Synthashredder

Crashed this out in about an hour.  I call him Sythashredder.  He's a deadly combination of keyboard musician and cyberpunk warrior, and travels the undercity searching for dive bars with the proper auras to play his groovy tunes.

That's all for now, folks.

Heroes of A Thousand-plus Faces

You know what happens when you let old, dear characters you made up years ago stay around for years?  You get too many ideas for them, too many to fit in one story, maybe (probably) too many to fit in all of the stories you could ever write.  Too many sides to their personalities, too many possibilities, too many storylines, too many character developments, too many endings...you get the idea.

These four are some of my most dear, and most troublesome characters, with all of the issues mentioned above.  From top to bottom: Victor, who has been a jet/starfighter pilot, villain, military-pal-in-reserve-or-on-leave, and general amusing chinstrap-wearin'-party-animal.  Xavier, who has been a trucker, an adventurer, also a starfighter pilot, a bush pilot, and nominated Most Likely to be Main Character Someday.  Reyna, the leading lady, close friend/sidekick/romantic interest for Xavier, sometimes a waitress, sometimes an adventurer, and sometimes a starfighter and mech-suit pilot.  And Jasmine, Reyna's younger sister, who was the jack-of-all-trades support character, cute freckled redhead, and once was an evil overlord (overqueen?) commanding a space dreadnought.  And now I'm considering merging her with another character (a vaguely defined commando or cop) to make a totally new Jasmine.

Long story short, I have my beloved, dorky-teenage-years characters still hanging around, and if they want a story I've got to decide what to keep and what to prune.  On the bright side, whatever gets taken off can potentially be used for other characters...and the cycle will begin once again...

Super Gouache Nebula

Take 2 on the orange-blue nebula idea, and I am pleased with the results.  Instead of towers that look like Dr. Seuss-themed gummy snacks, the pinpoint glow effects and stars are sharper, the streams of gas and dust are more defined, and the contrast is much greater.

Gouache is a step in the right direction.  For a truly proper rendering of a nebula, I believe acrylic on a large canvas would be the most appropriate method I have on hand.  Oils would be the best method, except I don't have any oils and have zero experience with them.  I appreciate the masterpieces done by other painters, but I myself am sadly impatient, and so use faster-drying mediums.

For comparison, here's the watercolor nebula painting.  I discovered that my reference photo was of the Orion Nebula, and that the blue "tracer bullets" are globs of nebula material shooting through space.  They are described in detail here.

(The gouache painting was scanned with my new scanner, the Canon P-208II.  It's a tiny portable scanner, it got the colors almost exactly right, it can scan up to 600dpi, and the only downside so far is it can't scan anything wider than 8.5 inches.)

Scythe Aesthetics

So this guy happened to my old scanner, which is now dead and gone.  The new one should be arriving any day now.

Death, as "the Reaper", gets a lot of variation in treatment in artwork.  The angle I find most compelling I would describe as realistic, solemn, and with careful elements of high fantasy added here and there.  Realistic and solemn I choose because Death is kind of a Big Deal.  He's the end of the road, the gatekeeper to the next world, the law no one escapes.  He should have an air of gravitas, solemn and grave (pun not intended, I swear), because of his position and responsibility.

Elements of high fantasy I choose because that's me, I enjoy coming up with fantastical things.  I specify "elements" because one of my pet peeves is a cartoony Death with a cartoony, overly ornamented scythe.  It's not the ornamentation I take issue with, though, it is the degree to which is it applied.  I would depict Death's scythe with a degree of decoration similar to a sword, or a wine goblet: it's polished enough or has just enough gems to show you're a person of importance, a knight, a noble, whomever, yet that polish or those gems won't get in the way of the sword or the goblet fulfilling its intended function.

Death I imagine as someone who wears the uniform (or robe) and tools and accessories of his position, and leaves it at that.  He wears them.  They are just ostentatious enough to show he is Death, the Reaper, and that is all.  He doesn't flaunt them or show them off, he goes about his duty and that is that.

A last note...if you take Death's scythe literally, as a farmer's scythe, it would be curved out to one side to fit around the farmer's body, an element which I incorporated it into the picture here.