Wednesday WIP, Vol. 34

Two days late... could be worse. XD The last two days were pretty busy. I still managed to get some stuff done since WIP vol. 33. There's some lineart and coloring going on. I also have sketches for the newly redrawn Rainbow Dash and the fifth design for the Hunger Games set, but I was too lazy to scan those for this. That and I don't get a lot of time for art stuff today, so I'm going to keep the blog short and sweet and get back to work. Here we have more work on my most recent commission project, lineart for Fluttershy, color and starting to finish the first in a new original set, and the finished 4th Hunger Games design.

Wednesday WIP, Vol. 33

Here's a look at what I've been working on this past week. I am slowly getting back into a routine that includes consistent art time. I am happy to see things getting done, even if it's not as much as I'd like. It's still a step up from weeks where I didn't get a chance to do anything artsy or craftsy.

This week is again mostly art projects. The commission sketch I've cleaned up some since I scanned this version; I'm being lazy tonight and not scanning an updated version. The lovely lady in formal attire is part of a new series of original designs I'm working on for Anime Weekend Atlanta. There will be a set of 24 prints--12 ladies and 12 gentlemen--and 12 matching badges featuring chibi couples. Can anyone guess the theme for this set? I'll give a hint. It's not Zodiacs. The third Hunger Games design is almost finished. I'm really happy with how it's coming out. The last sketch is for a random set I'm working on mostly for fun--it was something I came up with at Anime USA last year, and it makes me giggle, so I'm drawing it. I'll see if anyone can figure out where this set is going too. =P

Wednesday WIP, vol. 32

So, the blog is a day late, but it has been a better week overall for art--this means I actually have something to post here this week. XD

The third Katniss design is drawn and inked and in the process of being colored.

Just for the fun of it, I pulled out my markers and colored pencils and made this:

This was fun; I may have to do more of those.

I have lots of sketches for new art:

my favorite	don't like... will probably redraw

Wednesday WIP: June Part I

It's been a crazy month since I last posted a real WIP post, and sad to say, I don't have a whole lot new to actually post here, especially considering how much time has gone by since the last post.

Anyways, let's go with some updates to what I've been working on--much the same as what I was working on last time. Let's start with the plushies. Last month I started working on a set of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic plushies for Animazement's Art Show. We did not make it to Animazement, mostly because of little Sophie, but also because I spent so much of May sick that I wasn't able to finish either the plushies or planned costumes for the convention. The weekend before the convention we decided to cut our losses, canceled the hotel room, and stayed home Memorial Day weekend for the first time in 13 years (this will probably be a post topic for another day). I am still going to finish this set of plushies. They are still going to be one-of-a-kind. I will probably put them in Anime Weekend Atlanta's auction or maybe I'll do something online. In any case, here is a photo of the progress on that project: Twilight Sparkle is finished, although I may go back and redo parts of her mane; the other six planned ponies have most of their parts made--I still need to make their eyes and cutie marks, assemble the pieces, and add their manes and tails.

 
Along with the My Little Pony plushies, I was also working on a set of Soul Eater costumes for my family for Animazement. Once it became clear we weren't going to make it to the convention, I slowed down work on these. Generally speaking, most of these costumes are still piles of fabric. I have started Soul, although so far, about all I have is a little bit of progress on his jacket. I might have these done by the end of summer.... Maybe. XD

Then, I was working on that epic noir-themed Final Fantasy VI poster. That's still not finished. >_< It's really close though. My biggest problem right now is Photoshop. For every minute of decent work I get, I have to spend 5 minutes waiting for Photoshop to reload the file because it crashed and then I have to redo that one minute of work, or I'm waiting 3-6 minutes for the file to save before I can move onto the next minute of work. You'd think this was exaggeration, but sadly it's not. We thought we'd fixed the problem, but for whatever reason it reverted back after one session of good behavior. It's been incredibly frustrating. On the plus side, this project is almost finished. I need to add the rest of the color behind the picture and then do some minor touching up.

I have plans for a few other odd things. I am working on a set of My Little Pony human-form badges. I started this back at Anime USA last year, and I added two more character sketches at Magfest. These aren't necessarily new WIPs, but it's a project I'm going to be trying to finish up this summer. I'm also going to be working on finishing the Hunger Games bookmark and postcard set I started before we moved (for the last time). I've finished the designs for Katniss on the chariot debuting as the Girl on Fire and Katniss at her first Interview. the next one I am going to work on will be Katniss at her interview after she one the games in the first book. I've got a really cute design in mind, and I can't wait to get it down on paper. On top of those fanart projects, I am also working on a new original art set for Anime Weekend Atlanta--all I have for this set now though is scribbles and ideas, so no pictures to go with it yet, but I'm hoping that will change by next week. =) These are the main projects I'm working on (well more like my main secondary projects). There are also a myriad of smaller side projects that I'm kind of playing around with--as if I don't have enough to work on, but this kind of thing really suits my short attention span. This means though, now that I'm mostly settled, mostly well (and hopefully that stays that way), no longer pregnant and exhausted (believe it or not, even with reduced amounts of sleep being up with Sophie, I still have more energy), and done with distractions like travel and family events, which although fun, don't make ideal times to get work done, the Wednesday WIP posts for this summer should be filled with all kinds of fun and exciting things. =)

Wednesday WIP Posts Are Back

Now that I'm back to writing on this blog, Wednesdays will once again be dedicated to stuff I've been working on. Being that this is a convention month, I have a ton of stuff planned for this month. We will be attending Animazement in Raleigh, NC Memorial Day weekend; I believe this will be our 13th year going. Boy does that make me feel old. I will not have an Artist Alley table there this year. I am not particularly sad about this, since we will have a couple week old baby with us. I am planning on submitting some plushies to the Art Auction, participating in the artist charity event (if they hold it--which reminds me I need to email someone about that), and hanging out with family and friends (while cosplaying of course).

Let's start with what I have planned for the AZ Art Show. Technically I have lots of things I'd like to do, but given time constraints, I'm going to keep it to one set of things. As you might know, I like to make little chibi amigurumi plushies. I also happen to really like the new My Little Pony: Frienship Is Magic show. I've been wanting to try my hand at making pony plushies for a little while now. I've debated whether or not it was something I wanted to make available on my tables and in my Etsy shop. I've decided to go with the "not" answer. With the manes and tails and some of the details (like cutie marks) I think they will be more involved than the plushies I normally make for my table. Considering I have a hard enough time keeping plushies in stock for that as well, expanding that inventory just doesn't seem like a great idea at the moment. So, I am putting together a set of one of a kind pony plushies just for the auction at AZ. I have seven planned: the main six plus Derpy. Given that I have about 2 weeks left to get these done, I guess we'll see whether I make that goal or not. Today's WIP photo features the bodies and appendages for Twilight Sparkle and Rarity, although Rarity's body is still missing it's stuffing. =P I will hopefully be finishing those two up in the next day or so and be moving on to the rest.

Next up is costumes. AZ is the one convention where we really focus on cosplay. We have participated in the cosplay Masquerade Contest every year for the last 12 years. This will mark the first year that we are not planning to compete. I imagine it is going to feel weird not spending most of Saturday on that. However, we are still planning on cosplaying. This year's costume set will come from Soul Eater. I have wanted to dress my 3 older boys as Death the Kid, Black Star, and Soul for a couple of years now, and now seems as good a time as any to try that. My husband will be going as Stein and I'm planning on going as Marie. Originally I was going to cosplay Blair--I really like her witch outfit and it didn't seem like there was any real "pairings" (romantic or otherwise) outside of the main 3 characters and their weapons--given a choice, my husband and I like to do "couple" cosplays or at least cosplay characters that have a connection with each other. Having watched more of the series since then, I decided that maybe I could do Medusa or Marie since both of those ladies have clear connections with Stein. I've picked Marie because I like her, I happen to already own shoes for her cosplay, and she's a giant hammer.... I have a big thing for giant hammers. XD This is probably why I gravitate toward paladins and clerics in fantasy rpg games. Anyways. That's our cosplay lineup. We are still debating on what to dress the new baby as. I am still leaning toward Blair cat if it's a girl. I'm thinking maybe the priest Death Scythe character whose name is completely slipping my mind if it's a boy. Current progress consists of printing out references and digging through my scrap fabric drawers to see what I can use from what I already have for these costumes. Amazingly, I am only going to have to get a little bit for my costsume, stuff for Stein's sweater, and the yellow on Soul. This is cool because it means my fabric shopping bill is going to be almost reasonable--this very rarely happens when you're making this many costumes. Today's WIP photo is a pile of fabric that will eventually be costumes.

Finally, I have been working on a massive commission project I picked up at Magfest. This has been an incredible challenge--in a mostly good way. I was asked to draw the entire playable cast from Final Fantasy VI as a poster in the style of the Nintendo Noir badge set I put together. Originally my customer had asked for a movie poster style picture, but after some brainstorming, I included a mock-up of a club scene with all the characters in it along with a couple of movie poster mock-ups with the first set of WIPs I sent and he really latched onto the club idea. In hindsight, I probably made more work for myself, but it's been a fun project, so I'm not going to complain--my only real frustration is that it's taken me so long to get it finished. Of course, realistically, I was putting fourteen characters into a picture, each of which had to be redesigned for the noir setting plus there are more background details to add and so on. It is a large project, and that, combined with the moving mess, means that it was going to take some time to finish. That said, I'm definitely on the home stretch now. The character redesigns and sketches have been finished. Everything has been scanned into the computer, and I am nearly finished with the lineart, which is where the bulk of the work for the noir pictures is. Everything gets shaded in black, and color is added behind that to keep with the noir style. Since this is a poster, and not a small badge, I have used several shades of dark gray for shading to give it more detail and depth as opposed to the solid black I used for the original badge set. I have a little bit to add to the background in the top and bottom corners on the right side of the picture, and then I need to put in the carpeting on the floor. That will finish the lineart phase. Then I will fill in the color behind everything, clean up the lines, and everything should be done then. So far, I am very pleased with how it's coming out. =D

What Happened to This Week?

This is a bit of a continuation of last Friday/Saturday's post. XD My plans to do a lot of crafty things went completely out the window, as did keeping up with my normal web stuff, which included my blog. I pretty much spent the entire week in vacation-mode. It was a weird, but good experience. Usually even when I go on vacation, I'm working on art or crocheting something. Instead, I slept.... a lot. And, I watched anime... a lot. This was a very good thing because I also spent most of the week feeling ill, so it was nice to not have any immediate demands on my time or energy so I could rest up.

Now, if I was a much better organized person, I'd have had several pre-written blog posts that I could have snuck in, but that fails at the organized-requirement. I've never been a super organized person, so yeah... no pre-prepared posts here. Everything's written pretty much real-time. The plus side is that everything I post is pertinent and recent. On the down side, there will inevitably be times where I miss posting. Usually it won't be as bad as this where I miss a whole week--I think final count is this: I completely missed posting anything Monday and Wednesday, and today (Friday) and last Friday's posts are just random, why I didn't post anything pertinent posts. There will probably be vacation periods where I miss posting. Also, around convention times it's entirely likely that I'll be missing 1-2 posts right before the convention. That's just how things are around here.

This past week, my mom and I watched all of Ouran High School Host Club and all of Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. We also watched a couple of episodes each of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Soul Eater. She enjoyed all of it, especially FMA. It was fun rewatching both series. To any who have not seen them yet, go watch them.... now. For real. That's about all we did though, so that's about it for this post. =P We'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming Monday.

Panda's Watching Stuff

One of the things my husband and I wanted to do as part of the reorganizing and simplifying of our life associated with this move is to make a serious attempt at paring down our "Things to Watch" list. There's a lot of stuff there... and I mean a lot. Now, we could of course just opt to not watch some of the stuff on the list--and we might actually do that for a few things--but that isn't our goal. Most of the stuff on our "Things to Watch" list are there because we wanted to watch it, at least a little bit. Some are of course more appealing than others.

Since we've decided not to delete titles off the List, the next obvious thing to do is set aside time to start watching more of the stuff on it. Over an undefined period of time starting last week and going through whenever, we will be watching two episodes from two different series a night. We'll watch kid-friendly shows earlier and let our boys watch with us. The other shows that the kids should not be watching, we'll watch after they go to bed. We each get to pick a show to watch, so, at least theoretically, there's at least one show to look forward to watching.

To start things off, I chose My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. My cousin and several friends have been really getting after me to watch this, and since we did slaughter 3 of the ponies during our last D&D game; everyone seemed extra excited at the deaths of Celestia and Pinky Pie. That was definitely one reason why I chose to watch this series--I'm curious as to why. Also, a lot of people whose opinions I generally respect also had a lot of good things to say about the writing and the series in general. On top of that, I saw so much My Little Pony stuff--in Artist Alley and a lot of cosplays--at Otakon. I admit hoards of rabid fans usually scare me, but when I got D&D, Renaissance Faire, and serious steampunk types who I wouldn't expect to like cutesy things praising it as well, I'll admit it piqued my interest further... so, we're watching My Little Pony.

My husband has chosen to finish Soul Eater--we'd gotten a 10-episode start into this series when life intervened and we had to put it down for a while. We're not on a mission to finish this series, and on a random side note, I really really want to draw Death the Kid as a My Little Pony (in fact, go ahead and expect to see it one of these days). XD I also want to draw a Soul Eater bookmark set (Maka, Soul, Black Star, Tsubaki, Death the Kid, the Thompson sisters, Shinigami, Stein, Medusa, etc.) Anyways, back on topic... Personally, I really like the animation style, and the wacky humor of the series. I've heard it gets really dark, and I hope I keep liking it after it starts moving away from the craziness of the earlier episodes.

When we get a little farther into these series, I will be posting personal reviews of them and maybe some random fanart as well.