Sunday Art-Week Review 4...

Ahh... This week is a bit better than last week. Not quite up to a 100% yet, but I´m definetly breaking the funk.

Still I haven´t got too much to show for it. I´ve tried to do work on Confusia, Bomtur, and Mörkanger this week, but it´s just been slow and full og CTRL-Z, again and again. I did get some good hours in though, but nothing to show yet.

And I did manage to do my weekly autobiographical lie, and even though it went slow and I´m not that pleased with the finished art, people seemed to enjoy it.

It´s just called "Training", and is pretty much self-explanatory.

Then I got invited to write for a new norwegian gaming-blog with some really cool people at tokyo.no, and did a review of the fantastic World of Goo. I really need to write more pure text, and start to get a portfolio of things so I can perhaps get some paid work. Illustration and comics alone seem too hard emotionally. Writing is something I can do that doesn´t drain me quite as much. Yet, at least. Oh, well.

Anyhow... for the review I did a tiny review-score. Mostly as a joke because I don´t like review-scores and because I needed small silly things to draw to get me out of the funk.


I like it.

And also, to get out of the funk and mostly just to be a nice guy, I committed to drawing a birthday invitation for a friends 30th birthday. It´s almost done, but it would be rude to show it here before showing it to her.

And lastly... The biggest and most helpfull thing to get out of the funk(I´ve been sayiing "the funk" too much, sorry)...

... After the World of Goo review was done I was thinking about other games to review. Having just a mac, and not any Windows installed, the options are limitted. I know I´m gonna do Fallout 1 and 2 some time, but after that... What to do?

I´ve become more and more old-school in my game tastes, and have a growing fascination for the indie-scene. So while searching for indie-games playable on the Mac, I rediscovered The Battle for Wesnoth. It´s a pretty marvelous open-source project, trying to create a vast, cohessive, and very modable strategy game in the style of Fire Emblem and Advance Wars. So very old-school, utterly playable, and very addictive. In addition to being very strict, minimalistic, and balanced gameplay-wise, it´s got some excellent feautures that most retail games don´t even dream of, including direct downloading of add-ons from in-game menus, the best autosavesystem in a long while, and an excellent level-editor.

Oh... where was I?

Yes!

Art!

Of the week!

So... while browsing the Wesnoth forums I came across a great tutorial for doing portrait art for the game. Being really inspired it, and seeing some photoshop-techniques and tools I simply haven´t used before(I´m slow), I decided to have a go, and did a dwarven portrait.

At first it was a bit... meh.... But with great help from the awesome people at the Wesnoth-forum it quickly turned better.

And now it´s gonna get in the game as an alternative for the Dwarven fighter art, or something. So that´s fantastic! Having art in a game is a dream come true, and open-source games are like commercial games except cooler since your don´t have to suck on Satans cock.

I´m gonna try to continue doing art for Wesnoth, because it´s a fantastic project, and I really, really need to have a side-project that´s purely art, to keep me on my toes. And with Wesnoth the art is very much up my alley, the community seems great at feedback and I can learn a lot, and it´s altogether very much inspirational.

So hopefully next week, in addition to updates om my comics and other work, there will be some more dwarves! Yay!