Took about an hour in Photoshop. Man, I really should draw and paint more. It’s so much fun, and I really want to get better at it. Sucks that procrastinating is so easy.

That said, I didn’t want to just tell you that and then give you nothing, so please enjoy this digital painting of a bear that I made a while ago. Must be about a year or more old , but I never did get around to posting it.

I used a Wikipedia photo for reference, if I recall correctly, and did the lineart on a layer on top of that photo. Then I did my own colouring, and added in some water color textures for the final touch. It’s no masterpiece, but I rather like it. I really should do more things like this. It’s so much fun, and my Wacom tablet needs more exercise.

So to round up – day 2 of Make Something Cool Everyday: medium success. I pass. But just barely.

Tell me what you think.

By the way, the order here is completely random and does not reflect any sort of chronology or method. Also, I’ve only tried to do one of these gallery posts locally before, so we’ll see if this works. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll fix that tomorrow. It’s late enough as it is, and I need my sleep. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed.

UPDATE: Well, that was disappointing. Crap. Well. I’ll just disable the gallery part for now. Enjoy imagining the gallery that would be here if things worked. I’ll fix it up tomorrow.

UPDATE 2: I’ll be trying some thing to get this working now, so if you happen to visit the site during this time (not very likely, I suppose), expect things to look not quite right.

UPDATE 3: Ok, it all seems to be working. Silly mistake, really, but it’s all taken care of. Enjoy, people.

Click here to become mindboggled.

There, between some minor sporadic journal entries, and some never-played RPG adventures, I found this little text. What the hell, I thought upon reading it. This isn’t half bad. And so I decided to toss it up here. The journal entry just after it was dated 030511, so based on the regularity of my writings at that point in time I’m guessing this piece is from sometime at the end of April, 2003.

Take a look at it.

Some background, then. I play Guild Wars occasionally, and in the game, I am the leader of a guild called Ensis Equitas. This is me reimagining the same guild set in a dystopian future, where order is maintained by guilds of mercenaries selling their services to the highest bidder, or just pursuing their own arbitrary code of justice. The Sword of Justice, apart from being the literal meaning of Ensis Equitas in Dog Latin, is also the ginormous battle cruiser that serves as the base of operations for the guild.

Maybe I’ll continue this with other screens. Follow the life of a cadet, and make a series of it. I kind of like it, so it actually might happen. But we’ll see. No promises.

Click to view

I’ve been wanting to learn to use Illustrator for a while now, and the text in the center of this picture is the first step towards that goal. The shape of the word came to me on the train home a few days ago, and I couldn’t let it go. As for the word itself, it’s just plain cool. I’m actually thinking of using this image as the title screen for an upcoming project (if I finish it…), but we’ll just have to see about that.

Word design done in Illustrator CS, everything else in Photoshop CS3.

Click to view

Unfortunately what I’d come up with exceeded the maximum word count by almost 200 words, even after some editing after I typed it all up, and I liked it a little too much to just cut it all away. I tried, though, I admit, but I couldn’t get the feeling I was after in just 55 words. So that’ll have to be a project for another day. For now though, please enjoy the 232 words that I did write.

Click here to read it.