Suddenly; armoured guys.

Sudden unexpected productivity! Inspiration hit this morning and I managed to get these done in pretty short order. No complications, no real difficulties, no burnout. Unexpected, but I'm not going to complain.

It was the collars you see - I saw a breastplate with a really nice tall, open collar and when I tried to scribble on of my own, these came out. The swooshy cloth roby-thing covering their right leg was an idea I yoinked from some half-remembered Rackham miniature I once saw. Saves me having to do a symmetrical set of complicated plate-armoured legs. Implying complex 3d shapes with 2d outlines is easy - but doing the same shape twice from different angles to order is hard. besides, the cloth looks kind of cool and helps moderate the nodecount and level of detail.

Fairly complicated by my standards, but (possibly due to the limes) I think they're allowable. Oops - just noticed that I missed the second guy's axe - that quad shape on the blade is meant to be a gap. No big deal - this is just a quick white-out to make 'em look a little more presentable here.

So, armour. Lots and lots of armour. Fun. Not sure how interchangable the bits are. I kind of themes the armours, so #2 has that curved/pointy thing going on, while #3 has the triple-layer. I oculd probably get away with mix and match still. Interesting (to me) how different the looks are. #1 seems like a warrior-monk kind of guy, probably because that weird armoured headband is remeniscent of a tonsure. #2 Seems like a paladin or generic knight for reasons I'm unsure of, while #3's banded armour makes him look a bit more menacing and sophisticated.

Lime crisis

I've gotten kind of distracted from my vector peeps lately. Perhaps I need a new angle of attack or just a new project to overthink.

Still, not doing veeps doesn't mean I've not been doing anything. I play Kingdom Of Loathing a lot, and one of its iconic images is the sabre-toothed lime. One day I drew a lime in inkscape (to fill up a blank spot in a KoL-related flowchart) and it grew on me. I felt like doing something vaguely interesting with it and I was bored, so I copied and pasted it a few times and started noodling with them.

This was the first batch. Kind of mediocre, though I like what I came up with for a lime skeleton though. I reckon that if sabre-toothed limes have skeletons, that's what they look like.

So, to say that they went down down well would be an understatement. So I did some more. There was no shortage of ideas. I mean you've seen this kind of thing before, right? A single image or character modded slightly and wittily captioned? I can't remember exactly where I've seen it done, probably overpriced university posters, but it's a known technique.

Anyway - I embraced that and started churning out limes. Which was great fun. They're easy to do, I'm working off a simple template with no post-vector colouring or texturing attempts. I'd had a fair bit of practice with inkscape recently (as demonstrated on this blog) and this was all the same techniques, so it went easier. Slightly different style and conventions so it was a bit of a change. In fact, because I wasn't making a deliberate effort to keep nodes to a minimum, it was actually easier than some of the veep stuff. The lime skeleton's teeth or the igor lime's stitches are examples of the kind of indulgence I allowed myself. Squidgy hats were another, though not seen here.

Fun times.

I ended up doing seventy-seven in all, plus some bonus. I'll pop them up here with commentary in lieu of doing anything new I think. It's fun to talk through this stuff.

Firefox

Gasp! Colour! I didn't expect this, it just sort of happened.

Obviously elemental foxes - fire and unconvincing-ice. I like these. They're not great, but I like them. Probably because, like the crab mutants way back when, I wasn't trying to do vaguely plausible light and shadow, but creating a texture/pattern that provides enough detail on its own.

I am a slave to patterns, so I'll probably try and do some other elemental foxes. I've worked out a tail design for an electrical fox (flickerfox?) but need another pose. If I wanted to be all cheaty I could re-use these two poses and do one of each for each element, but that'd be... cheaty.

On the other hand, variants are basically a no-go here. What could I possibly vary? Tail-swoosh? Head angle? Petty stuff you probably wouldn't even notice.

So, yeah. I'm happy with these. They ain't art, but I had fun doin' 'em and, havin' done 'em, I like 'em.

Squagus and friends.

It's short for "squid magus". Placeholder names are fun, in that they don't have to make sense to anybody but myself. Favourite so far: "psycho cheeseborg". What can I say; it quacked like a duck.

The squagus himself has been in this semi-finished state for some time - I did him during my brine mutant phase. I wasn't happy with him though. Shapeless robe, symmetrical pose and gribbly tentacles. Too easy. Lazy. The only bit even vaguely interesting is the gill-fin-ear shape on the side of the head.

Anyway, today I was squiggling (squiddling?) and I got two semi-satisfactory giant tentacles. I'd always intended to do some giant tentacles for the brine mutants, but... hadn't. Tentacles are both easy and hard to do. They're a very simple shape and vector drawing makes curves a breeze. But they need to have a certain amount of itnerest to be worth doing at all and twisting shapes with a definite cross-section are tricky for me to think around. These are a barely acceptable kludge to me.

To make them match up with the squagus I quickly block-filled them. Those blue-green things at their bases are emant to be water-splashes, like the tentacles are bursting up out of the sea. They're supposed to be the limbs of some huge krakenish thing the squagus has summoned. Possibly even the cult's elder fish god.

Tentacles. Not terribly exciting, but necessary to me. And I'm warming (a little) to the squagus, when he's in their company. Maybe. Ish.

Hungry natives

So, colouring is still not really happening. Which is bad. But I'm still puttering along, which is ok.

Here's some culturally ambiguous, miscellaneously exotic jungle/island indigenous peoples. Please note that for maximum offensive cultural stereotyping they are even waving spears.

The pseudo-tiki masks were fun to do. It's a shame that I only do three variants because doing a bunch of different masks could be really fun. Maybe I'll get a chance if I come up with another "native" type. I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking regarding the shape of #3's mask - soemthing about the angle making the fourth corner seem to disappear? Too scared that I'll cause knock-on problems to the face design if I try and fix it.

I had so much fun with the big masks and crazy hair that I had difficulties differentiating them elsewhere. Copped out on the spears - they all have the same head, just different decoration. I was originally thinking I could totally change the weapons so one had a spear, one a sword, one a club (or whatever) but I oculdn't get the pose to work with non-spear weaponry without straying over the edge of the frame.

Also: dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are hard - their body shapes don't like to fit in small square spaces.

The leftmost one I did a while back. I think I might need to colour him before I can decide whether or not he's worthy - I like the idea of the pose but I just can't judge whether I pulled it off or not. Also he has cheapo mirrored feet, which I probably ought to redo.

Death-chicken was more recent and while I don't like him as much as lefty, I'm happier with him. He also has more fiddly details that I could biddle with for variants - mouth and crest mainly. Lefty's got a nice simple look going, but that limits the possibility for tweaks.

They've both got those dromaesaur claws going on. Now I'm thinking that the left guy would look better without them. Thing is that they're nice easy, identifiable and node-cheap foot detail. Low hanging fruit.

I imagine these dinos live in the same jungle-riverish area as the natives above. Pretty generic I know, but maybe I'll come up with some kind of twist later.

Javelins and squires.

I've been vacillating about whether to put this up. It seems a little like admitting that the previous linearts aren't getting coloured any time soon. But, if I'm not then they're not so I might as well keep going with what is getting done.

I'm hoping that I just need something inspirational to jump back on the colour-horse again. In the meantime though it's linearts.

I was really happy with javelineer pose, but the more I look at it the more limp and noodly it looks. Still, it's at least an attempt at something a bit more dynamic - I really don't want to fall into a rut with posing.

I like the heads; hair continues to be a difficulty but it went ok here. Torsos took ages to detail in a way I was happy with. The funny angle and a lack of space really limited what I could do without it looking cluttered and messy.

The legs are... bothersome. Those crotch-crescent thighs aren't working right, but I can't seem to fix it. I'm calling it done and moving on rather than obsessing though - for all the bits I don't like, overall I'm going to call the javelineers "adequate". They're characterful enough to me that I can let myself overlook the dodgy bits.

Speaking of characterful, I'm very happy with the pose of the squires. Not exactly dynamic like the javelineers, but different and with a sense of motion. Stumbling forward with someone else's weapon and armour.

I like the pose so much I wanted to give them more variation - perhaps a sheathed sword rather than a lance - but I couldn't come up with a third option and this way they're all themed and can go alongside the heralds.

It occured to me that the pose was perfect for soemthing I tried to do when I was paying more attention to the mad surgeon theme - an assistant stumbling forward with a comically large syringe in his arms. Now that I have an idea of the knid of lines that pose needs I could try and do a different version for it, but I also wonder whether I oculd get away with a novelty reskin.

I want new models in preference to reskins, but it seems like an interesting way to do "rare" characters: reskins that completely change the character of the model. It could be kind of cool, or it could be kind of lame. It would add more variety than just an on-theme reskin, and would be an easy way to get a new character without having to make a complete new model. But easy is often a trap. The big thing turning me off the idea is what if the "rare" variant appears alongside a regular? It'll probably look obvious and cheap.

In the works: masked jungle natives and small nippy dinosaurs. Will they make it past sketch? Who can tell!

A change of tack

So, I know the name of the game was supposed to be "keep ploughing forward" but that ideal wasn't terribly useful when I was hitting feldspar.

I did the rightmost guy first, using the same block shading method. But I just couldn't summon any motivation to do the others. On the one hand i think I failed to come up with interesting colour schemes here. On the other I might just have OD'd on amateurish block shading. In any case, I tried something different on the other two.

Rather than worrying about light sources, I embraced the flat cartoon look of the veeps and did a sort of graduated fill, darkening towards the bottom to draw attention upwards. I'd pondered using this method at the start, but (lazily) never actually tried it. I'm not sure what to make of the end result, but it was very fast and a fun break. Trying new things is good.

It's not actually a graduated fill - instead it's multiple passes with a low-opacity brush of a different colour (hence the banding). But that's not important. Middle guy I carefully selected the shades to work down to. Leftmost I used a universal grey-purple shadow colour. And as a result the one has no contrast and the other is way too dull and dark. But there might be potential here.

I kept working on linearts while i was trying not to finish colouring the monks. Heralds!

I expected difficulty making meaningful variants, but it flowed pretty easily in the end. The tabard designs were fun and they could look nice with some bright heraldic colours on them.

I think these guys might be part of another themed group like the (neglected) brine mutants and the psycho surgeons. Some kind of knights, squires and chivalry thing. I can think of two acceptable armoured knights I've done in the past that could be purposed for that. I've avoided making variations for old veeps so far because I wanted to be making new stuff rather than going over old stuff, but it remains an option.

Speaking of redoing old stuff - trivia time! The heralds were me idly re-doodling one of the veeps I drew way back when I first started playing around with vector stickmen. Of course looking back now they're all abominable, but there's brain fodder to be had there. The cutthroats from a little while back were another example of trying to modernise one of the original bunch.

I've deviated a fair bit from the original idea. I'd wanted to see how few lines you needed to make something identifiable. Which is how I came up with the basic skeleton pattern. But I've gone the way of packing in more detail instead, with the minimal lines thing being just a stylistic quirk.

Saturday night ninjas

I've failed at giving these guys a good name. The title above is a placeholder until I come up with something good. They're supposed to be vaguely city-ish unjapanese ninja-ish people. And the one in the middle turned out a bit too John Travolta as a result. I'm not entirely unhappy with him though - he's just a bit weird. Sporadic weirdness is good.

The linework's a bit borderline. The idea is they're drawing those cleaverish swords from where they hang on their backs, but I didn't get it looking right. It might have worked better with an actual visible sheath, slung like a bedroll, but the twisted torsos made gatting a working angle a bitch. At least the legs aren't as bad as they were - until i realised and fixed it, their left knee was roughly three inches below their hip.

Alpha makes me think of white chocolate and raspberry though, which is nice. And Beta and Gamma's hairstyles have pleasantly low nodecounts.

They're done though. Post 'em and keep moving.