Vid: Remember the Bobcats

I made this several years ago, and just realized that I never posted it online. It's one of my favorite short films I made, and I'll bet that it only took about an hour and a half total to film and edit. I'm surprised at how funny it turned out, and am pretty impressed with how much faux drama and how many cheesy clichés I could fit in it. I've tried since to make similar short films, but none of them turned out as funny as this one.

Battle Card 2.0: Archangel

This one was pretty fun. I'm basically doing one of each army type, so I chose the Archangel as the one from the Good army. I liked angels a lot when I was a kid, and even had two separate Archangel cards in my deck, along with a pet phoenix. This one combines the abilities of the two. I think this card may have a bit too much yellow on it, but oh well.

Vid: The Trump Card

I haven't posted a less-than-ten-second video for a while. This was just my brother and me looking to see how it would look to flip a card in slow motion. Pretty cool that it ended up landing perfectly aligned in front of the camera.

Graphic Art: Dragonfather

I was searching for drawing inspiration the other day and my thoughts turned to one of my top 5 favorite computer games of all time, Heroes of Might and Magic III. I loved this game as a kid and still consider it one of the most poignant PC game masterpieces ever made (hence it being in my top 5), and a lot of it is the imaginative aspect of the game. The majority of the storylines are given through text-based events, and each creature in a battle represents an army, so a lot is left to the imagination when playing. I have often compared it to a very complicated board game.

Anyway, one thing that I thought of that is also left to the imagination is the heroes themselves. They are only represented by a stock horse sprite, and distinguished by a small portrait. They can equip artifacts and armor, but you never get to see them wearing them. I came up with the idea to take one of the complete armor sets, the Power of the Dragonfather, and see what it would look like as a complete set. The result turned out pretty neat, and was a good practice of figure drawing and lighting.

I very likely will use this as inspiration for more drawings. There are a lot of cool artifact sets on Heroes III, and some of them would be fun to replicate even without putting them on a person. This is also good news in light of my upcoming annual project month in February! More on that later. 

Relic Comic: Adventure of Abel

I'm not sure where I was going with this comic, but I do remember that I had an obsession with monks at the time. For some reason the profession seemed appealing—writing, transcribing, simplicity—so I put myself in a comic about one. Many times, monks in my stories would be the heroes of the stories they were in, as if they were protecting the village without the village even knowing about it. I'm probably digging way too deep into my adolescent mind though. I think I just liked monks because of their robes and Gregorian chants.

Sorry about the size on this browser. Click on the comic for a better zoom. And don't ask me what that monster is... a giant thumb with glow worms coming out of it I guess?

The Misty Snow Cave Cold

This Christmas / New Year vacation I made a snow cave with my brother. I love making snow caves so much, I should make it a tradition. It's so satisfying to hollow out the pile of packed snow, cart out snow boulders on mine-sleds, smooth the walls with hoes, and make niches for candles. It's a very satisfying project—basically real-life Terraria or Minecraft.

Relic Comic: Revenge of Abelhawk

This comic is full of meaning to me. Drawing has always been my way of escape. I doodled in class to help me stay focused; I drew in my free time; and was always excited to find a new form of drawing or coloring, be it colored pencils, Photoshop, or markers. This drawing shows another way I used drawing—to relieve stress:

As the comic states, this was based on actual circumstances. There was a guy in my physics class in 9th grade who used to bug me and make fun of me a lot, mainly because I was shy and wouldn't defend myself (and of course, everyone in class loved him for his jokes). All I could do was ignore him in real life, but I was able to retreat to my drawing desk and draw a fictionalized version of a stronger, bolder me handling the situation in an epic (and admittedly excessively violent) way. I was also on the yearbook staff at the time, which explains me taking a picture at the end and putting it in the yearbook. A little Easter egg is the heart symbols on the caption of the photo above the beaten-up kid—I think that picture was implied to be a picture of me making out with my crush at the time. Classic junior high mind.