I took a break from practicing faces today to try out some origami butterflies. I used a variety of colourful papers, including magazine photos and wrapping paper. There is a small amount of cutting involved to round the edges of the wings before the final folds are made, so technically, this is kirigami!
The origami box under the butterflies is a traditional Masu box, and is really quite simple to create in any size. I used an unbleached craft paper for this, which has some lovely flecks of raw fibre embedded in it.

It's been a rough couple of days, as I've been fighting a memory corruption problem in the engine. Because we are developing for multiple computers systems, problems sometimes do not become apparent until I switch from working on one operating system to trying it on another.

I develop mostly on the Linux operating system, and hop over to Windows once a week to make sure my engine works there as well.

This time Windows caught a problem which Linux did not.

So, to make a long story short, because of this issue, I have just a quick update to our forest from last week to show you.


Our forest from last week looked like this:



Today we're going to add the tree canopies which Jen has made. Like our trees, Jen has created these tree canopies to be monochromatic because the game engine will render them in silhouette.

Adding this canopy nicely completes the eerie look of the forest:



Okay, weather next week I promise!

Another sketch of Ned and those challenging-to-draw spectacles! Sketching the mouth sort of fell apart, but overall, I'm happy with the rest!

I've found that mature male faces are some of the most challenging and interesting to draw, with all their wonderful creases, planes and deep shadows. This is the character Ned Gowan from the television series Outlander:

This last week Jen and I have been discussing the visual appearance of our game and the effects required to produce them. We wanted to produce the look of a dark forest with a mystical background glow and the trees drawn in silhouette.

We already have a glow effect which we used on the moon and planet in our background sky, and we will use this for our background.
I've made a background image to create the mystic glow, and this is one of the few pieces of programmer art which will be usable in the final game:

That image will completely replace the sky and clouds in the background, and will provide the basis for the glow.
Jen has created a few tall trees which will be randomly placed in the scene: With the trees and the background in place, the result without the glow and silhouette effects looks like this:

When we turn on the glow and draw the trees in silhouette we get that mystical environment we were looking for:



How about some more effects next week? Maybe some weather?

I've realized that there is some security in sketching small when I'm practicing faces. I think it makes me feel like I'm more in control, but I'm realizing that sketching larger allows me to incorporate more subtle details, in addition to pushing the limits of what I feel is comfortable.
Now I'm working on gradually increasing the sizes of my sketches. This was one of the last teensy-tiny faces I sketched:

This sketch seemed to be a success, particularly the energy in the lines. Having a good variety of pencils on hand helps too. Here, I used a 2H pencil for the initial sketch, then 2B and 4B for shadow and definition:

A lot of behind the scenes work done during this past week, however, you folks might enjoy seeing more layers added to the game engine.

In the last demo we had 4 layers total. Today, I'm going to show you 7 layers. The first 6 layers are each a different colour:

For the 7th layer, Jennifer has created a mountain range:

Adding the mountains to our environment:

Now let's add some foliage and a random splattering of trees:



Things are really coming together. Next week let’s try some new effects...

Drawing faces has turned out to be kind of hit-and-miss, but I'm trying to sketch at least one face a day. This was one of the sketches I was pleased with – not a very true likeness of the subject, but I still quite liked the shapes and lines:

I've just purchased a sketchbook that I'm devoting entirely to faces and figures. I'm hoping that with LOTS of repetition, my skills at drawing people will improve.
These are two of the handful of sketches I've done in the last couple of days, and I'm realizing that posting them highlights to me some of the rather glaring errors I've made (yikes!). All good learning experiences, anyway!