joe randel's art dump

One day I come home from work to find this ^ at my door. Well actually it was in my house since my wife had brought it in. Anyway, if you can’t tell what it is, it’s a box from Japan. I made a purchase off ebay this was it. I’ve been waiting for these for some time now and I was very excited to open it up. Do you want to know what it is?

It’s toys!!! But not just any toys, oh no. These are Takara’s Material Force and Lady Force. Two fully poseable figures for all my drawing needs. Because that crappy wooden artists dummy isn’t worth two shits.

These two though have 30 different joints and stand around 4 inches tall each.

Here’s a shot of the back of the package. Dang that’s cool.

And look! Japanese newspapers comics. Oh man! This one’s a riot! ^_^

And Japanese ads. I don’t know what this guys selling, but that frog’s in to it.

Okay, now in to the packages. Here’s a mini ad for other Material Force figures.

Ahhh… free from cardboard solitary. They even come with extra hands to use since there is no way you could pose digits that small.

The female comes with 6 extra hands while the dude only gets 5 extra.

Now let’s have some poses of the happy couple. Wax on, wax off.

Hang on dude!

Look froward to the future young sir.

Climb that ledge!

Oh… naughty naughty figure…

She looks so innocent.

Zombie ATTACK!

SHOOT HIM!!

He’s getting CLOSER!!

oh the drama…

BOING!

So there you have it! I just wanted to share these with people since I think these are pretty dang cool. Now I should have to hunt down pose ref on the net. Hunting for that one pose but never finding one quite how you’d like so you settle for something close. Nope, not for me boy. Not with my Material Force. No sir.

So I went to that whole Massive Black Art Workshop. You wanna hear about what I did? Okay, first I’m glad that my work paid for this thing because if I had shelled out $550 bux out of my own pocket I would have been quite dissapointed. There was no “class” or even “workshop” set up as I would have expected it. I thought that those there would be drawing and the MB team would look at what we’re doing, give us tips or point out what we’re doing right and show us how to add polish to our work. Well it really wasn’t that at all. What it was, was a lot of watching the pros paint on thier PC’s/Mac’s which where then projected to large screens. We could as questions during each “session” as to what the artist was doing, where the ideas came from and so forth. Which you almost had to do if you wanted any info out of the artists because most where pretty quiet when they where painting. Dull, dull dull.

Well it wasn’t all that bad. I’m a very big visual learner so watching them use Photoshop and/or Painter was good for seeing how they use the brushes and such.  I did learn a lot through that.  And some of the art pro’s did do a good job on explaining what they do and the steps they go through.  Dan Milligan did a super awesome job talking about storyboarding and the art that he does (good enough art as he puts it).  Coro Kaufman also did a great job getting the audience involved with his tech demo and told everyone to look for inspiration for ideas everywhere, then told a story about how he gave someone a spacehsip design by showing them a shoe from a Victoria Secret cataloge.  BioWare was there as well and did a great presentation on character and location concepts and what we should be thinking of.  Here’s some points.

• Things you you should always be doing to help get ideas.  Observe, Analyze and Study.
• Only put in elements into your drawing that you need.
• Don’t be afraid to be obvious with your ideas.
• Draw all the stereotypes you can think of regarding your character idea.  Once they’re all out you’ll explore more the over all design and concept.
• THINK before you draw.

So over all it was actually a pretty good experience.  Not what I expected but still pretty cool.  I think what I came away was a better understanding of my own art skills and how I was limiting myself in my ideas and through Photoshop.  I’m now starting to experiment more with brushes and I’m having lots of fun with it.  Oh and incase you’re wondering who did the painting at the top, that would be Andrew Jones.  He did the concept art for Metroid Prime 1 & 2.  Very cool guy but he dresses a little on the wierd side.

And now you know, the rest of the story.

Woo! I’m super excited.  This weekend I’ll be attending Massive Black’s Concept Art Workshop.  Yup, 4 days of intense learnign and training from some of the best in the art biz.  I haven’t done this kind of thing since college and I’m all jittery.  These are super pro artists here and I’m super rusty.  After looking through the program several times I think I’m going to be in the sketchbook programs.  They seem to appeal to me the most but I should take in a life drawing session as well.

I’ll post some of the things I draw and maybe take some pictures too. Sorry, no art with this post.  Just brag’n to the world about how awesome my weekend will be.  The only sucky thing is lunch isn’t til 2:oo most days.  An art dude has ta eat ya know!!! o_O

Okay, okay, okay… so there was this contest over at Fur Affinity a little while ago. Some of you might have heard about it. The winner got a white PSP and a game of choice and the runners up got games of choice as well. Well, I was really excited about this contest so I cranked out a bunch of entries to match the theme of the contest; video game cos-play. What you had to do was draw your character dressed up like a video game character. I did a total of seven drawings. Not because I thought it would increase my chances of winning, but because I had too many ideas to cut them all back and choose the best one. Well the contest has come and gone and now I think it’s far past due to post them here as well. They where originally supposed to go up with the site change but I decided to post my monster instead.

And now, with out any further delay I present seven drawings of Gwen in video cos-play. Ta da!!!

What about the contest you ask? Well, I didn’t win, and to be honest I feel a bit burned, and from what I saw on the AF forum, I’m not the only one that felt the judging was a little questionable. But congrats to the winners all the same. It was a fun contest to be in and I’m happy with the art that I produced for it. Plus, here’s a little bit of trivia for ya. I’ve yet to win a furry contest full out. I’ve won in categories and even tied for 1st but I’ve never walked away with best in show all on my own. Kind a sad but what can ya do.

Ah well, congrats to the winners once again.

It’s the new site… with a new name. Just trying things out here. It’s like a new pair of shoes. Gotta wear them in first.

Things are up and running but there is still some tweaking to be done and some things to add, but the core of it is up and running. Now if anyone see’s anything that isn’t working and such just let me know and I’ll see what I’ll add it to the list.

Now once apon a time I had a drawing jam going on the forums here at the archives. Well, after a loooonnnggg delay I’ve got it done. the topic of the jam was to draw a monster/creature and this is what I came up with. Not to shabby me thinks.

Well that’s it for the moment. I’ll get to fixing the rest after the weekend but I figured I’d throw this up since I had the chance.

What do you all think?