Yep, some new stuff; that is, a full promotional piece for my current webcomic project, Cryptohuntress. Perhaps a print in the near future?

This is something I don’t ordinarily do. That is, make my first finished rendition on a project a full illustration. Typically I just kick out a bunch of 3/4 character design sheets and maybe the odd head detail, but nothing this time consuming or featured. I thought it important to do this first, though, for various reasons:

• To establish a uniform look and feel, especially typographically; this whole project is inspired by a kind of fantastical Art Deco.
• To show myself that it’s worth it employ this much polish on a personal project.
• To give a powerful first impression, since I’ve been out of the loop so long.

Cryptohuntress has been swimming around in my head for a couple years now. It started off as a sort of joke during a time where I was heavily into HP Lovecraft; I did a small illustration of a victorianesque femme fatale with a tommy gun and her foot on a severed monster’s head, and that’s basically where it ended. Since then, the idea just gathered momentum – after all, it involved something I was best at drawing, and that’s women!

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the concept, though it’s safe to say that it’s a sort of an eldritch-James Bond in an alternate 1930′s thing.

Only problem I have right now is deciding on format. I could go totally authentic for the era and do black-and-white or sepia, but in the end, these may just be print or cover choices; I’ll probably be doing the comic itself as linework with limited shading, on some funky ‘old papery’ stock to give it a cool texture. I’ll have to play around some more… Either way, the print looks cool in a bunch of different styles.

Ladies, the real sanity test.

You can snag your own shirt at my CafePress site, available in both male and female attire.

Ironically, I’ve been sketcking far more often than I ever did while I was working; an act that doesn’t require me to verbally vent about the state of things. As a result, my art overall has improved and evolved in ways I thought I had already solidified; the facial style of my characters has changed, as have bodily shape and proportions. I even feel confident with a pencil again, as I had been doing everything purely digital for so long. In fact, I hardly did any digital work during the past year – while my sketchbooks have gotten plump and full. This is a good thing.

Consequently, this habitual shift has sparked a desire to start keeping a sketchblog. I want to begin just posting up my raw sketches on here, as a way to more easily chronicle my progress and to get my ideas out to people I know and trust for some honest evaluation or just simple moral support. If anything, it’d be just another way to keep a focal lens on my art.

This will all be culminating into a new comic idea, as well. My fascination with the atmospheric aesthetic of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories and hourglassy femme-fatales have inspired me to delve into a kind of eldritch art-deco clockwork flavor of science fiction. The project is currently called ‘Cryptohuntress.’

Another factor leading me in this direction is that I’ve been gaming regularly with a group of close friends in things like Arkham Horror and Trail of Cthulhu – the latter of which is something new we just got into, and I’m the Keeper. It’s a great opportunity to start workshopping how to create investigative horror fiction, and keep it compelling.

Other than all that, I’m going to try to stay on top of this blog. I’m looking forward to firing up the scanner!

Well, a couple weeks ago, we had a breakthrough. When the first Rainbow Six Vegas came out, I wanted her to play cooperatively with me. She refused after half-a-try of not getting the hang of it, and I couldn’t appeal to her to give it some more time. That is, until I recently got the sequel; my wife loves Role Playing Games, and as soon as I told her that your character could level up and get new stuff, she was automatically open to at least trying it.

Despite prefacing our first session with, “I’ll try it to get you off my back, but I know I’m not going to like it,” she fell in love with it. Over the course of the coming week, we played through the entire story campaign together. She wound up enjoying the slower-pace, thinking-man’s tactical gameplay, even though she’s historically too impatient for it.

This all got me thinking about making this post – one about the other games I wish I could get my wife to play. There have been many I’ve suggested to her repeatedly over the years, only to be shot down with disinterest (though I call it ignorance to their greatness). So, here’s a list of the top 5 games I wish my wife would play:

#5 – HALF-LIFE 2

Now, my wife’s isn’t adverse to playing Half-Life 2. In fact, it’s been on her “Need To Play” list for a few years now, which is way too long in my book. She enjoys dystopian science fiction (a taste I think I passed along to her), and has always seemed interested in it – she just keeps getting distracted by newer stuff. I keep telling her that the story, atmosphere, and gameplay are well worth the experience, but this is one title she continuously puts off.

Likelihood of her playing it: Moderate. While she keeps avoiding playing it, I know she has interest in the game. I might talk her into it one day.

#4 SINS OF A SOLAR EMPIRE

I haven’t really ever gotten onto her about playing this incredibly good strategy game, but it still one of those titles that seems to intimidate her. It looks complicated at first glance, but its a rewarding experience that she keeps denying herself. She’s a fan of science fiction and stuff, and I secretly would love to discuss the finer points of TEC frigate effectiveity, but I think she’d mourn the lack of any character driven plot.

Likelihood of her playing it: Doubtful. She’s too disinterested in it to get past the learning curve.

#3 UPLINK

Uplink is a hacker simulation game with a thick atmosphere and a story that creeps up on you as you snoop around the game’s virtual internet. It involves cyberpunk themes – with is a plus if I ever wanted to talk her into playing it – but its core gameplay can be so demanding, frustrating, and complicated that unless she somehow got hooked on some aesthetic aspect of the game, she’d be too annoyed to ever try it a second time. Which is a shame, because the game spews surreality.

Likelihood of her playing it: Almost impossible. She’d find the game too stressful.

#2 OUT OF THIS WORLD

This platformer from the early 90’s was one of the first games that attempted to mimic a movie’s level of immersion. On the surface it appeared as a standard side-scroller, but it was actually a literal work of art. Through thoughtful, expressionistic art direction and subtle gameplay design choices – such as the lack of a HUD – Another World (or Out of this World, in the US) made you feel like you had traveled to this barren alien landscape yourself, unnervingly alone and overwhelmingly vulnerable… Which is exactly why she’d hate it. This game was difficult, bordering on the necessity of clairvoyance to beat, and though I think she’d take away some level of appreciation for the experience, she’d just break all my joysticks in the process.

Likelihood of her playing it: Impossible. She’d get killed by slug things in the first level and then throw my PC out the window.

#1 DEUS EX

My wife’s aversion to playing Deus Ex is a tragedy for me. Here is a game that oozes atmosphere, character, suspense, and gameplay genius that she dismisses because it looks and sounds old. Now, I know my love of this game isn’t colored by rose-tinted glasses; I’ve seen testimonials online of gamers who played this game for the first time recently and immediately were awed by it. Sure, its presentation seems outdated at first, but give it a chance! This game offers everything she likes about cyberpunk and dystopian fiction, and her only hang-ups on it are superficial. That, and I genuinely learned to look at the world we live in a different way when I played this game. It literally changed my life when I was 17, and I’d love to be able to discuss its themes and symbolisms with the love of my life.

Likelihood of her playing it: Low. It’d take all the willpower she can muster to give it a fair shot for me, but by that time, she might dislike it just to despite me and how much I’ve built it up in comparison to every game we discuss.

Hi, folks. I haven’t forgotten about my vow to keep my blog updated, I’ve just been under the weather for a few days. A lot of people have been getting a nasty cold virus lately, and I was one of them. Had me so congested that I was afraid to fall asleep a couple nights because I was paranoid I’d suffocate!

Anyways, I’ve just about beat it and sleep is getting back to normal. I finally have enough wits about me to write a little entry.

Not much change since last I post, still planning and sketching away for R6:8, as you can see above; it’s the head design for my main character. His head and face are normally obscured by a hat and scarf, so this was the first time I actually defined how it looked ‘naked.’

In other news, today was Inauguration Day. I feel bad that I was ‘that guy’ in the office today, being the cynic. I just feel like there’s a lot of eloquent speeches going around, but that’s about it; I won’t feel good about this until some good comes of it. So far, Obama alluded to ‘big government’ stuff in his speech that made me ‘read between the lines’ and cringe a little bit. Time will tell.

Anyways, if you hadn’t noticed, this blog changes it color scheme to match the images in the posts. That being said, every time I update, I plan to have something new to show off. It’s a good incentive to keep drawing.

If I had to claim a specialty as a character designer, I’d  admit that it’d be the ‘classy fatale,’ the alluring – but not skanky – heartbreaker-with-a-gun. A cliche since forever, I know, but I love retro-pulp, and this type of character, and their style, is one of my favorites.

The above image was something I just whipped up this afternoon for R6:8. I’ve got the look of my male lead character down, and am now delving into the supporting cast. Not surprisingly, my first stop was a female. Admittedly, they’re the easiest for me to draw. Women were the first thing I perfected in high school, after trying to copy Michael Turner’s (R.I.P.) pencils – and let’s face it, if you’re trying to learn to draw comics by mimicking Turner, you’re going to be drawing a lot of women.

Granted, as a straight guy, women are fun to draw – but it’s mostly because I feel the most confident and comfortable doing it than male characters. Humorously, I worry sometimes that my wife or my family think I have some kind of pornographic addiction, but it’s as simple as doing what I’m best at. If I’m at a point where I’m not happy with my art, drawing one of my female characters usually makes me feel better, and ready to challenge myself again.

Still, it’s a kind of crutch I gotta force myself to get past. I can draw almost anything, I just shy away from it often so I don’t frustrate myself. R6:8 is my first comic without a major supporting heroine. Blaque is a vaillainess, and thus won’t get that much panel-time. This is an intentional challenge for myself, and I’m actually excited about it.

I do this a lot – start something, change it, and then shelve it. In this case, it was because I became indecisive about the core of the cyberpunk iteration’s story; I was treading amongst so many derivative genre cliches that I couldn’t pick a solid twist. I loved the artistic style of the world, though, and that was driving my enthusiasm. In the end, I decided that if I had to pick just one side-project for a comic this year, it’d be one with a more original hook. R6:8 had that hook.

I plan to do something with both iterations of T3RTION (the former one under another name, of course), but they won’t be soon. One probably won’t even be a comic; I was toying with the idea of writing the cyberpunk one as a blog-published novella, with single illustrations.

Anyways, I’ll find more stuff I did recently to post up for anyone who might be curious. I have a habit of doing some stuff and letting it sit on my photobucket.

Something new is on the horizon, as I try to dust away the cobwebs around here. I want to become a more active blogger, at least to keep my intellectual juices flowing. I’m in a production-time lull right now, and relying on creative news to run this blog has been a tall order for about a year!

I’ve learned some things, though – like the value of casuality. My new webcomic, R6:8, won’t be such a serious endeavor. The idea I have for it is fun for me, and I want to make that fun be part of the process. I won’t be sticking to a rigid several-per-week posting regimen, and I’m not going to be spending all my time and resources promoting it like I did BugReport. It’s as much a hobby as anything else, and I want to enjoy doing it. I’ve turned past projects into a sort of part-time job; I blame BugReport’s fall on its over-production.

So this one will kind of leave a lot of questions floating out there, but in an endearing surreal way. The site will be centered around the comic, and very little fluff – if any at all. Like a lonely portal into another dimension.

In closing, I don’t want t promise anything, but I hope to be posting semi-regularly on here from now on.

Also, progress is being made on bringing Modsprocket.com to life. Stay tuned there for more Wulflorne, and other projects!