Hey, starting a new comic up, called Birdoh, about some birds.

I’m hoping to be updating it at least 3 times a week, but, we’ll see how that goes.  You can see subsequent updates on Birdoh.com, which right now is a barren wasteland of nothingness.

Did this drawing a few weeks ago, just never got around to posting it.  Girls in panties is becoming a trend with me, it seems.

I don’t have any really exceptional commentary for this piece.  It came together pretty quickly on a Thursday evening, as I came to the conclusion that drawing > sleeping on a work night.  It was the result of wanting to draw but having no real ideas in my head.

So, I fell back on my old standby of “the ladies” (as I oft-times like to call them, typically while sporting a half-cocked smile and the first few buttons of my polo shirt unfastened, revealing a small tuft of billowing chest hair).  I imagine this girl as being an exceptionally sleek female assassin, tasked with infiltrating an American Apparel shoot and taking out an unsuspecting Dov Charney, perhaps distracted during a moment of public self-pleasure.

This week saw the return of comedian Louis C.K.’s awesome, awesome….awesome comedrama short film anthologicom Louis for its 2nd season, and I was inspired to do this surprisingly speedy drawing of his signature crimson-coiffed countenance.  Alliteration-Ho!!!

Anytime I read reviews of Louis, the critics always go out of their way to mention that Louis C.K. is “certainly no actor”, but that’s a large part of what makes the show so great.  The sheer darkness of so much of the it’s subject matter would be overwhelming were it not for Louis’ tendency to always seem utterly baffled by the world around him.  He manages to evoke a sense of innocence, alienation and cynicism all at the same time, which is pretty remarkable.  A “real” actor trying to “feel the moment” would oversell most of the material, and would transform the show into something just crushingly sad.

Plus, the first few minutes of this week’s episode is probably the funniest thing I’ve seen on TV all year.

I finished up inFamous 2 this past week, and figured I would post some thoughts, a review-esque retrospective.  Think of it as a supplement to more detail-oriented “traditional” reviews.

Simply put, I really love this series, which I think puts me in something of the minority.  Developer Sucker Punch’s two forays into this world have both been met with complimentary, perfunctory 8/10 review scores and the polite golf clapping of the gaming establishment, but people don’t really seem excited about these games.  And I think that’s a shame, because what’s being done with this series, though written off as solely iterative, is ambitious and progressive in it’s own unique, understated, unsexy way.

Though their first big splash was with 2002′s Sly Cooper on the PS2, I’m firmly of the belief that Sucker Punch are a band of early 90s 16-bit developers who, during a freak accident stemming from a massive “Blast Processing” explosion, were frozen in time for close to a decade, only to awaken in the late 90s to a brave new world of polygons and disc-based media.  Though their new games parade around in a shell modernity (sometimes awkwardly and unconvincingly), their hearts beat with the chiptune thump of antiquity.

As a result, I don’t think there’s any other big-budget “Triple A” developer working today, East or West, PC or console, “casual” or “hardcore” more madly, passionately in love with the thrill of movement in a digital world.  The original inFamous suffered in the eyes of many because of it’s perhaps too-narrow focus on mechanics, the joys of dashing through a world with a freedom and fluidity of motion unequaled by anything else out there, and the simple, seamless jump between platforming and 3rd person shooting, doing both with substance and remarkable grace.  Granted, the enemies lacked variety, the morality system felt largely inconsequential, the framerate was oftentimes terrible, and the open world didn’t even begin to approach the depth of possibility found in other modern sandbox games, but my god, it FELT amazing.

inFamous was that rarest of modern games for me, in that it managed to tap into what I used to love about gaming as a medium without feeling like a “throwback” or a cynical stab at “retro gaming”.  It just felt right.  Protagonist Cole McGrath had that perfect balance between feeling weighty, like he took up genuine physical space within the game world and had real heft, and feeling light enough to quickly scamper up the sides of buildings, or go leaping off of a roof and hovering 10 stories down to land with balletic grace onto a narrow streetlight, only to unleash a hellstorm of lightning bolts on the thugs skulking about on the street below.  It’s what I’ve always loved about action-platformers, that mix of delicate traversal followed by big, bellowing waves of offense.

That mix gets pushed to even more delirious extremes in inFamous 2, but it takes time.  Roughly the first half of the game feels painfully similar to the original, and while it’s still enjoyable for what it is, the game’s adoption of a prettier, more technologically stable yet more predictable art style, the increased focus on narrative and the misguided attempts at God of War-style “cinematic action”, by way of Cole’s new hand-to-hand Amp weapon, make it feel like a unique franchise sanded down to awkwardly fit the role of homogenous blockbuster.

But right around the halfway point, you get to make a choice between two new paths of fire or ice-based elemental powers, both of which offer some radically new movement options.  A new group of enemies is also unleashed upon the world, who are blessed with acrobatic mobility at least equivalent to your own, and a new stretch of the city is opened up that’s drastically different from the vertical, concrete grid-based cityscapes you’ve become accustomed to traversing.  At this point, at least for me, the game magically transformed from being dry and overly familiar to some of the most mechanically engrossing stuff I’ve ever experienced in a video game.  Movement becomes bigger, faster and more dynamic, and combat explodes into near-anarchy, as you wind up in massive rumbles between the three distinct enemy factions, with your amplified powers capable of unleashing near-biblical levels of decimation upon the battlefield.  I can’t remember the last game that made giggle like a schoolgirl more or more frequently than this.

I can’t say that everybody would enjoy this game to the degree that I did, but this isn’t a buyer’s guide, just some personal thoughts.  I oftentimes feel estranged from modern gaming, not out of any sense of elitist disgust, but simply because it seems as though the sorts of games I did and still do love have fallen out of fashion.  I don’t blame a new generation for having their own unique wants and needs from the medium, but when even people my age or older are losing their shit over games like Bioshock or Red Dead Redemption, stuff that I appreciate in principle but feel no great emotion towards, I wonder where I fell off the wagon of critical consensus.  I’ve always desired for games to advance as an artform, but as I age, I become less patient with games that so desperately want to be “meaningful” or “adult” or “cinematic” and find less intellectually lofty, more mechanically daring stuff like inFamous 2 to be a far more compelling vision of the future.

Also, in regards to the drawing, I’ve always considered inFamous to be the greatest Spider-Man game ever created, so it only seemed appropriate.

So, I wasn’t sure I should ever even publish this picture, but I need a palette cleanse after that last piece, to start the week fresh.

I did this a few months back, and it was really the genesis of my attempts to adopt a looser, more personally enjoyable approach to drawing (documented in painful detail in my last post), which is why it’s such a scrappy mess.

I like it though, way more than a lot of more technically accomplished pieces.  On a technical note, however, this is (sadly) one of the first pieces I’ve done where I focused on making it work when mirrored.  It still looks better as presented, with the subject looking left, but it more or less works when flipped horizontally.  It was interesting how effective flipping the orientation back and forth was in helping me figure out why certain things just looked “off”.

I like the eyes on this piece, more than anything.  There’s nothing terribly complicated about them, but I feel like they convey a certain sense of warmth that I really enjoy.  That’s what I like the best about drawing, being able to scratch together a bunch of fundamentally meaningless marks that, when you get lucky, have the ability to convey something unexpectedly vulnerable and human.  Her eyes make me happy.

Ugh, this drawing was a pain in the ass.

I mean, I think I like it, but the time I’ve spent this past week working on it has been…obnoxious, to put it lightly.

Over the last few months, I’ve begun to use an approach to line making in Photoshop that’s as much sculpting as it is drawing.  I used to have at least 3 main layers to any piece in PS, with an initial quick sketch, a 2nd more detailed drawing, working out most of the specifics of the size and shape of things, and a final “clean” layer that kept the structure of the 2nd layer but focused more on line weight and adding in the little details.  This sort of worked, except for the fact that my final layer always felt flat.  There were always shapes or lines, or a certain intangible energy to my faster, more spontaneous sketches that was lost once I set about making things smooth and “presentable”.  Plus, it had a tendency to bring out all of my worst OCD line making tics, redrawing lines to a compulsive degree in search of a “perfect” weight or shape that was never quite attainable.  Needless to say, this approach resulted in my hard drive becoming a mass grave of unfinished pieces, cast into the pit out of frustration, their rotting scraps a persistent reminder of defeat.

I knew there was no way I would ever be able to draw again, or take any pleasure whatsoever in doing so, if I just kept hammering away with this process.  So, the approach I’ve been using of late has been built around one layer.  The drawing you see is built from the very first lines I sketched out, trying to keep some of the beginning inertia but balancing it with a “finished” degree of polish and attention to detail.  In thinking about how to best utilize a piece of digital media like Photoshop, it struck me that perhaps the most radically different trait versus traditional physical media is that removing is as absolute as adding, and at that point everything began to fall into place.  Instead of focusing on getting a line “just right”, I just draw, then take away, then add some back, then take some more away if need be, slowly sculpting lines out of sketches.  My lines changed from representing a single stroke to being the final product of dozens of small revisions, freeing me from the spectre of “perfection” and also giving my marks an individuality that they never before had.

This drawing, though, existed in something of a middleground between the two approaches.  It’s still a one layer piece (for the lines; the color is obviously on separate layers underneath), but I just spazzed out on some of my linework.  Some people, due to being less anal, less concerned with detail, simply more talented or a combination thereof, are better able to just “step away” and let a piece breathe, but I still have that propensity to keep hammering away at my lines until they reach some arbitrarily self-defined degree of “rightness”, which they obviously never quite do.  The whole process is maddening, and there were more than a few times where the idea of sitting down to work on this piece felt torturous.  I won’t even go into the two night odyssey I endured trying to get the hands looking right, or how genuinely depressed I was because I couldn’t get the claws on my cartoon dragon guy to look the way that cartoon dragon claws are just supposed to look, goddammit!  I think that my greatest failing as an artist is that my insane, obsessive, self-hatred-driven work process never really comes through in the final product, even though it’s so much more authentically “me” than the cartoon dragon guy with the (still sort of fucked-up looking) claws.

Anyways, this has devolved into navel-gazing idiocy, and my non-existent audience doesn’t not come to my art blog to hear me whine about Photoshop, they “not come” for the art!

Draco Lord Pedant, in fact, based off of a sketch I did sometime last year that I liked but could just never get looking quite right.  I guess I like this piece, and think it’s more or less pretty cool.  I’m not ashamed of it or anything, so that’s something.

On the whole, it seemed like a very sedated show.  Even just 5 or 6 years ago, there was a real, palpable sense of excitement post-E3 that propelled the industry forward through the long, barren summer months ahead.  Sure, you may have to suffer through both unbearable heat and cynically produced licensed dreck, seeping from the glistening fat folds of the bloated Hollywood industrial complex, but fall promised a cleansing bounty of “gamer’s games”, appointment games.

But nowadays, and this year in particular,  E3 suffers from an amazing dearth of surprise and excitement.  There are plenty of causes: an expansive gaming media/blogosphere/Twittersphere that almost completely negate the possibility of “surprise announcements”, a significant shift in recent years away from publishers dog-piling everything worth playing into the 3 month span between late August and Black Friday in November, with big budget “Triple A” games from name brand developers popping up at every time of the year, and perhaps most importantly, a shift for the big 3 console manufacturers away from “gamer’s games”, with their big conferences focusing as much if not more on stuff with broad appeal (motion games, peripherals) and more general non-gaming content updates (media streaming, social networking, etc.).

To put it more succinctly, gaming has become big business, where every financial quarter matters, and E3 reflects this, moving away from being a direct appeal to the enthusiasts and becoming more a general status report for stockholders and mainstream media.  It’s understandable, and even reasonable, but it becomes an issue when gamers still imbue the event with the gravitas of being THE gaming culture event of the year, something meant to excite and inspire us instead of simply telling us “Things are going A-OK!”.

Gaming is changing.  Expanding, growing, branching out from a centralized, easily-definable base, and that’s ultimately a good thing.  It’s time that our perception of E3 changes along with it.

Nothing highlights this better than the rather tepid response to Nintendo’s new “Wii U” console, though ironically enough, even the business world seems turned off by the reveal. Everybody knew it was coming, as pretty much all of the significant details of the system (HD output, tablet-like controller, coming in 2012) were leaked months ago, and Nintendo failed to add any truly compelling twist to the formula, falling back on their odd, decade long fascination with dual-screen gaming (started back in 2002 with Gamecube/GBA connectivity, executed more successfully with the DS, but never really standing out as a necessary feature in and of itself).  An E3 console reveal is supposed to be a “BIG FUCKING DEAL”, caps intended, but this year it felt more perfunctory than revolutionary.

Even Sony fleshing out the details of it’s new Vita handheld failed to get temperatures rising, it seems.  It comes across as PSP2: unfathomably sexy hardware, again promising “console gaming on a handheld”, but failing to realize that “console gaming on a handheld” is a lot like cost cutting social services to lower the deficit: people like the idea but recoil when presented with the realities of it.  With the rise of smartphones and the iOS and Android platforms over the last 5 years, the very idea of a dedicated gaming handheld, having to pay $30+ for games and carrying around physical media to play them, seems sort of quaint.  Plus, sexy hardware today is going to have trouble keeping up with the exponential processing power growth of the smartphone market.  It’s feasible, and likely, that iPhones 2 or 3 years from now will make the Vita look like a Gamegear, and still sell for less money when bundled with a wireless service contract.

But enough rambling.  I need to rest up for marathon sessions this weekend of Acclaim’s awesome new Mister Popper’s Penguins game, followed up by a playthrough of Midway’s treatment of Bad Teacher.

Earthbound is one of my favorite games of all time.  It’s a game that was never mechanically or visually on the bleeding edge of innovation, even back in 1995 when it was first released stateside, but my god was it a memorable experience.  Set in a contemporary world (a rarity even nowadays, where high fantasy, sci-fi and various genres that include the word “punk” still have a strangle grip on digital roleplaying), with a sensibility that giddily stumbled between humorous, sincerely weird and weirdly sincere, it was “quirky” before “quirky” became the adjective used to describe every game not about gun fetishism.

Plus, the enemies were all awesome, which is what inspired me to do this piece cramming together a horde of it’s assorted ne’er-do-wells and nogoodniks.  It’s a game that I’ve always strongly associated with summertime, so it’s only appropriate that I slap it online to celebrate the season.

Lately, I’ve been on something of an Odd Future kick.  I won’t waste my time writing yet another analysis of the group’s “unsettling content”, other than to say that OFWGKTA is black comedy, with a liberal dose of self-hatred and pathos mixed in for good measure.  I fully understand why some people take issue with them, but if you have a dark sense of humor and an appreciation for good hip-hop music, it’s some of the most compelling stuff to come around in forever.

Anyways, group leader Tyler, the Creator released the (NSFW) video to his new single “She” last Friday, and I was inspired to do this drawing of Ace in all of his stalkerific glory.  I drew an initial sketch Friday night and finished things up a few minutes back, so figured I would just throw it out there and be done with it all, so I can move on to the next thing without laboring over this piece.  This is probably the quickest completion-to-publishing time I’ve ever had on a drawing, and it’s sort of nice.

So I, like most sad, lonely, heterosexual visual artists, enjoy pretty girls.  If I’m sitting down to draw without any particular goal in mind, 9/10 times I’ll end up scribbling down the female form.

This is one of those random drawings, done a few weeks back.  It turned out a lot nicer than I ever expected, and it uses colors that are far more vibrant than I’m accustomed to.  I genuinely like it, which is saying something.

Also, to echo the subject line, pic is sort of NSFW.  No nudity, but bare back and underwear-addled posterior.  The height of perversion.