Art

"Although little is known of the sect of witches and warlocks known as the Shedren, there was a somewhat famous member from the early to mid eighteen hundreds known only as Lilit or Lilith, although most references call her Lilit The Reaper.

After the Dust Fae Hordes drove the Imperialists, Arabs, and assorted disorganized negro tribesmen from North Africa in 1826, the entire region became a wild and barbaric place, even worse than the reputation given to the American south west. The Goblin and Orc warlords organized gladiatorial matches that briefly rivaled those of the ancient Romans in order to keep their savage clans from revolting or dispersing after their victory.

Only the strongest humans were allowed or could even survive in such an inhospitable culture, but some were able to thrive and a slow integration of the Moorish complected humans began. It was at the height of the integration and gladiatorial spectacles that Lilit appeared.

It is a testament to her prowess and powers that a woman of clearly European ancestry was so feared and respected by such a primitive, warlike culture.

She fought in the arenas for nearly five years, and was never once defeated. No one could predict where she would appear, or when, but it was soon common knowledge that when she did arrive, always unannounced, she would be given the privilege to fight the strongest available competitor or the organizers and guards would face her reputedly cold and murderous wrath.

She favored battling monstrous, beastly foes, very often imports from the deepest parts of Africa or sometimes Russia or Asia. Oni, Trolls, Ogres, and any other Fell beast that was shipped in was fair game.

By all written accounts, she was a true terror in battle, toying with her foes as a cat might play with a mouse, stalking and evading while attacking with the great runed scythe that was her trademark weapon. She could blend with the shadows and dust as most Shedren are said to be capable of. The scythe was chained to her armor clad right arm, which was by all accounts, literally pinned to her flesh. She could throw and spin the scythe on its chain as if it were as easy to use as a cattle driver's whip. It was said that wounds inflicted by the awful blade could never heal, and that a victim would bleed out as surely as the sun would rise the next day.

Although petite of frame and stature, with a pixie-like countenance, she possessed incredible strength, nearly matching the historically renowned brute force of the Order of the Titan Knights. These abilities have lead many to believe that she was, in fact, a true demon of some sort, but such exaggerated hyperbolic reputations are not uncommon in the history books.

The records indicate that she vanished after four years and ten months; her last battle was against a remnant of the Titan Knights themselves, a legendary Slavic brute named Sir Crzebolg. she was wounded during the battle, a first amongst all of her recorded matches, but nary a month later the tenuous alliance of warlords collapsed and the gladiatorial arenas were closed and fell to disuse as the entire region boiled over into an all out civil war.

What happened to her after that, or if she ever recuperated from her wounds, is a mystery lost to time, for better or for worse. The Shedren are reluctant to speak of her, and betray a mix of contempt and irritation towards the topic, but do not deny that she was one of their sect."

- From the research notes of Dr. Fordrick Wilkinson
- Professor of Occult Studies, Oxford University, 1933

This started as a livestream sketch that I spent a lot of time trying to polish up in the end. I think the end piece has around 80 layers. Lilit is a somewhat obscure historical figure from the Steamvolt alternate-earth universe I'm slowly developing. I can't say whether she'll ever make an appearance in the comic, or if she's even still alive, but you never know ;)

All work done in Photoshop CS4, on my Fujitsu 5010 tablet PC.

I Fixed My Laptop with Floss:

That's right, I said floss. One of the weird things about a tablet PC is the unorthodox hinge system they use. Rather than a pair of hinges on the edge, they need one central hinge contraption that also rotates so that you can put the thing into slate mode. This hinge gets a lot of wear, and seems to collect dirt and debris. Dirt and debris makes hinges not only stick, but make noise. A horrid, primordial screeching crackling sound similar to a combination of nails on a chalkboard and bones being crushed by a rabid hyena. You think I'm kidding? The creaking on my tablet got so loud that I was able to wake a person who was in the depths of a dreamless ambien coma, and coworkers have been giving me odd looks. It was LOUD.

Sadly, there's just about jack shit online as far as suggestions go for fixing this issue. Most suggest just cleaning it out, but other people, like myself, noticed that the solid dry lubricating pad had degraded form use and crumbled away. Not good.

The one thing I did find suggested using, of all things, waxed floss. The floss is actually good for cleaning out the metal residue and dust to stop the creaking, and the wax seems to make a pretty good dry lubricant. So what the hell, I tried it out, and holy shit, it worked. It cleaned out the black metal dust and dirt, and mostly stopped the creaking. The joints were still pretty stiff, even after trying to work the wax into the bastards for a while, so just for good measure I zotted each joint with a blast of dry waxy teflon spray that I just happened to have hanging around from another never-finished project of mine. Yeah, that's right, I have dry wax teflon spray just sitting there waiting for a good use. I'm weird like that.

So anyway, after all was said and done, it works again. I had briefly tried some silicon grease that was used for paintball guns, but it doesn't come even close to the amount of viscosity needed, and the hinge seized up after a day. So don't do that: Floss and Teflon spray. It works, bitches!

In other news, I drew a Lemming Toad, seen above, who is now up on Mojizu waiting to make the grade (or not). Fun little guy; I tried out some different line colors, but in the end I wound up darkening them anyway. I can't seem to quite hack the light line styles of some other artists yet. Guess I'll try again another time.

And in YET OTHER news, I'd like to give my personal superfluous and completely ridiculous packaging award to Razer for their Mamba gaming mouse. The mouse itself is superb, and I love that I've gone from a chunky 800 DPI to a nearly unnecessary 5600 DPI of sniping accuracy for gaming, so I'll give them a little link/plug here for a fantastic product (I got mine on Amazon; cheaper!), but holy shit guys, did you need to ship the mouse in a giant plastic display case with an honest to god pedestal for the mouse to be displayed on? I get that you want the packaging to be nice and all, but this is sort of a 'fuck the environment and the green movement and all that hippie shit, let's go the other way and just cram as much unnecessary bullshit into the package as we possibly can! SUCK IT ENVIRONMENTALISTS!!'

I mean, the case comes with a little three tire bureau underneath it with drawers for storing the various parts of the mouse. Why you need these, I dunno, because once the mouse is up and running there's no reason to store anything in them. Well, perhaps it could make a poor woman's jewelry case, as I think about it, it's that friggin huge. And the plastic case could probably make a decent planter for, oh, say, some sort of vegetable or herb that needs good root space.

I do get that I'm sort of hypocritical for bitching about excessive packaging when I'm dropping a chunk of cash on a gamers mouse, but still, I think they could have scaled back a little and been a little more environmentally conscious while also saving themselves and the end consumer a few bucks on the over the top packaging.

I've been spending a shit load of time at DeviatArt lately, to the point that I'm neglecting my blog even more than usual. One thing I've noticed a lot of people use is Livestream, to basically broadcast their desktop while they draw. This is, in my nerdy art-geek opinion, one of the coolest things ever. It's so cool that I even started doing it. The program is flash based, so naturally it's a bit unstable, but it does get the job done.

This causes some problems though. In order to get the word out past DeviantArt, I'm going to be forced to use twitter. It pains me to do so, but it must be done. I've gotten a lot of notice on DeviantArt as well, so it may be time to make one of those new-fangled facebook pages and whatnot.

No Myspace though; fuck Myspace.

Anyway, just so you can see what kind of stuff I work on, this is one better than average sample of what I work on in livestream. THis one is already about half colored, a large portion of which was done in a later broadcast.

I guess this means I need to get this site back up into better running shape, clean up some CSS, and se tup some proper links and widgets for the facebook/twitter/livestream bullshit.

This is my attempt to be 'too cool for all this social networking junk, but I'll join it anyway since all of you plebeians are on it' while trying to hide my starry eyed wonder at all this wicked cool technology. How am I doing?

Anyway, here are the new dorky links of note:

http://www.livestream.com/plognark

http://twitter.com/plognark

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Plognark/280296857134

Well, I got my entry completed for DJ Shwann's art contest on Deviantart. I found out about the contest late, and had to rush, so I got... well, let's just call it tunnel vision. That's what happens when your base image is five THOUSAND pixels wide an you can zoom in on a character's cuticle flaws. You lose sight of the big picture. For example, tits that looks like someone's rump.

Here's a before and after:

Really, wow, how did I miss that. I mean, the touch up isn't great, but the first 'set' really did look like the asscrack of a relatively hairless plumber all spilling out and causing nausea and mental anguish.

At least they're hairless, if they weren't I'd have much bigger problems.

Anyway, in my continuing attempts to not suck this has been a solid round of failure with a helping of introspection and humility to wash the bitterness and self loathing down.

Seriously though, they weren't even at the correct angle, they're all cockeyed and pointing the wrong way, as if she had a growth on her chest that was pressing them outwards and to her left. Like one of those cancer people with the hundred pound tumors. God damnit.

First drawing of 2010! Tried out a few new techniques with textures and brushes.

Some sort of cyborg critter...I figure it's a super alert tough alien slug critter that gets a complex forebrain, proper legs, and enhanced auditory sensors. It's got a keen sensory cluster to keep an eye out for aerial predators in its natural environment.

Yeah, this is the sort of stuff I make up when I'm bored at work.

This is a commission piece I did for a comic writer, AuraComics, on DeviantArt of her Original Character Enya beheading a Medusa. I really went overboard for a regular commission, but it was fun and I got to test out a bunch of new things and stretch my artistic muscles a little bit trying to make everything work.

Well, I'm gonna take the plunge and get windows 7 for my tablet. I've been running Vista, which I got somewhat late in its life cycle, so I didn't have any of the issues that the early adopters did, but for some weird reason Fujitsu installed a 32 bit copy on this thing. I don't know why the hell they did that, given that it's got a pretty beefy 64 bit compatible core 2 duo, but whatever.

So after waiting a little bit, I haven't heard any real horror stories, and in fact, I've heard some pretty positive stuff about the performance of windows 7, so I was considering getting it. What tipped me over the edge was Photoshop CS4, because CS4 has some pretty interesting features I only recently learned about.

Now, CS4 had some little candy updates and perks they were promoting, but there's one feature that really made me happy: They resolved the 66.6% zoom issue. What the hell is that, you ask? Well, I'LL TELL YOU because I'm nice like that. See, when you do digital art, you zoom in a lot. Or at least, I do. The problem with photoshop is that when you zoom to odd values like 66.6% or 33.3% the image gets all chunky and pixelated. This is because they use some kind of crappy 'nearest neighbor' sampling system that makes the image look like garbage.

This has annoyed me for a hell of a long time, and actually has come close to pushing me into the Painter 11 user camp, and prompted me to try out other good programs like Sketchbook pro, artrage, SAI, etc. CS4 finally solved this issue by using OpenGL off of video cards to render the image. This is the same way your video card would render a video game. Pretty slick!

At first I wasn't sure my laptop could handle this, given that it's got an onboard intel chipset, but a few driver updates later and I got the sucker working. HAPPY DAY!

Now, in my research of all of this OpenGl craziness, I discovered that CS4 is also a 64 bit program, and that since I can't drop a video card into this thing, I can at least get an operating system that can use my full 4 gigs of DDR3 ram and take advantage of some nice code optimization that's come out. This may spur me to actually install my larger hard drive that's been sitting in a drawer too. I'd love to have another 300 gigs of storage or so on this rig.

So if all goes well, I'll have Windows 7 and CS4 later this week. I know that being optimistic in the face of anything Microsoft related is sheer folly, but I can't help but be a little eager and excited about a rather significant system upgrade.

In other news, I have also discovered that codecs are a pain in the ass. Anyone who looks at any amount of porn on the internet is going to find, sooner or later, that they need codecs to watch this junk. The problem with codecs is that they can completely botch up other functions, and slow your system down in the same way that too many active processes can.

Case in point: Against my better judgment, I picked up Fallout 3, because I just wanted to make sure I never ever have any free time ever again, and that my marriage falls apart due to my neurotic game obsession. The game is awesome, but it initially ran like shit on my system. This was disheartening, but I have OCD, so I couldn't just let it go.

So I finally dug up some forum posts about the fact that the Oblivion engine that Fallout 3 is based on does not work will with a codec called Vimeo. The one culprit turned out to be a sound codec that causes the game to hang for a few seconds every minute or so, getting progressively longer and longer after each hitch. There are few things more frustrating than being in a huge gun battle with super mutants and cannibalistic raiders and the game decides it needs a good fifteen second pause to sort its shit out. I found myself tense, waiting for the action to continue, hoping that muscle fatigue wouldn't cause me to screw up my aim and get my little game avatar shot to death.

So anyway, I got a utility to list and disable codecs, and now my entire desktop PC is running better and smoother. Not just Fallout 3, but pretty much everything. Figures, doesn't it?

Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere about watching too much internet porn.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Click the image for full size!

You can buy prints of it from Deviantart here!

Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year, and I'm usually too busy/lazy to make any art specifically for it, but this year... this year I have conquered my own apathy! Yay life!

I always figured that sitting on a broomstick would cut off blood flow to your extremities. Hell, you don't even have stirrups to lift your ass up and let the pins and needles go away.

Well, decided I needed some more practice with skin tones, so here's what I came up with after a few hours one night.

Which brings me right to the topic of Fan service. For those who don't know what fan sevice is, it's basically gratuitous titillating imagery in comics or movies that do nothing to promote the story or plot; they're just there to get the audience or readers all hot and bothered.

Now, the problem with fan service is that people really really like it. Well, let me clarify: guys really really like it. We're almost all slaves to our testosterone, so any hint of flesh can get us to start reverting back into caveman mode. I haven't met many women who care about it, for the most part.

I don't really have a problem with this, personally. A little fan service is fine, but it's easy to go overboard into the ridiculous. Some of Masamune Shirow's recent work has gone so far overboard into ridiculous near-nudity and panty shots that you might actually forget that the plot and characters in his recent Ghost in the Shell works suck ass. There are loads of other works that are really nothing but pointless fan service as well, and I tend to find them pretty annoying.

Now that I'm working on my own material, it's tough to find a balance between the two extremes. I really love drawing women, but I feel like a jerk off if I start drawing too much bare flesh for no other reason than to see more skin. At the same time, that's what gets attention and accolades form the a huge portion of the people who buy comics or read web comics.

I don't really have any solutions or anything, It's just something that I ponder as I work on further layouts and comic pages.

The Clipper: a cantankerous beast that hunts down smaller robots and critters. It first impales them with its hook arm, and then snips off useful bits with its clipper arm or jaws that it can add to its armor plating or make repairs with.

It's slow moving, so it typically waits to ambush its prey and is very crafty and cunning. To make up for its slow speed, it has heavy armor plates and is extremely strong. It's still seeking more armor bits to protect its heart and power supply.

This is a contest submission for the movie 9 on Deviantart.

Down to the last minute, my buddy Jim and I burned the midnight oil and finished this up at 11:40 PM last night in a frenzied rush of grinding, cutting, riveting, twisting, blood, sweat, and... well, no tears, I don't think either of us cried while making this. We're still definitely nursing more than a few nicks, scrapes, and scratches from working with all of that metal though.

This was an awesome project though. We procrastinated a bit, of course, so we were sort of scrambling at the last minute, but we managed to get it done without too many compromises.

Components include the following:

1. The guts of a broken wind up clock
2. The heating elements of a burned out electric space heater
3. an old rusty ice hook
4. a pair of rusty hand clippers that had been inexplicably dipped in yellow paint
5. the sheet metal from an ancient rusted out tub that looks like it may have been a still for a moonshine operation back in the prohibition days
6. worn down snow tire chains
7. several armatures from car rear view mirrors
8. an old rusty trowel
9. Half a dozen old electrical relays
10. a bunch of braces and brackets for fixing cabinets that turned into this guy's bones
11. Several old rusty horseshoes
12. What felt like hundreds of feet of steel wire, and hundreds of nuts, bolts, rivets, washers, and wingnuts

I'm absolutely certain there are more random weird parts in there, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head.

I was hoping we could get a more dynamic look, but once he started pushing thirty+ pounds we were more concerned with keeping him upright and sturdy than getting a slick action pose.

We'd like to thank the guys at The Junk Shop for letting us rummage through their piles old rusty contraptions and take a bunch of parts for twenty five bucks.

We'd also like to thank the Sadie Mae Foundation for giving us first dibs on all of the good old junk and tools from their fund raising tag sale.

Well, that's all for now, I've already typed up too much here. We'll find out if we placed in the contest on the 30th.