it's like... marjane satrapi meets junji ito and the two are fused in a mass of writhing horrific faces communicating profound fundamental truths about the human spirit

A panel from a four-page comic I submitted to the Jonathan Cape Graphic Short Story competition. It was really fun to just churn out a story in a week, it felt like I was back at uni (in a good way, short creative projects kick ass). I should try and do this kind of thing more, yadda yadda yadda

i dont want to live on this planet anymore

billions and billions of fuck

some stuff for a music video I hastily dipped my artistic proboscis in today.

odolwa: masked jungle warrior

Inspired by my friend's recent Majora's Mask fanart and my girlfriend playing the game for the first time. Might do some more, the bosses in this game are pretty and I feel like doing more fanart.

I used to give Majora's Mask a lot of props over its elder, more mainstream sibling Ocarina of Time (that name sounds more stupid every time I read it), but I think after a while I started worrying that my rabid appreciation for the notably "edgier" MM was probably just a contrary sort of nostalgia. However! I'm watching Blanca play it now and it's been just long enough that a lot of the character design (and the design of the story in general) is actually really appealing to me.

Most of the character design in OoT is simple and recogniseable (princess looks like a princess, bad guy looks like a bad guy, Link looks like... Link), but the incidental characters you meet just around in towns and stuff could sometimes be pretty funny (or creepy) in a way that makes them stick out a little bit. Majora's is a famously sidequest-heavy game, and what's more it doesn't have the standard fairy tale Princess/Hero/Bad Guy triad (which the other games go so far as to fucking canonise), which essentially removes all of the boring characters (except Link, who is well-known to be a characterless player vehicle). They take some of these weird little side characters who would usually stand around forever in town X continuously repeating the same line (then they go and design a lot of new ones) and then give them this amazing groundhog day cycle to play around in.

I can't really stress how good an idea this is - by simply adding a restriction to the timespan of the game, by putting it in parentheses, this actually gives the characters such a vast amount of life, it allows them to move and change and fight and trade and get married and do a lot of the things people actually do. It doesn't matter that the whole story is only three days long - it rids the game of that weirdest of tropes that almost all videogames by necessity fall prey to - the paradox of infinite time, something that I feel is possibly one of the most well established and subtlest ways to kill peoples' immersion.

But yeah, the character design is also fucking amazing, the lack of pressure in this obviously being a B team title completely freed up whatever artists worked on it and they just went crazy and it's just beautiful to watch. And it's funny how much the gamecube incarnation rips it off, especially since Wind Waker pretty much holds the sole status of "artsy game" among the Zelda brethren.

some amazing videogame sprites from blazblue

These are from Blazblue, a current-gen game available on PS3 and XBOX. I think you can buy it for your computer, too. Anyway, its main claim to fame is that its an HD descendant of 2d sprite-based fighters, most notably Street Fighter 3 and Guilty Gear (it's known as a "spiritual successor" to the latter).

These days the majority of fighting games (and big-budget videogames in general) tend to be rendered in 3D (makes sense to make use of the entirety of processing power and your disposal) which may label games such as Blazblue as something of a novelty. However, it's not like Braid or Super Meat Boy where the use of 2D mercifully limits the amount of art and tech that go into its creation, this is a big game designed by a big Japanese studio. And I mean, literally, BIG. Look at the sprites below - full sized they probably take up a sizeable portion of your computer screen (for contrast, have a look at the resolution on this sprite from the last popular 2d fighter, SF3 - pretty astonishing when you compare the two). The whole idea with sprite art is to be completely economic with the resolution you have, you never want to squander it needlessly. Blazblue takes the (huge) resolutions of modern TVs and monitors and uses every pixel it can to give you a crisp image of a character that might have come straight from your favourite anime (which is, of course, what this kind of game strives to emulate).

The ordinary character sprites and animations are already luscious enough, and you can search youtube for some very pretty fight videos with all the characters. However, being the stickler for details that I'd like to think I am, I was looking at some sprite sheets of the characters and noticed how beautiful the "electrified" frames are - these are frames of the character that will flash up intermittently for no more than a few fps when the character is struck by an attack that's designated "electric" in nature. The skeletons are knowingly cartoony and often include details that you maybe wouldn't notice in the ordinary pace of play - take a look at the weird little idol inside Colin's top hat, or the unhappy fish apparently secreted in Taokaka's claw-sleeves. Besides that, the poses are nice and the general design of them (outline, form, colour) I find really appealing. See what you think.

einar

espen

character from a story i'm trying to write. trying to get comfortable with linework again, lazily I either make it really fat and vague or I just resort to the pixel-wide thing. also trying a bit harder with character design. lazy lazy lazy.