More sketches

Back in 1990, before the advent of the internet, we still played games and I used to draw and/or paint a great deal more than I do now - recent sketches of the Thing and Fat Elvis not withstanding. A year or so ago, when ellefurtle and I were packing to move, and colonel_maxim was vacating the Athenaeum Club before swinging off on his Afghan adventure, we unearthed a couple of sketches I did in 1990 and 1991 for a character in a Cyberpunk game the good Colonel was running at that time.

I recall that I was pretty damned pleased with the original sketch, but less so with the second that I did a few months later. As time passed, I decided that actually, to be honest, they were both so far below par that they weren't worth the time and effort spent on them. A reassessment of that when we refound them found that I had actually been too kind. Whatever the merits (if any) of the character design, the sketches were dismal and I thought that I should redraw and update the character.

Anyone who knows me realises that for reasons that even I can't explain, over the past 15 years my artistic out put has dwindled almost to zero, so nothing got done even though I have had ample space (not something I was blessed with in my Clapham Garret days) and opportunity.

For some reason, over the past four or five months, the urge to draw has slowly been coming back and although it has taken until this May just finished to actually place pencil on paper, that urge built until I just needed an excuse. That was provided by budgie_uk when his son injured his hand and the left arm in cast challenge was born. So I drew a Thing. Twice. Then we saw the Elvis impersonator and the idea stuck in my head and then I rediscovered the ShadowFire character studies and since then I seem to have allocated Sunday afternoons for drawing.

That brings me to the point of the post. Hidden below the cut, saving me from a nagging by the bandwidth challenged is the original ShadowFire from 1990. It's probably not worth the effort of a look, ( but it's there anyway. )

The character back then was based loosely on Louise Brooks, but rendered appallingly. I seem to have had a thing for impossibly tight catsuits, too.

Over the past couple of weekends, but primarily this one just passed, I have revisited the character - largely for my own edification. I wanted to come up with a drawing I was happy with, even if the game has been defunct these last 15 years and the character will probably never resurface again. ( The 2009 're-imagining' is here. )

Recognizably a development of the original character, I think, but now more anatomically believable, dressed hopefully in clothes that a woman might actually be seen dead in - though still with a gun (and now a katana), she has become inexplicably right handed and is now of Japanese decent.

I'm quite pleased with ShadowFire 2009.

More sketches

Back in 1990, before the advent of the internet, we still played games and I used to draw and/or paint a great deal more than I do now - recent sketches of the Thing and Fat Elvis not withstanding. A year or so ago, when ellefurtle and I were packing to move, and colonel_maxim was vacating the Athenaeum Club before swinging off on his Afghan adventure, we unearthed a couple of sketches I did in 1990 and 1991 for a character in a Cyberpunk game the good Colonel was running at that time.

I recall that I was pretty damned pleased with the original sketch, but less so with the second that I did a few months later. As time passed, I decided that actually, to be honest, they were both so far below par that they weren't worth the time and effort spent on them. A reassessment of that when we refound them found that I had actually been too kind. Whatever the merits (if any) of the character design, the sketches were dismal and I thought that I should redraw and update the character.

Anyone who knows me realises that for reasons that even I can't explain, over the past 15 years my artistic out put has dwindled almost to zero, so nothing got done even though I have had ample space (not something I was blessed with in my Clapham Garret days) and opportunity.

For some reason, over the past four or five months, the urge to draw has slowly been coming back and although it has taken until this May just finished to actually place pencil on paper, that urge built until I just needed an excuse. That was provided by budgie_uk when his son injured his hand and the left arm in cast challenge was born. So I drew a Thing. Twice. Then we saw the Elvis impersonator and the idea stuck in my head and then I rediscovered the ShadowFire character studies and since then I seem to have allocated Sunday afternoons for drawing.

That brings me to the point of the post. Hidden below the cut, saving me from a nagging by the bandwidth challenged is the original ShadowFire from 1990. It's probably not worth the effort of a look, ( but it's there anyway. )

The character back then was based loosely on Louise Brooks, but rendered appallingly. I seem to have had a thing for impossibly tight catsuits, too.

Over the past couple of weekends, but primarily this one just passed, I have revisited the character - largely for my own edification. I wanted to come up with a drawing I was happy with, even if the game has been defunct these last 15 years and the character will probably never resurface again. ( The 2009 're-imagining' is here. )

Recognizably a development of the original character, I think, but now more anatomically believable, dressed hopefully in clothes that a woman might actually be seen dead in - though still with a gun (and now a katana), she has become inexplicably right handed and is now of Japanese decent.

I'm quite pleased with ShadowFire 2009.

It's the first of June already!

A pinch and a punch; it’s the first of the month.

Five months down and seven to go; how did that happen? I have only just got used to thinking of it as the 21st century and the decade is almost up. It doesn’t seem that long ago when the year 2000 was an impossibly distant date and I couldn’t imagine what the world would be like. And here we are nearly ten years past it and apart from mobile phones and the internet; it is pretty much the same place as it ever was. The music is worse, everything that was good for you is now bad for you and flying cars and jet packs have failed to materialise, but other than that I don’t think it’s significantly different to when I were a lad.

Last night at the pub, we tinkered with our new GPS gadget for the first time. I think I can say with a degree of confidence that it is not the most intuitive operating system that I have ever seen and it we were not helped by the fact that the manufacturers have seen fit to include operating instructions for models other than the one we bought. Have they highlighted them so we can ignore them? No, they have not. Have they written the manual so that it tells you the model the feature works with before it goes into detail? No they have not. To that end we spent ages getting cross with each other trying to set features we hadn’t got against instructions that were irrelevant. Of course, it would have helped if we had just allowed each other to read the booklet and play with the gadget uninterrupted, but hey, it’s a shiny new toy. I shall have to investigate downloading maps to use with it – at the moment we get an overview of the UK and North West Europe with the motorways drawn in. That’s probably of more use when you are at about the same distance as the satellites themselves, rather than in a beer garden.

Thinking about it, that’s one thing they didn’t have when I was a kid, but the principles of poor manual drafting haven’t changed in an age.

It's the first of June already!

A pinch and a punch; it’s the first of the month.

Five months down and seven to go; how did that happen? I have only just got used to thinking of it as the 21st century and the decade is almost up. It doesn’t seem that long ago when the year 2000 was an impossibly distant date and I couldn’t imagine what the world would be like. And here we are nearly ten years past it and apart from mobile phones and the internet; it is pretty much the same place as it ever was. The music is worse, everything that was good for you is now bad for you and flying cars and jet packs have failed to materialise, but other than that I don’t think it’s significantly different to when I were a lad.

Last night at the pub, we tinkered with our new GPS gadget for the first time. I think I can say with a degree of confidence that it is not the most intuitive operating system that I have ever seen and it we were not helped by the fact that the manufacturers have seen fit to include operating instructions for models other than the one we bought. Have they highlighted them so we can ignore them? No, they have not. Have they written the manual so that it tells you the model the feature works with before it goes into detail? No they have not. To that end we spent ages getting cross with each other trying to set features we hadn’t got against instructions that were irrelevant. Of course, it would have helped if we had just allowed each other to read the booklet and play with the gadget uninterrupted, but hey, it’s a shiny new toy. I shall have to investigate downloading maps to use with it – at the moment we get an overview of the UK and North West Europe with the motorways drawn in. That’s probably of more use when you are at about the same distance as the satellites themselves, rather than in a beer garden.

Thinking about it, that’s one thing they didn’t have when I was a kid, but the principles of poor manual drafting haven’t changed in an age.