Andrew Loomis’s art books (currently working on the first: Fun With a Pencil) are really, really helping my drawing technique. Along with my skimming of Successful Drawing, reading Fun With a Pencil helped drive home the idea that you have to draw everything from basic geometric shapes, which helps a lot when you’re already familiar with perspective (as I am).

As I have complained in earlier posts, I haven’t drawn much lately. This was just a fun little thing to get me going again.

As for the image’s subject matter - well, this is one way NGE could have been better. The other ways being fewer plot holes disguised as legitimate ambiguity, more episodes and a larger animation budget.

Less antagonistically (and you have all likely heard all this before), Neon Genesis Evangelion was a decent series that could have been awesome if it weren’t for Ganiax’s fallings at the time. Given more screen time and the budget/development time to accomodate, it likely would have been a lot more complete and I would have probably loved it. As it stands, I’m not a big fan overall; but I liked the mechs, the whole “pseudo-reasonable, militaristic use of the weapons that can counter the invading monsters” thing, the characters, and the music.

Sometimes. (spoilers)

    I tear my eyes from the screen to pour myself another cup of coffee. My second week and I decided to impress everyone by taking on three damn assignments. I think I’ve actually spent the majority of my life this week at the office. No, yes, I have. 14 hour days. More spreadsheets, only one of the 3 reports due Tuesday done, currently Sunday. How the hell am I going to get this all done?
    “Are you still here?”
    I look up, startled. Zachary is still in. Or, he had come in for the Sunday. I can’t tell, at this point.
    “Wait. You’re still in here?” I reply, suddenly aware of how much my eyes hurt. When was the last time I blinked? I blink again. The burning only encourages me to keep my eyes closed, and I’m now looking up at Zach with my eyes closed. I look away.
    “No, I just decided to come in for the afternoon,” he responds. I massage my eyelids, pretending that I can somehow stimulate my tear ducts into action. ” Unlike you, apparently. How long have you been here for? People were saying you’ve been staying late late during the week.”
    My week’s been: Come in early, leave after completing almost another shift’s worth of hours, take the hour-long bus home and do a poor job of getting to sleep by spending hours on the Internet. Whatever. What the hell was Zach doing in?
    “Uh, yeah, I have,” I say, as I finally convince myself to open my eyes. Focusing on something no more than a foot away from your face, for hours on end, takes a toll on you.
    “How many projects are you working on, anyway?” he continued. “You don’t need to make yourself look good, man. We know you’re new around here. And I mean,” Is he going to mention the Tavros project?, I thought. “the Tavros project is behind as it is.” Fuck.
    I replied flatly. “I took up work, I have to finish it.” Suddenly realized my tone, scrambled to continue a bit more personably. “I mean…it’s stuff I’ve agreed to do, so I need to do it.” Whoops. Just repeated myself. “It’s not like I can drop any of these now, right?”
    “You don’t have to drop them, Mark. Just let us know you can’t do it for Tuesday and get some sleep.”
    Sleep. I suddenly am aware of the fact that I had not been unconscious for more than five hours at a time since last Wednesday. Temptation sets in. No! I couldn’t. “It’s going to look really bad on me if I drop anything now,” I repeat.
    “Didn’t you just hear me?” Zach looks exasperated. “Look, just…they’ll understand if you just show them what you’ve done so far. And,” I almost miss the brief pause, “I mean, Tuesday is coming up.”
    “What about Tuesday?” I reply.
    “Oh, I don’t know. Something, for sure.”
    “Quit bullshitting me, Zach.”
    “I’m just saying. Go take the next two days off so you can catch up on sleep.”
    “And why Tuesday, too?”
    “Well…”
I was getting irate.
    “Zach, I don’t really see any reason to be so vague about-” I paused. “Oh, shit. That’s-“
    “Yeah.”
    “-Valentine’s Day.”
    I thought of Anne. I really hadn’t talked to her throughout this whole mess, never mind see her. If I went on like this I could very well sleep through Valentine’s day. If I didn’t, well, it’s not like I could put anything together in this state.
    Brief silence. I broke it. “Shit.” Repeating myself again.
    “That’s right. I mean, what do you think Anne’s gonna think if you show up a gibbering wreck, or if you don’t plan anything at all? I’m looking at what you’ve got here and I’m telling you now you won’t have this done for then.”
    Heart pounding. I mean, it did that sometimes; not getting enough sleep combined with gallons of coffee does that to me. But this time I could tell it was because of genuine anxiety. A real crisis. Things are gonna be shitty either way, but…Anne means more to me than screwing up second week on the job.
    I sighed. “…You’re right. But how do I tell them?”
    “Just leave a note on Thornblad’s desk. He’ll understand.”
    I wrap up some stuff and write up the letter. By the time I stand up, Zachary has disappeared. Maybe he just left while I was at it, but…it was just really, quiet. Iunno. And how the hell’d he know about Anne, anyway? I haven’t really told anyone about her yet; I mean, I hardly talk to anyone yet. Then again I don’t think I remember any of the conversations I’ve had all week, so maybe I did mention it.
    I pack up and exit the office, locking it behind me. No sign of Zach in the parking lot. He drives, so. Must have left in a hurry…

    I head for the bus stop.

————————————————————-

It’s a good thing I have no aspirations to be a writer.

Work’s been rough for both my motivation and sleep schedule. I had slightly bigger plans for this, which fell through. On top of that, I’m doing a pretty awful job of practicing drawing at all.

I really need to get back on schedule.

”’The Robinson Logs”’ are a collection of audio logs taken during [[The Fourth Retaliation]] by [[LAV]] pilot, [[Quinn Robinson]]. Because of the sudden appearance before, ubiquity during, and immediate destruction of LAVs after the war, the Robinson Logs are a frequent subject of study. Debate over the veracity of Robinson’s increasingly erratic account of LAV combat and the conflict in general continues, in particular with regards to [[#Jan_04_2303|the last recorded entry.]]

————————————————-

(Teleprompter prompt: last recorded entry)

Well holy shit, I figured out how to shade in Corel Painter Essentials. Also holy shit, I did a very rough job of it. I suppose that’s what happens when you rush through something you barely understand how to do within the span of a few hours.

Despite the sheer sloppiness of it all, I did actually achieve good shading in quite a few places and am happy to finally get back to shading in the first place. I’m pretty proud of the heart in general, some aspects of the helmet (in particular the notch on the nose of the rebreather) and the linework overall. The pipes look awful (as do the bloomed-out side-screens) and I kind of just ignored making the face look like anything, being happy enough that the eyes weren’t horrid. If anyone gives a damn I can put up the pencil sketch, which is somewhat incomplete but also doesn’t include the uneven shading everywhere.

我々は再びロシア人とエスケープされている情報の小さなサンプルを傍受している。締めセキュリティで私たちの試みは、あきれるほどに不十分な証明されていることを最高司令部に連絡してください。

Decided to just doodle today. Still getting used to my work schedule, as evidenced by how little I got done in two hours. As the amount of sleep I get decreases linearly, my procrastination increases quadratically.

I figured out how to draw diagonal cylinders! Turns out it’s just “horizontally- or vertically-rotated cylinder, which is then rotated along neither of those axes.” Drawing a circular pattern on a cylinder face rotated in this way, however, is a completely different story. I figured that one out too, thankfully.

My perspective is getting better/more consistent in general, thanks to this art book.

Been busy practicing with an actual book (top right).

Been making marginal amounts of time to screw around (bottom left).

Just noticed I can upload different photos within the same post (not this post).

The mech is a vague, 15-minute, and uneducated attempt to draw the 1940 AMX 40 as a mech. It uses the mech design idea I ignored a few posts back. World of Tanks is an excellent source of inspiration as long as you just want to draw war machines.

“Behave yourself, Inspector, or my two associates here will be more than happy to-“

( Prompter line: “Did I say two? I lied.“ )

Half-hour warmup. Next half-hour warmup will be drawing the cars and people in this scene.

Exams are done. Holy shit, free time is something I can have without feeling guilty.

I somehow ended up drawing this from a more aerial perspective than the photo itself, so there’s a small amount of perspective error here that I’m sure will make it impossible to draw the car properly later.

Pseudo-plug about something free, scroll down to the bolded text for comment on this entry:

The Marathon Trilogy is damn good.

Between being basically “Doom++ with a pretty good plot”* and (on its hardest difficulty, though there are enough difficulty levels to suit anyone) being very challenging without being unfair, Bungie’s Mac-years FPS series is probably the coolest old game you’ll ever play. I did once play this game before back in high school, but I had hit a brick wall on some puzzle and soon gave up. (Now I’m at it again, with a few more years of (fast) FPS experience and hopefully enough brainpower to get through its puzzles.)

Aleph One’s a “source port” of the old Mac games. Like with Doom’s source ports (zDoom or Skulltag), this means that the game’s engine has been modified to work in newer OSes while still reading and running the original games’ campaigns and maps. It runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, and has a fully functional (though slightly inflexible) multiplayer feature.

But anyway. As for what I’m drawing.

A guy called Craig Mullins who now works as a [freelance?] concept artist in varying applications did a bit of fan art for the first Marathon game back in the day. He then got hired by Bungie and made some official art for the later ones. His Marathon art has a simply excellent focus of aesthetic, and it combines ultra-realistic, somewhat gritty character and weapon design with expansive, perspective-infused backgrounds. Needless to say, this struck a chord with me.

I’m redrawing one of his pieces of concept art - an alternate costume for the Security Officer. This one appears to take a lower-tech approach to the Officer’s uniform, and while it perhaps wouldn’t fit in with the far-future general aesthetic of the Marathon series I found it to be unbelievably cool. Probably the thing that catches my eye the most is the half-trenchcoat that he seems to be wearing. For these reasons, I’d like to redraw it.

The file that this drawing is going on will likely also come to contain my attempts to redraw and touch up the Marathon weapon designs, such as making a basic cutaway of the Assault Rifle and its two ammo drums, as well as attempting to prove Durandal wrong about the WSTE-M5 shotguns being too complex for a human to understand.** I might upload each drawing separately until the sketches for each are finalized, because jesus is this canvas huge.

*The last entry, Marathon Infinity, introduces so much surreality and time travel it’ll give you a migraine. Allegedly it at least doesn’t contain any plot ambiguity, unlike most surreal pieces of media. 

**I will not succeed, seeing as whatever I’ll design will be simply a method to replicate the WSTE-M5’s functionality, without actually replicating the seemingly invisible loading mechanism as not-seen in-game.