Been there, drawn that

I'm not very good at computer coloring, but here are my first dabbles, from some years ago, back when I found out what Multiply Layers are all about :P. Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban!

And I still like them :) These are a couple of very young Lara Croft drawings I did back during the first game to make a comic on the small adventure of her origin she tells at the beginning. I borrowed Gary Whitta's script (with his permission) and did the full 8 pages (a personal record) and even inked it and all! Maybe I'll upload the pages here some day :)

I just happen to be out of home (in Brussels, indeed) today, wso we have to do with whatever I find on my laptop for today :P This is an Argonath pic that I did way back, when TTT was released. The big river must have been filmed somewhere around Milford Sound, in the fiords in New Zealand south island. A friend just told me yesterday that we should build two of these in Gibraltar strait, Same posture, same size: Santiago and the Cid :P I'll have some Brussels pic in a few days here!

Some summers ago, I was lucky enough to travel to Banff and it happened to be one of the most beautiful landscapes I've seen in my life. Must be hard to live there in winter, though :P I carried my Moleskine, as usual, and made some sketches over there. This one is in Calgary, where downtown looks like Metropolis, all clean, crystal and metal ... Lucky me, I got there just in time for Stampede! and spent a couple of days watching cowboys, cattle, wagons and partying! And finally I travelled to Banff and spent a week hiking and looking for bears. I managed to get a clear shot of a black cub! This sketch I did all the way up 6 glaciers plain, where I was fool enough to go in shorts. Not that it stopped me or anything! There is a teashop close to the end of the track, though, and I was grateful for the hot liquid :)

When I'm in the mood and I play rol, sometimes I'm sketching very fast the situations in the game with a touch of humour on the absurd side. A friend uses to gather this small and very fast pencil sketches into another blog: Other lives, other worlds (it's in spanish, I'm afraid) and he's quite the writer :D I'm uploading today a sample of these skecthes during the game of The five rings. This one is an oni (demon) who attacked me. He was part of the seven demons clan, a very powerful group of foes, and looked like a mex between Gollum and a corpse, but he happened to come flying with an umbrella, so in my imagination he was like this ... And this is how the poor guy ended when my very lucky character got a critic with the dice: This is a friend who tried to talk a guard into letting him and his partner inside the fortress. He just happened to be too talkative and did not quite get to the point ... And this is Mimisiku-sama, a powerful warrior (and a bit of a f...

This is a pencil sketch of my character at RPG The Five Rings, a sort of feudal Japan (Rogakukan), where kamis, magic and katanas roam free :P I gave it a touch of pastel color in the kimono, too. Yoruichi-sama was freely inspired in Bleach's character (quite freely, because I had not seen the anime then, but the master obviously had :D)

This is a sketch that I did in several steps. First, it was meant to be inked, but I was too lazy to do it. I decided, then, to color it smooth with watercolors, as strong colors would not work without inks. All in all, I did not like the results, so I decided to go back to the original idea, only this time I had to ink over the ecolines. I used a black graphic pen, which is faster than a brush. Not sure about the results, but too late to go back now ...

Yep, I did not like the flick, but I still like the aliens in general (I'd add Ripley for a winning combination, but hey!) and Paul Anderson is still in my list (he just did AvP1, not this one!) Here is a quick pencil with your friendly alien ...

So, finally, this is what I've been doing lately. It's a view of Paris from the roof of Notre Dame. I took the picture myself some time ago and did the sketch the last weekend. I think the front needs some more defining, but this is what you get for not using Photoshop :P