (our perspective) looks a bit odd to me.

05-17-2012

My first drawing with a background. It made a much bigger difference than I thought it would.

05-22-2012

I think the shadow's a bit off on this one, but otherwise it's good. The shading looks a bit cel-ish, but I think I like it that way.

Kaiju City Defense

Note: I may develop the idea further at a later date. If so, this post will be updated.


The base idea may remind you of many anime of yesteryear: Monsters attack the city one at a time, and it’s up to you to defend it. But unlike Evangelion, GaoGaiGar, or Go-Busters, you don’t have a giant robot. Instead, you have conventional weapons. Fighter jets, tanks, SAMs, etc.

You are awarded a certain amount of money at the end of each in-game month, minus repair costs.

There are three phases to the game.

The downtime phase is the default state of the game. This is when you buy and upgrade things. (Towers, units, structural armor, underground storage, outposts, etc.) Time passes in an accelerated manner, how fast is up to the player. At the end of every month, the player gets a paycheck.

The preparation phase has you placing any purchased units and making any other preparations such as ammo selection. You will also receive intelligence concerning your foe. Depending on how good your detection systems are, you will receive information on the enemy’s location, form, and maybe even weaknesses.

The defense phase starts when the monster comes within range of your defenses. This progresses in real time, as it heads toward the center of the city. Once it gets there, it starts to dig. Whatever it wants, it’s underground. This also happens to be where your headquarters is, so the longer it attacks the more it could get damaged.

• Towers can be swapped out during the defense phase, though this takes time.
• Monsters change tactics in response to player defenses
• Conversation segments where you have to brownnose diplomats for extra budget?

Chasing shadows

Today we drew the light bulb with charcoal again. However, there was an extra challenge; the sun was setting and the blinds were open. This meant that the shadows on the bulb were changing very quickly. Some improvisation was required.

The top picture is my art teacher's, and the bottom one is mine.

Drawings from the past few weeks

Three blind contours, each done on a different day.

A blind contour and the final drawing.





Sketches done with charcoal.









The drawings on the left in this picture are mine, the ones on the right at my teacher's. The top row are charcoal, the bottom pencil.

Eclipse Phase character concepts

If you've read AREva, you know that I like tabletop RPGs. However, the reason I stopped writing it is because we stopped playing it. Why? Scheduling issues. This is the bane of any RPG, and it's the reason these characters never got the chance to be played. However, good characters should not go to waste. Even if I'll never get to play them, I hope that someone reading this might.

These characters were made for Eclipse Phase. It's a very strange setting that takes place ten years after the singularity- an event where technology advances so much it radically changes our nature. In Eclipse Phase, your body might be a suave-looking man, a sexy lady, a walking tank, even a cloud of nanomachines. Anything you have the money to buy.

My character in the game was based around the concept of forking- copying your mind into a new body. Whenever he goes to some place he hasn't been before, he somehow acquires a new body and forks his mind into it. The forked personality then connects to a network he has set up that lets him know where all of his kin are. This way, he knows if he already has family wherever he's going. The way this would've worked in-game is that whenever the party goes somewhere, the GM rolls a die to see if any of his kin are there. If so, the GM then rolls on a table of pre-made NPCs to see who the party might meet.

My friend's character was a bit less serious than mine, and is based pretty much entirely in gameplay, with no backstory. He had an affinity for cheap bodies, and stuck to them exclusively. This is because he went through them very quickly. His strategy in battle was to charge the enemy, attack until he's killed, and charge back in with a new body. In effect, a one man blitzkrieg. Our GM had nicknamed him "Kenny."

Even if I never get to experience these two, I hope someone else might be able to. As always, this post is under Creative Commons. So if this missive inspires you, feel free to run with it. Just be sure to credit me somewhere.

Rabbit figurine drawings

Top-left picture was a blind contour, bottom-right picture was a long drawing. (40 minutes or so.)

Proportion study

Forgive the typo.

Infinite Raceworks

One problem I'd realized with Infinite Mechworks is that getting a mech to walk is actually pretty damn hard. And while being able to design your own mech is very cool, (some might even say awesome) it's not for the light-hearted. That said, being able to design your own machine is a very neat concept. And so, I thought the idea might be better suited to a racing game.

Specifically, a sci-fi racing game. Think of it as a mix of F-Zero, Wipeout, and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. In order to keep the construction from being too daunting, you have a small number of adjustable parts to construct a chassis. The rest of the vehicle's parts are logical; an engine, cockpit, thrusters, and a hull. Once assembled, the game draws power lines in the most efficient way it can think of. These lines can then be modified by the player if they so desire.

Once the vehicle has been constructed, the player assigns commands to buttons on their controller. (Or keys, if they're using a keyboard and mouse.) For example, moving the left stick left or would turn wind flaps on a hover vehicle, the right trigger would activate the force pads at a certain power and turn on the thrusters. A weight inside the vehicle allows it to bank, and is controlled by the bumpers. All of these commands are chosen by the player.

There are three kinds of vehicles, classed by their mode of transportation. Traditional vehicles race on wheels, modern vehicles use force pads to hover and jets for thrust, and hybrids hover but can strategically deploy wheels for traction. Like Infinite Mechworks, a simulator is available. One of the most important features of the simulator is a wind tunnel; aerodynamics can be extremely important, especially if you're using a hover vehicle.

Now for the game modes. You can participate in single races and tournaments as in any racing game, but various limited modes are available as well. In stock races, you are given the same vehicle as everybody else, and have to rely on pure skill. Fix-up races give you a stock vehicle, and some cash to spend upgrading it. Drag races give you a budget that you have to spend on making the fastest, most efficient machine possible. Darwinist races take place across several tracks, and racers have to exchange a certain number of parts between tracks. Survival races last until only one vehicle is left functional- vehicles are often modified with spike pistons and other weapons for this mode.