Sunday, December 30, 2012

To Jennadelle

When I first joined deviantART, one of my favorite DA artists was Jennadelle. She had distinguished style and used certain design motifs commonly enough that these features belonged to the "Jennadelle" look for her many fans. Whether these aspects of her artwork meant something deeper than their appearance is relatively unknown to me. However, she did seem to have a broad idea churning in her head, something grandiose and mysterious.

Then she just up and vanished. Left deviantART, the internet in general, and stopped most communications, save for her closest friends. I was merely a preteen onlooker at this point so I never heard from her since that moment.

Every now and then I reminisce over old artists who got me through the years. My life as a teenager was rocky at best, and artists like Jennadelle filled my head with fantastical imagery and escape. I have no way to thank her, so this is a drawing inspired by the memories she provided. Thank you, Jennadelle.


Click image to zoom in.

-Kez

Friday, December 28, 2012

If brushes were knives

Gosh I don't know.



Feel free to download and mess with these brushes.

::: http://speedy.sh/XUnSs/Kezrekian-brush01-misc.abr

-Kez

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Scarred hand

Moar scars.


Index finger: caught in an exercise bike's bladed metal fan as an infant
Arm: contact reaction with an unknown coral. scar is only visible when arm is pumped with blood, showing an array of light dots.

-Kez

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Scars

Didn't know what to draw, so I ended up drawing myself - and my scars.


Top: hit by a rock
2: unknown - resides at the back of my retina
3: bit tongue in car crash
4: diseased lymph node tissue surgically removed

-Kez

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Brush frenzy

Whenever I download new brushes into Photoshop, I like to test them out with quick scribbles, deconstruct them, and combine them with existing brushes. The drawings are quick and the subject matter never.. well, matters, but sometimes after dropping color in some places it'll start looking like something.

So enjoy a bunch of thumbnails that range between sense and nonsense.


On rare occasion, a composition erupts that is particularly interesting. Like this cat.


Fun times.
-Kez

Monday, November 19, 2012

- Hidden


A game idea that's been brooding in my mind for a while.
-Kez

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

The Temple of Aetallas - stepsetera























Fun times!

Edit: Made a tutorial on this gifmaking, to the extent of my slim little knowledge.


-Kez

Monday, November 5, 2012

The end dreams

I often dream, not only in color, but in sound, characters, plots, and designs. Strange things I've never seen or imagined before seem to find their way into my head at night, and last night's second dream was exceptionally 'explosive.'

---
First dream
-
Myself and a friend were in an abandoned series of concrete houses, right next to a hidden beach. The evening was closing in on us, but we resumed our stroll along the exposed pipework and unfinished foundations, beneath the skeleton and plastic roofing over our heads. I look to my right, down the beach, into rustling foliage. A Utahraptor lightly walks out, in our direction.

Startled, we rush to higher ground. It hears our exasperation and follows us up into the open-faced rooms and floors, getting angrier and angrier. I try to distract it with an illusory raptor made from a forgotten stuffed animal. It tears through the toy and roars at us. My friend is gone. I face the raptor head to head, separated only by some barred wall. It hisses at me and charges. I duck underneath to the floor below. Now that I'm out of sight, I try to trick the raptor into following my scent to a wrong direction. It shrieks and roars in frustration. I can hear it getting nearer and nearer. My only escape is outside the building complex.

With that in mind I hurry to a staircase, to find that it's blocked off by debris. I look up at a window in this corridor and the raptor tears at the door behind me. I thrust the window open and

we're five stories up. It's nightfall, blue and swirling grey all around me. I step onto the ledge and shut the window behind me. Clinging to the building, I inch my way to various windows. All locked or broken.. But finally I come across one window that is not locked. Its glass is frosted and dirty, hiding whatever lies inside. I yank the window open and fall inside.

This room is quiet. Toys are strewn about. There are soft, night-darkened colors, a crib in the corner. It's a nursery. I realize I'm in the home of someone who is living here. Sneaking past the napping baby, I tiptoe across the room and exit.

In the hallway. I hear the parents talking. There's a light from the kitchen - there are two ways leading to the front door, thank goodness. The father however moves into my field of view. I crouch into a dark corner. He walks right up and past me, into the nursery. I make haste towards the exit and finally breathe a sigh of relief when I'm out, back into the veil of night. The distant raptor roars an echoing cry.

---
Second dream
-
We were all in a completely silver and grey room set up like a rectangular auditorium, with a giant hallway leading up to it. I've no place to sit. The whole school was there it seems - but there were only about 50 or so in our school - where did all these other kids come from? I sit down in the far left aisle, gazing down into the open hallway, with no doors, no windows, no idea where the fluorescent lights are coming from.

From the hallway, more students and people show up. We're being crammed into this room. There are a few people who look different... dangerous. They seem to be modern-day witches and wizards, dressed in military uniform, threatening us with their wands that oddly resemble swords or guns. Their leader then ushers us out into the hall again. We're being transported somewhere? As we exit the rectangular room, our hands are bound behind us.

As I pass the line of enemies across the hallway from our march, their leader tells us that it's time for us to meet our fate rather than run from it. We deserve our end. My face goes pale. The walls are all, still, windowless and grey. The hallway weaves right and left and straight, in unfamiliar ways, taking us to

the deck of the ship. We are on an enormous, absolutely colossal ship, out at sea. It looks like a storm is beginning in the far distance, but it... it resembles an eminently expanding atomic explosion. The sun is setting to my left, far up the line. There is a bridge that starts from the top of the line and goes back around the ship to where we can not see it. Our forced march takes us into a room in groups. We are shut inside for a while. I find myself in this dark, fluorescent lit room with women dressed as badass pirates, but they are all scared and hopeless. I ask them what's happening. They don't respond. One woman looks me in the eye and shakes her head.

The door opens, revealing the bridge that spans over the irritated ocean. Our enemies are waiting outside, urging us forward. After a moment of pause, I take the first step, look out to the pirates, and they follow. We walk along the bridge, eyeing everyone we have known  back on the ship.

The bridge takes us back around the ship, to an island with a few tall mountains and a small village nestled between them at the water. The ship leaves right after we reach ground. I turn to face our new setting. It's so quaint and cozy... what could possibly be happening?

Some little girls walk up to us and start undoing the binding around our hands. One little girl has a red wagon with a sunhat, a rabbit doll, a fake pie, and a crayon drawing on paper. They ask us to play with them, only to scatter when they see more enemies in uniform approaching. Seeing this too, we fake our bindings and put our hands back behind us. Their leader is a witch in military garb- dark green fabric with bronze trim, crazy black hair, a hat, and a scowl on her face. She directs us to one of the village huts, up a flight of steep stairs. It's sunset - red and warm outside.

Inside the hut, however, was a strange thing. There's a round table, some bottles, chairs filled with our foes, typical house objects... but one of the walls opened up into a completely new area. A swampy beach at night. Riddled with arms and hands... severed arms and hands. I ask the witch to explain to us what's going on.

She grins at us. 'The end is nearing and we can't let you escape.'

One of the pirates gets angry and thrusts her fist at the enemies, "You won't live to see our end, you filthy rotten scum!'

The witch notices her unbound hands and bares her teeth. 'We'll start by taking your arms!'

We bolt back outside past the guards and careen down the stairs. We cross the beach to the other side of the valley and look back to see our enemies running towards us, down their end of the valley, when suddenly

the sky before us explodes. It slowly lights up, crackles, smokes, erupts, BREAKS itself open. I clutch the little girl with the red wagon as she screams.

The entire world shakes and heaves, shivers beneath us, and the sky grows brighter and brighter. I look back up into the sky just in time to see a dark but colorful avalanche cloud of smokey liquid pour over the mountains around us and careen towards the ground. The colors turn into rain.

This is the most unique sensation I've ever felt in a dream. The colors formed uncountable patterns, every color of every spectrum. Plaid, polka-dots, spots, stripes, triangles, circles, geometric twists, swirls, grids, hexagons, squares, brick patterns, textures, graphics and shades, mostly white backgrounds, it all poured - poured, like completely coated - the entire world. Everything was distorted. My hands looked like inter-dimensional ever-changing spacial shifts, my fingers morphing from pointed to square to nonexistent to blending with the mountain, also covered in this mind-boggling burst of time and space. For this split second everything was not. Just not. I wanted to scream. I heard everyone around me screaming and cussing death and mortality. I wanted to... but I felt my fingers.

My fingers looked like an uncontrollable circus of pulsating particles, but they felt the same as always. As instantly as I realized this, not only was my mind washed with clarity, but the entire universe was, too. The rain slowly turned into real rain. It strung and poured all across existence. The colors and insanity vanished as soon as they had appeared. Everything was normal. And bright. The sun was rising a crisp new day behind me. The island was lush and everyone rejoiced. The enemies were gone.

---
end

Monday, October 29, 2012

Fakemon - Style Matching

Amanda and I are in the middle of creating a Fakedex as an homage to Pokemon. Some of our designs are from old ideas we had long ago, while others are new. There are two Fakemon I'd like to showcase who went on a journey from a terrible design style to a good one.

To prevent scalding your eyes with shitty webcam pictures, I loosely sketched over the older sketches. I did not change the quality of the drawings themselves.

Meet the obsolete 'Staruff' and 'Runuff:'



Every Pokemon game needs a basic animal you can catch at the beginning to ease you into the game. Normal types are traditionally simplistic in nature and design, so I tried my hand at making a dog Fakemon.

If you look very closely and squint your eyes, you can see the molecular structure of Drawsucksium. These were made years and years ago. But after rummaging through my old crap and seeing these guys again, I wanted to readdress them.

As you can see, there was a lot to fix. The written number 2 and 21 don't make any sense to naturally occur, and they just look like any old dog sans Pokemon's Sugimori style. However, there were features I wanted to keep in mind. The muzzle, and some indicator that this is a racing dog. These early doodles attempted to accomplish such a motif with the race numbers on each dog's side, but that needed to change.

Onto the more recent redesign:



The name change was a no-brainer. Staruff and Runuff sound stupid. Tritrot sounds playful, and Quinderby sounds not only more developed but more competitive.

With these sketches, not much has changed stylistically yet. But design wise, Tritrot gained a little bandana and three dice-oriented dots on his side rather than a number 2. Quinderby has longer, thinner legs, an extended muzzle feature, five dice-oriented dots, and a medal.

These two were meant to embody playfulness, loyalty, and athleticism. They didn't embody zilch yet, still looking like dogs with stuff on them. There was a severe lack of 'Pokemon' look to them that was carefully assessed as I drew the final design.

Here are the initial sketches for the final design:


Not only are the poses profoundly better, but I finally kicked into my senses and took proportion and Pokemon design style into consideration. Tritrot was made before Quinderby, and even between these two under-sketches, I think I made progress with the Sugimori mindset.

Both needed bigger heads and anatomical style choices. A big thanks to Amanda for suggesting the flag motif, and helping to change Tritrot's ear design. I added a little marking to Tritrot's cheek resembling the eye black used in sports to push his athletic energy. For Quinderby I made sure to cross his eye with the muzzle marking, and meshed it with his nose as well. Pokemon tend to do this; parts of them sometimes match up with one another for the sake of their pixel art. It's easier to indicate structural features when there is less information to cram into a small pixel space.

Also. At first, Quinderby didn't have flag-shaped ears. They started out looking like Gelert ears:


After much deliberation, Amanda spontaneously asked 'What if the ears were flags too?' So they changed, and looked 10x better instantly.

The final line art is the most telling:


 Even between the under-sketches and their final line art, fixes were made. Amanda helped with Tritrot's eye design, and his head also grew in size. Quinderby got some boot-marks and a couple more tufts.

The line art itself is made with the basic 3 to 4 point Photoshop brush with 70% hardness and 25% spacing, with size-to-pen-pressure on, but no opacity pressure. After it was finished, I duplicated the layer 2 or 3 times to strengthen the lines and make it easier to color them in.

After all this, I've learned much about style-matching. Here's a little guide for you. It's rudimentary but it's what I learned.


It seems the best thing to keep in mind is that Pokemon are - first and foremost - made for the games. Imagine scaling down your Fakemon designs and having to pixelate them. Will they hold true to their more specific, drawn-out designs? Will a gamer be able to emulate your drawing if they only saw the pixel sprite? Obviously, since the newer games have higher resolution, more details are permitted (one possible reason why their designs are getting more complex with each generation).

I have a long way to go and much more to learn but this has been an informative step. I hope you got something from this little journey. Here are the results:



Thank you for reading,
-Kez

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Tentacarnivore revisited

A lot of people have been looking at this old thing recently:



But it's outdated, so I redrew him. Slight design changes. Enjoy.



I had too much fun exaggerating his pose and anatomy. Drawing claws and highlights is surprisingly therapeutic and, strangely, rewarding. It's like a present you unwrap by drawing it.

There are already things I want to change/edit on this guy. Stay tuned.

-Kez

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

First cold rains












Here are some photographs taken after the first cold rains of the season. I haven't been in weather like this for a long time.
-Kez

Monday, October 15, 2012

Webcamportraitfest

Amanda and Erica and myself!
-Kez

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Reflecting on freedom


Haven't been able to breathe like this in a while. A quick 30 minute doodle, nothing in particular.
-Kez

Saturday, September 8, 2012

The Velvet Forest


Inspired by this image:


to draw this:



"Even the rain is inviting. Warm coziness everywhere, even amongst dirt and vines, I feel myself being pulled into the Velvet Forest, deeper and deeper. I'm afraid I am already lost. I did leave red flags behind me, so that I may find my way back... but a mystifying, calm cluelessness washes over me whenever I've seen one again. I look at it and it means nothing to me. My soul is numb."

---

If I can't sleep, I may as well do something.

Very often do daydreams pull me through forests and rivers, oceans and skies, mountains and deserts. A deep desire to stretch beyond the horizon drives me forward - even into danger. Someday, I hope to create a game where a player can venture into and become lost in a world so like - but unlike - their own. I want to capture the feelings of oddly placed nostalgia, curiosity, and courage. Perhaps someday I will.

-Kez

Monday, August 20, 2012

Friday, July 6, 2012

Wip: tri-jaw monster


Just a sneak peek for now. I'll be making this into a tutorial, so stay tuned.
-Kez

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Birthday party!

Drawing and chilling with Erica and Amanda!


This character might look pissed but I'm happy to be drawing her!

Not sure what to do for my birthday besides this perfection. :D
-Kez

Monday, June 25, 2012

i don't know what i am doing

Delirious
Aerodactyl

Breloom

Kabutops

Nidorino

Persian

Rhydon

and also??

I want my foot to heal sooner - tired of taking painkillers
-Kez