Instagram Roundup April

So I've started an Instagram account. I've held out for a while but now I've found a decent reason to do one. You can follow it if you like, just search "izaksmells" and you'll find it. Or you can just wait for the monthly roundup here. Pretty much the idea is to get me back into doing actual drawing, on bits of paper with some sort of marking impliment. Like a Neanderthal. It's also a handy place to collect the random sketches I do absent-mindedly on bits of paper. What you won't find on my instagram is A. My face B. Sunsets for no reason C. Real things (mostly) D. Pixel Art E. Digital Art

It will be mostly a voyeuristic look into my sketch books and random quotes from my friends. Quality isn't guaranteed. Also I have a comic on there about a roadtrip, which I'll collect here for your benefit when I've finished the first chapter. You can go hunt it down for a sneak peek if you really like at #zeroplace. When I've got the first chapter finished I'll put it here and let you decide whether or not I should keep doing it or not.

A photo posted by Izak Flash Man (@izaksmells) on Apr 5, 2015 at 7:51pm PDT

A photo posted by Izak Flash Man (@izaksmells) on Apr 5, 2015 at 8:54pm PDT

A photo posted by Izak Flash Man (@izaksmells) on Apr 5, 2015 at 9:29pm PDT

A photo posted by Izak Flash Man (@izaksmells) on Apr 11, 2015 at 3:44pm PDT

A photo posted by Izak Flash Man (@izaksmells) on Apr 11, 2015 at 5:52pm PDT

A photo posted by Izak Flash Man (@izaksmells) on Apr 12, 2015 at 6:46pm PDT

A photo posted by Izak Flash Man (@izaksmells) on Apr 25, 2015 at 4:25pm PDT

A photo posted by Izak Flash Man (@izaksmells) on Apr 25, 2015 at 4:44pm PDT

A photo posted by Izak Flash Man (@izaksmells) on Apr 27, 2015 at 6:44pm PDT

Samurai/Archer Progress

Yesterday I got most of the "loading arrow" animation done. I just need to do a variety of different aiming directions then I'll be done with the archer for now. I'll probably need to go back and do some sort of "appearing" animation and death animations. We'll see.

ANZAC Weekend Art Dump

Here's a quick doodle I did to warm up.

It's ANZAC weekend, the 100th anniversary in fact. We have a mate in the Navy whose actually at Gallipoli for the occasion. My brother whose in the Airforce in Dubai at the moment got woken up by me at 2am (his time) to ask some quick questions about where the fiber internet is gonna get drilled into his house. He had to wake up 2 hours later to get ready for the occasion over there. Sorry man.

When I was first deciding character size I did a variety of options to visualise and figure out which one felt the most comfortable to work with.

I just finished up the run cycle. It may get a rework. When I get it signed off I might post a GIF up.

When You've Gotta Go

That's it! 20, boom. I did a couple more cloud conversations than I was comfortable with but oh well.

Cover making time!

Blobby & Chromacon 2015

19/20 here's 17 & 18 that lead up to this panel. Is the last page I'm working on for this comic going to be a "wow Bon Voyage"? Nope. Probably not. But it's exciting none the less to get all the pages done.

The weekend was intensely busy. I put some washing on during Saturday morning and didn't manage to pull it out again until Sunday evening. That's how I define business now. One day I'll measure it by how often I miss out feeding my kids.

The second annual chromacon took up Saturday, and it was awesome. We had an embarrassing start though. After dodging needing to have a conversation with a young anime nerd (she'll grow out of it hopefully. It's a phase.) We were trying out a giant Cintiq. It took Becky ages to get used to not in any small part to the fact they weren't running Photoshop. We asked the person if we could put a different program on and she tried telling us something about a colouring competition or a discount if we wrote our names down. No thanks. People came over and asked her more about the hardware. Suddenly we realised that all the branding on the stall was for Artrage, the program we had been bagging the whole time. Not a single piece of Wacom branding anywhere. WHY HAD WE NOT NOTICED?

We extricated ourselves from the situation and went downstairs to where the main hub was. I kind of prefered it upstairs where it was in 2013.
I randomly got talking to this guy about his notebooks he had strewn on his table. 5 or 6 moleskins lying there stuffed with doodles.

"This Is It! (AIA) Augmented Inkality Auckland Morning Sports Special, Episode II : Two Towers" Final. @instagram #WHPidrewthis #sketch #doodle #city #Auckland #NewZealand #Inkality #autokite #JackyKeJiang #cgcgcgcg

A photo posted by Jacky Ke Jiang (@autokite) on Apr 19, 2015 at 4:35pm PDT

I sat there wigging out over how rad they were and asked the guy why he didn't have any prints or anything for sale. He said he got payed all day to draw anyway so he didn't need to bother with that sort of thing. We got talking and it turns out he's the art Director at thatgamecompany. I'm talking to the guy who designed the journey character! Hot damn!
"The character is based off a paper cup folded up." he explained. I asked him how intentional the ambiguity of the character was and he said "Totally. We wanted people to be able to project themselves onto the character." and then went onto talking about how they simplified down the look of the character to help with the material renderings and stuff.
He showed him my 8bit version of the journier and told him that's about as close as I'll ever get to being as cool as him. He looked at it for a second puzzled "yep, that's my character." I probably should have explained to him that I drew it.

Art by Benjamin

I saw Benjamin Zhang Bin there as well. He was a huge inspiration for me when I first started getting into digital art with my tablet. Pity I couldn't tell him, he couldn't really do english and had handlers and fans all over the place. But he's done an original bit of art in Becky and I's Chroma book. If I said anything to him I would have come across as a tosser anyway.

Rihanna's Erect Nipples

I'm not ready to fully announce why I have this comic on Instagram but I will soon. In the meantime enjoy Rihanna's erect nipples in her new music video, American Oxygen. I'm sorry, I know I don't normally talk about pop, but Kristof said the quote and it was too good not to use.

A photo posted by izak flash man (@izaksmells) on Apr 16, 2015 at 6:56pm PDT

That Birthday Question for 5 Year Olds

You may have had the great fortune to bump into this Question.

First of all it wasn't written by a 12 year old genius or meant for regular students. In fact it is "actually a question from the Sec 3 and from the Sec 4 SASMO (Singapore and Asian Schools Math Olympiad) contests held on Apr 8, 2015 (see photo below). Being Q24 out of 25 questions, this is a difficult question meant to sift out the better students. SASMO contests target the top 40% of the student population and the standards of most questions are just high enough to stretch the students."

With that in mind I decided to create one that was more appropriate for everyday use.

Pixel Archer + Samurai Concept Art

So here's how the final design of our main protagonist is gonna look. The antlers were part of the original vision and for a while it was looking shaky whether they'd make it through to the final design or not. They might even get bigger!

Here's a version without shoulder guards, just to give you a feel of how he looks straight on.

And this is the final archer, he's bad ass. And by final I mean, final concept before I make him cool and animated and fix that fucked up bit at the bottom of his bow. The spikes on his head are probably gonna be a real bitch during animation but screw it. I like him. I nicknamed him "Sauron Archer" in the file names.

I'm just about to get into doing a behind view of the protagonist and then doing some attack animations for him. First animations of the project! Exciting.

Dead Or Alive 5 Last Round - PC Review

Super catchy title. I got DOA5 Last Round and just managed to get through the storyline and then into arcade to unlock some more costumes. I'm actually surprised the game has a storyline. It's perhaps the most well executed story I've ever seen in a Fighter. I mean, I'm not saying it was a GOOD storyline, but it was a story none the less.

The Setup

But before we dive into the game, lets look at setup. The resolution can be cranked all the way up to 3840x2160 if you have anything that can handle that which is nice. Full controller support and also "Breast Motion" options. There are 3 options, "Natural", "DOA", or "OFF". "Off" is essentially solid breast implants and "DOA" is if their boobs get replaced with waterbeds, constantly rippling and slooshing around. I'm a "Natural" kind of guy.

Also for a game that fetishises asthetics over all else, I was pretty unimpressed with the dirt and sweat/water effects. I thought everything would get hyper wet and shiny, but it doesn't seem to do a whole lot. Tekken Tag 2 does a better job and doesn't even gloat about it.

Curse you flamingoooooo!

Note, all images shot on Bandicam with all standard settings cranked (not 4k however. Anti-Aliasing: 4x SSAA.) Also I didn't cap any pre-rendered scenes. I did let the engine frame a lot of the shots though, I'm not that hardcore.

This is my serious fart face.

It has a Storyline?

The story would pick up whatever character it needed at the time, moving through the selection process for the DOA tournament, the winner of the tournament, through to stuff with Kasumi, clones, and Ninja Gaiden. Sometimes the story would cut back in time to follow another thread of a character you just beat, and the ramifications it had on his little story before getting on with other things. It was quite well done.

"I'm looking for a real man." another literary gem.

The writing was goofy, as you'd expect from a team that spent most of its time shopping for swimwear and getting tits to work in a titty like fashion. There were a couple of moments of physical comedy that went off without a hitch and got me to laugh. It happened twice. I counted. But for a game where I expected the usual "fight to the end for a 30 second cut scene" rubbish I was pleasantly surprised, and I feel like I actually know what's going on in the game world now. And for once I now know who won the tournament.

The Maps

This feeling even overflowed into the arcade maps that I now had some sort of context for. They had a place. Also the environment interactions have been taken to another level. I was already familiar with busting through walls or getting knocked off cliffs from DOA3 on the original Xbox, but they have some pretty ballsy stuff going on now. For instance you can trigger one map to get sucked down a cave river and almost off a waterfall (which you boot your opponent down.) It was super rad the first time that happened.

Combat AKA Gameplay

As of this writing I'm not 100% a master of the combat. I'm out of the mashing stage, and I can confidently tell you what the character is going to do when I press a couple combinations. Blocking is set to X on the Xbox controller, then you have grab, punch, and kick. Pretty simple setup to get your head around really. Career tip one for any would be button mashers out there, never press X. It just makes you look like the spaz that you are.

Glitch Intermission

And now an intermission of fun glitches. My new favourite character is now "rotar blade/Industrial tank lid thing" that's attached itself to everyone's heads. It made me crack up, and the bug reproduces itself every time. At first I thought it was a legit part of the game because of how perfectly it tracked peoples heads.

DOA? More like T&A

Also when you win or lose a match the character poses for you so you can run the camera up and down their firm bodice (if they're wearing a bodice). It kind of makes me feel like a total creep. But hey, equality.

Should you get this game?

Maybe when it's twenty bucks. It's not worth it at the moment. It's fun, but at the moment lacking Online multiplayer. Maybe in a month when the hype has worn off and all the features are in it'll be worth it.

Pixel Archer Concepts

These two are throw aways now. They didn't cut the bill or fill the mustard. We've settled on the final concept which is 100% more bad ass than these ones. I'll post him tomorrow probably. We've also settled on a final design for the main character which I'll probably post tomorrow. The archers will be the antagonists of the game which is planned to be quite short.

Apparently the dudes will have a playable prototype next week, and from that point I'll be starting on animation.

And maybe one day it'll be on Steam Greenlight, and it'll be your turn to pull your weight.

The Samurai Pixel Concept

I've got another art gig for an unnamed project. It's still early days but this is my favourite piece from what I've worked on so far. The kid probably won't stay purple. And probably this particular concept won't ever see the final light of day.

So there you have physical proof that I can draw more than just huge hips. I can also draw minuscule hips and huge broad shoulders.
It's Easter weekend here right now and everything's great. I'm even getting into the slave trade.
Oh also Elite: Dangerous is now on sale on Steam. You have no more excuses.