Of belts and gis

Yoko GeriSome would say that I perhaps have an unhealthy fascination with such apparel. It is apparent, especially if you look at my various doodles (and doodads) around my hard drive, my desktop, my tabletop and even my sketchbook.

I say, though, that the gi, though overused, is absolutely perfect for people who have little to no knowledge of how to best portray the human body, and instead opt to hide it beneath swaths of cotton fibre. All while making your character automatically look badass.

All this, of course, at the cost of making your masterpiece look like yet another of those Ryu-inspired deviations.

While most of my recent life has been revolving around my new Serbian Machine of Doom (or I suppose you could call it a PS3), I’ve managed to find some time in between my various marathon runs (courtesy of the fucking wonderful army), engorgements on sustenance (again courtesy of the fucking wonderful army) and mindless rampages over in both Team Fortress 2 and Serbian Simulator of Destruction to actually dust off my Wacom tablet and have a go again at doing something vaguely related to art.

I’ve talked about Illustrator and its brush options before, I believe. However, I don’t think I’ve actually ever tried to do something serious with it other than random brush swirls and other assorted bullshit. This is my first attempt at actually doing something that wasn’t yet another ‘test.ai’ that would eventually find its way into my Recycle Bin the week after.

What you see in the post image is essentially a precursor as to what awaits. I started out with something simple so as to boost my already overinflated ego when I would inevitably create something awesome (in my own eyes, of course).

I then actually set about working on something a little more complicated, though. My results are below. And yes, these are using Illustrator’s stock brushes, I’m lazy, too lazy to go about creating my own, and to find some awesome ones on DeviantArt or something.

You all know what happens nextWIP shotWielding two swords all up in here

Anyway, the real hard part wasn’t really drawing the damn linework (brushwork?), but the goddamn fucking unintuitive way Illustrator’s selection tools work.

I’ve ranted about this before (I think) but seriously, Adobe’s flagship vector artwork solution is on its 13th generation (and counting, if the CS4 version beta is anything to go by), and I’m still seeing the lack of certain selection features that would have been much appreciated had I access to them when working on this. For instance, fucking let me deselect by region instead of deselecting vertices one by one, or even line segments (which is actually just as annoying).

That aside, I actually enjoyed painting in vectors for a change, although I did notice even my new rig tended to experience some slowdown once the screen became a cacophony of lines and dots. I shudder to think how my old rig could have even hoped to cope with this onslaught.

Originally, the concept for this piece was that there really was no concept. I mainly wanted to create a nice little HD wallpaper for my PS3 and just happened to slot in two of my titular characters from a as-of-yet-unmentioned project. (That’s pretty much why I cut them off at the legs, both for laziness and artistic effect.) As the time I spent on it turned from a couple of minutes to that of hours, though, I decided to go all the way and finally update my character sheet document with the updated look I decided on while working on these little sketches.

By Hour 2 (or 3) though, it got a little confusing with all the lines around, as you can probably see from the WIP shot above. I’m pretty happy with the results though, and I may be doing a couple more of these in the future, along with using these current pieces for some other stuff. For example, a shirt, which is a welcome addition to my now archaic store which is in desperate need of some new material.

I just wanted to pop in the fact that I’ll be away for the next 2 weeks though. Why? Well, I’ve been conscripted into a course that will end up with me being either dead or having a license authorizing me to drive APCs. The bad part? My workload will likely double and the course means I can’t go home every day until it’s over with. The good part?

There is none.

You’ll understand, therefore, that since today marks the last day of freedom for me, it’s time for me to return to the world of Liberty City before I head off to a far more cruel one. And there is no American Dream in that one, either.

   

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