Designing our own Crash Bandicoot sampler, wedding edition (part 1)

So, this has been a long time coming! Ever since The Wonderful Smaz and I started making serious plans for our wedding ceremony, I knew I wanted to sew my own sampler to commemorate it (like how a Poundland 'wedding plate' is rolled out for every Royal wedding - except, y'know, far better). However, I didn't really know where to start - I knew I wanted it to be Crash-themed, but that was really about it.

Designing this one first really helped, especially when it turned out better than I pictured. Forever a cheapskate, I am still using graph paper, and my resulting designs have become very dog eared, crumpled, and liable to change at any moment. At my day job, they call this a 'living document'.

There are so many elements about my first sampler that I really like but the iconic items (crystals, gems, crates) were particularly fun to work on, so I used that idea of iconic as a starting point:

The top four panels are based off the wall textures from the levels Sunset Vista and The Lost City in the first ever Crash game. Smaz and I have always loved the aesthetic of these levels, and the music's pretty damned catchy too.

 

And below, our names worked in backstitch, the classic Crash icon on the left (again, introduced in the first game although you can see it in the N-Sane Trilogy edition too), Aku Aku on the right, and the Wumpa fruit with clear gems in the middle space - all four of these, can't get much more iconic than that!

I picked ecru aida as I really love the look of unbleached fabric; I get why if you're not a fan, but to me there's a beauty in no two similar pieces. It adds a lot of texture and interest to my needlework and in the case of bright colours (see Aku) it really makes the design pop.

Stay tuned for part 2 ...

Designing my own Crash Bandicoot sampler

Of all the fandoms that have had inspired needlework patterns - you can't move for Doctor Who or Star Wars ones, for example, and there's even some Sailor Moon ones if you know where to look - there's not a great deal for Crash yet. As a lifelong fan of the orange marsupial who married another lifelong fan of the orange marsupial, I took matters into my own embroidery hoop.

You know how you see traditional samplers involving a depiction of a house, and motifs such as an alphabet or an idiom, and small lucky charms (I'm compelled to point out I don't mean the cereal)? I wanted to go for that feel for this piece. I looked into small Crash B. items that could translate easily into stitch, and sketched them out - the layout looked as below:

 

(click to enlarge)

The Wumpa, the Aku Aku mask, the crates and the crystals worked well - the well and the relic did not, I felt they made the layout look a bit unbalanced especially given the symmetry of the house, and they were discarded in the final stitching.

Now I really do need to invest in a proper cross-stitching software (as well as a new domain, you've probably noticed the watermark - but more on that later) however in the meantime I draw any designs I have out on graph paper and then go straight onto fabric from there. For numbers I do end up doing some of my own calculations, but this generator from Yarntree is grand when it comes to working out size.

I have a lot of thread colours so I do tend to pick ones out from my stash before I begin - I'm not pernickety over brand, I've used and owned DMC, Anchor and 'offbrand'. I don't mind offbrand, the colours can be quite good providing it's for decorative wall art (never used it to embellish clothes), but you're going to get a good strong thread with DMC and Anchor so if one can afford it, go for it. This sampler was done in a mix of DMC and offbrand, mostly DMC.

I ordered light-blue DMC aida for this project for a nice summery feel.

 

In-progress shot!

I do love when a piece starts taking shape, there's a stage when you think 'oh no, is this going to work??' and it's not unique to sewing - it pretty much happens when I draw and paint as well. I got that feeling a lot when working on the house but overall I was fairly happy with how it turned out. In retrospect a bit of shading work wouldn't go amiss but as the final sampler is fairly simple, childlike and colourful, it does lend itself to the overall vibe.

The sand at the bottom was a last-minute addition - the house and fence needed something. I thought full cross-stitch would be a bit overpowering, so I opted for half-cross stitch in two strands.

Second in-progress shot, just after I decided to add clouds. This was especially last minute, and only came about after I noticed that the gap between gem/crystal and border looked far too bare.

One of my favourite bits about the sampler is the French-knot 'glints' on the gems.

And finally, all framed up and ready for the wall! A few 'sparkles' added with metallic thread and I was very happy with it. It's so bright and bold, and very fun to work on with no monotonous bits (even the larger parts stitch up fast). I'm looking forward to my next Crash stitch, whether it's one I design, or if another stitcher designs one - I'm looking at you, Etsy.

Let's petition for Crash 2010!

So if you're in the Crash Bandicoot community - chances are you'll have heard about this.

Recently, JumpButton and LXShadow over at Crash Mania discovered some concept art and an animation reel by former Radical workers that were part of the cancelled Crash project. Now, Activision weren't exactly in our good books to begin with, but now the Crash fanbase has decided to take action by signing and promoting a petition. And here's the bit I'm doing for 'em.

Here is the petition, if you'd like your voice to be heard, too. There's no guarantee that Activision will resurrect the project, but the least we can do is make some noise* and show some support for our favourite bandicoot.





The YouTube channel for the petition is here. Check it out!


* - however, the wrong kind of noise is 'phoning up/e-mailing people who worked on the concept stuff asking for details on the game. You might be anxious and want news, and you might not mean to annoy them, but it's seriously not cool to go hassling them. As JB says: "I've hidden the B-Roll for now, as some of you people seem to think that emailing and calling a man who you have no business emailing/calling. He can not and will not be able to tell you anything about Crash, so back the hell off, and when he stops getting calls, maybe we'll put an edited version back up."

New Stuff

... wow, it really has been a while. What with working for money (for upcoming university) and having other stuff to do, this blog gets kinda neglected at times. But not to worry, I'm here - and with something Crashy-related, too:



I got a little bored last night, so I seized the nearest pad and a biro and got to work on some doodles of the Doctors (I coloured in Brio for my new forum signature).


Aaaand ... something CMTV related!:








Guess which show has a summer special? I'm pretty darn hyped for it, and you should be too (and if you haven't seen CMTV 6 yet, you need a smack on the butt). This was finished off last week, before I went away on a mini-holiday to meet Smaz's family and friends (awesome people, by the way) and the videos were uploaded after I came back.

Also on CMTV - a new little news item on the unreleased Crash 2010 game. I'm happy to see all this material (especially that animating and concept art, it has me drooling) yet sad that this game never really came to fruition. I do hope Crash is continued someday, though.


Until next time, you blog-lurkers, you!

Fun with Puzzle Bobble

Or as I knew it, Bust-a-Move 3DX (this game series had so many names). This is Twinkle from game number 3, and she's my favourite! Her little dancing during gameplay's pretty cute as well.

I didn't keep track of how long exactly it took me to draw and colour ... around 2 and a half hours, maybe. It was after I'd started colouring that I noticed I forgot to draw a part of her outfit (that was a long part of the white cloak thing around her shoulders and made her look like she had a tail). Never mind.

Crash and Polar keeping their new years' resolution

... to stay out of trouble? To get fitter? Either way, I'm pleased with this. It's been a while since I've done a piece of Crash fan-art, and I did the rough sketch back in November not long after I'd moved into my new home. It's only now I've really had the chance to outline it properly, scan it in and CG it.

Personally ... I think I need to improve on my shading and fine details. Sometimes I can be so haphazard with the brush that it looks half-assed, and I don't mean to be like that. On the plus side though, this is the first background I'm really pleased with. Backgrounds are not usually my strong point, and I tend to stick to the safe side by leaving it plain or keep it to very simple objects.


Anyhow - no matter what time zone you're in, enjoy your New Year, guys! Let's hope this decade is good to us. *toast*

May the CM members be with you

First off, I apologise for not posting often this month. My personal life has been quite hectic so I don't have much time at all right now to update. However, there's one update ... you've probably all seen it but I'll show you anyway because I'm uber-proud of it:



Do you like? This Star Wars parody was done for B-Mask for CMTV. It took me a while to do, but I feel it's one of my best digital pieces so far. I felt that using lighter line-art worked a lot better, due to the previous work I'd done on the Tita Gasman request for Korusan.

CGing Tutorial

Requested by soPWNEDXcore at DeviantART; I put together a CGing tutorial. This is probably my most used way of CGing (sometimes I have to bend or adapt my 'guidelines' to suit the piece) but I've been asked for tips a few times now. This is, however, my first tutorial. I do hope it is of use. :)




DeviantART link to the tutorial is here - you'll have to visit this link if you want the tutorial large enough to read. Blogger has shrank the image I uploaded here..


As for the Brio piece - it's part of a larger piece so I'll show you when it's all done. :)

First attempts at animating

First things first - I've recently been doing some work for BandicootMask on the Crash Mania forums, for CM-TV - a show starring the members of the forum, providing information about the forum and Crash Bandicoot series. If you watch that video, you may spy me somewhere.

I used Clay-Model Polyrhythm (or as I called her, 'Polymodel') as the subject for a couple of hand-drawn animations I did. I just used the GIMP to flip the pictures together like a flick-book (I have not downloaded the Animation Package for the GIMP, but if animating becomes a regular thing then I may just do that).


Plain lineart:
Tired Polyrhythm
Sleeping Polyrhythm


And 'Polyrhythm Sleeping' I actually coloured in GIMP today, frame by frame:



Nothing particularly Flash-y (hurrrr) but I do enjoy it even if positioning frames and drawing the same thing over and over does get a tiny bit tedious. It's fun! :D

You know when you wait twenty minutes for a bus ...

... three all come along at once? Yeah, that's a bit how it's like with art projects.



I know Nina Cortex is Lil' Miss Evil but an occasional friendly picture won't hurt her rep.

Anyhow ... I'm in the middle of doing another piece of Nostalgia Critic fan-art. It has a background and I'm digitally colouring it so it's taking a while (I want it to look decent, at least). It was originally intended to be a caricature but I think it's looking more cartoony now, we'll see how the final product is.

I'm still doing work for my new college course; I still have a few more photos to take and pages to work on.


And, I've also been requested to do a tutorial on how I colour digitally! I'm pretty bad at explaining things so you'd have to bear with me, but when everything else is out of the way I'll give that a shot, too. *thumbs up*

ポリリズム の 家族

You have nooo idea how long it's taken me to write this. I seem to have come down with temporary blogger's-block, but I'm doing this knowing I'll feel proud of myself and accomplished after I press 'Publish Post'. *grin*



This is Paytotheorderofofof2, on YouTube - one of my favourite video-bloggers. Watching her videos - especially her 'YouTube: Most Rewarding Thing' video - actually helped me get the confidence to do my first v-log (remember the 'sketchbook' videos?).

She kind of reminds me of someone I went to college with.




And this guy inspired me to think about filming my own 'nostalgia' video. It isn't filmed and up yet, I'm still waiting for a few things first, but it'll be up. If you get a chance, go watch some Nostalgia Critic episodes - even if you didn't watch the movies or TV shows he reviews, he's hilarious.

... I just need to draw the Angry Video Game Nerd now. >.>




Poririzumu no Kazoku.

Unfortunately I haven't kept this piece - it really wasn't one of my best - but it has a strange childlike charm to it, I guess.


I've put a couple new links in the Links section under a new heading - Awesome Series. Take a look at them, a lot of hard work goes into them, I enjoy reading/viewing them, and - as the heading states - I think they're great. I like supporting fellow artists. *thumbs up*

Floating Spanners

Well, I did do my charity sponsored-walk. It was tough, but well worth it. I didn't quite reach my target but I still raised a good amount of money and it was a great night (it didn't rain either) so all is well.

In other news:


YouTube has been playing up tonight so I'll just leave the link to the drawing video here. N-Gin can also be seen in his steampunkish glory in full-view here.

So, so far in the 'Oh God, Not Another Crash Bandicoot (Fan) Re-Design' series we have a Cortex, a Tropy and an N-Gin. Brio's quite steampunk in the Victorian sense anyway - the design of his lab, the Jekyll and Hyde parody, etc - so if I ever choose to 're-design' him I'd have to focus more on the mechanical aspect. Oh well; I never intended it to become a 'series' anyway.

Updates one of ... three [digital ver.]

Now comes in DA flavour!

Here, have some moar CLANNAD fanarts.

A slideshow video of stages is here. I downloaded HyperCam recently; but this was before I got hold of it so it's a stages-video instead. Besides, this did take me a long time because I worked on a humungous canvas.







DeviantArt link to this Cortex doodle

Well ... Cortex - although we love him as he is nowadays, the comic-relief - always was awesome at being a serious/slightly scary bad guy, too, back when Clancy Brown voiced him. His evil laughter in Crash 2: Cortex Strikes Back were enough to want to make me hide behind the sofa (and, in general, an evil laugh really makes a great villain). I wanted to try and incorporate that side of Cortex into the drawing.

If you want to see me speed-CGing this, I've provided the YouTube video below:


The lineart was traditionally done and scanned in. I've only just got hold of HyperCam and I'm still all excited over it so I was focussing more on recording what I was doing on the laptop. Below ... you can see the first drawing I recorded with the software.



This Coco sure looks angry. Go see her be angry some more on DA.

The deviation is aptly named, don't you think?

I ... don't think it's a good enough CG for my main DA gallery; I can see numerous mistakes. Still, it's viewable in my DA space and several Crash fans seem to like it, which makes me happy. ^^




I'm posting three times tonight for easier organisation. It might make more sense to have one uber-post, but what can I say, when I'm in the mood I like to organise ... stuff.

May? Yes, you may.

It's Bank Holiday Monday next week, as well as my art exam, so I've got a busy week ahead! The rest of May will be spent revising for the rest of my exams - as well as having a paid part-time job alongside charity volunteering - so I probably won't update a lot this month or in June at all. I'm a little tired even now, so I'll keep this fairly short. Anyhow. *claps hands*





I'm actually pleased with it for the time it took (however, the nose needs a bit more work done to it.)



Second up is this owl, inspired by Ravenari's works, as part of my Animal Forms unit (my exam unit):



I'm also quite pleased with this, although my fingers ached for a while afterwards because of how hard I was pressing down with the pencil crayons. Eep.


Also, before I go - I changed the Quote of the Month for May! Take a look >>>>

Now back to my usual posting - first, let's go with digital.

DA Link: here

Yeah, Brio's got the "O_o" face goin' on. I had to take a reference photo for his hand with my webcam. For the record, no, my hand isn't quite that bony (or as a friend commented, 'Nik-Nak fingers') but photographing it really did help with reference.

I also practised with layers. The lines look a little more 'sketchier' than usual, and that's because I used my scanned lineart for the outlines - I didn't go over it with the tablet. I like the effect; I like it a lot. :)


I saved this while outlining the buildings, as a work-in-progress shot ...


DA Link to final piece: here

I spent around nine hours doing this. Working on a larger canvas doesn't speed up your colouring either, but it was well worth it. Steampunk'd up Tropy needs moar fan-art.

I went for his original Warped design not only because it's nostalgic but because I felt it suited the image I wanted - of a quirky steampunk setting that wouldn't look out of place in a Crash game. *thumbs up*




And finally, a collaboration. The same friend who I mentioned earlier came over yesterday, we produced this wonderful piece of fanart:


Best use of dodge and softglow ~EVER~. ASAHINA MIKURU KAWAII DESU NE


And this song's been stuck in my head all day:


Not real food, do not eat.


I should listen to Lemon Demon more often.

In Which I Subconsciously Tell Light Sources to Go to Hell

Alternative title: "Clannad: It's Actually Very Good". I'll try and keep it spoiler-free, but I'm going to talk about the anime a little as well as present Fuuko:


(NOTE: I've seen Fuuko's hair as light green, dark green, brown and even black. x_x)

Now, I don't have the full version up on DA now. I took it down, saying I'd only keep it for the blog. Special thanks to Affen92 for the sky stock. I didn't even notice the light sources error until a friend pointed it out, and as soon as he did I thought "God, yeah, how could I have not noticed?" (Since then I actually have been keeping an eye on my light sources in my work.)

However, here is Fuuko without the background.


Clannad was originally a PC visual novel (I'm not sure if you can really call them 'games' as all you really do is click through text and make the odd choice here and there) and unlike Key's two other famous works AIR and Kanon, Clannad had no adult content or anything remotely fanservicey. I haven't obtained the visual novel myself, but I've heard very good things about it.

What I have seen though, is the anime; and it's probably made my eyes well up and my throat burn more than any other series I've watched, particularly the Kotomi and Fuuko storylines (I won't spoil them for you by explaining why). At the same time, it really has some humorous moments, particularly with the comic relief character Youhei Sunohara and how Tomoyo Sakagami - ever the cool, austere heroine - kicks his ass repeatedly. Occasionally, Kyou Fujibayashi helps out, too.

The soundtrack is also very good - especially that of Dango Daikazoku/Chiisana Te no Hira (which sticks in your head and pulls at your heartstrings) and the opening theme, Mag Mell. You'll also catch yourself humming the After-Story (basically, Clannad's second series) opening, too.


And the funny thing is, I usually hate the school-days harem-romance-type anime, it's way too overused for my liking. Yet I enjoyed Clannad and even laughed a little and shed a couple (well, several) tears over it. So it must have something good. o_O

Stephen Colbert in 6 Steps

... only towards the end he looked a little less like Colbert and more like Harry Potter (especially with that oversized timer). Ahh well.

But anyhow, I got "I Am America (And So Can You)" for my birthday and found the reference image, and wanted to have a go at drawing it. *shrug*

*falls over*

I'm sorry. I don't feel up to writing about each of these pieces just yet, 'cause my brain's tired out. I've finally finished sitting my mock exams, and they take the energy right out of you (never mind what the real ones do to me, I'm usually outright incoherent afterwards). Just that yes, they were done traditionally but had to be edited digitally slightly because the camera doesn't really bring out the quality. I am very pleased with both pieces, but I wish I either had 1) better photos, or 2) a working scanner.

The Azumanga fanart comes with a drawing video. I can't explain much more than that.





Drawing Tomo Takino





Drawing Ayumu Kasuga 'Osaka'




Drawing Chiyo Mihama

Crash Bandicoot says 'Merry Christmas!'

... or rather, Cortex should be saying that. I did this for the folks over at CrashMania. I think I could have done the colouring on the present-sack a little better (as the radiation logo looks a bit odd rippling without any highly-visible folds in the bag) but I'm definitely pleased with the linework.

(I also did this on a big GIMP canvas then I shrunk it to get a little better quality, so my fingers are hurting a fair bit from the outlining and colouring.)



Enjoy, and if I don't post before January again, happy holidays to one and all.