Saturday, February 28, 2009

[very loose] game concept sketches?...

so i'm trying to flesh out a game idea by doing random sketches with the characters, to develop their personalities and see where it leads. so far all i have is that they're called "CATTYwampi" [yeah- really clever, right;)?] and and are trying to "right" various structures [each of the team having their own unique abilities to help with the job] that are "cattywampus", due to being vandalized by hooligans, no-good nicks, and the their ilk. nothing too complicated, as i'm trying to scale back some of my ideas these days in an attempt to lighten them up and make them more "doable". these sketches are a bit old, but i figured i should post them before they disappear into the sketch pad archives, and possibly never heard from again!




... more to come on experiments with the actual look, which i'm hoping will be a combination of line work on top of photo textures and dabbled with in last year's holiday card: http://blognaude.blogspot.com/2008/12/this-years-holidays-cards-new-drafting.html
... and i've been dying to do some wooden cut outs of them as well- just have to find a place to mount them;)

oh! and btw- they're actually all based off this sketch which i did a year or so ago, took quite a liking too, and actually appeared in a handful of pieces in 2008.
... patenaude

Friday, February 27, 2009

Saturday, February 21, 2009

baby's room part IV...

long time, no post! luckily it's because i've been so busy WORKING on the project, to POST about it. i've come to a nice break in the process though [waiting to clear the room out, so that i can figure out the composition, attach the various depths of mounts (some will be overlapping others)], to show ya what i've been up to.

after getting a bit more familiar with the scroll saw and cutting out near all of the animals + a ton of flowers...


... it was time for some paint tests. i didn't want to potentially ruin something that was going in her room, so i decided to test out a few characters that jen had banned [too many thonrs;)] + smaller versions of animals that are actually making the cut.

i experimented with goauche, oils, and tube acrylic, before finally settling on CRAFT acrylics [of all things] for the colors, gesso for the white borders, and tried and true windsor newton indian ink for the outlines [applied with both brushes and nibs]. + plenty of glossy sealant to keep it all safe.


because i STILL wasn't ready to wrap up the final pieces, i decided to whip up a blue bee for my good friends chris & angie, who just had their first baby, zachary, and while i was at it i couldn't resist whipping up a second one...


next it was onto the real deal! i ended up watering the paint down a bit and laying on quite a few layers to keep it nice and flat to keep any distracting bush strokes out.


and the flowers- TONS of flowers, which will be sprinkled all over whatever the composition ends up looking like.

here they are, almost done- just a few more paint touch ups + a little more inky clean up work...

to mount them, i'm using long tacks driven thorugh small pieces of scrap wood, gluing the tack head side of the wood to the back of the cut outs- layering more wood in between for ones that will "float" further form the wall. the nice thing is that it's _SUPER_ easy to arrange and rearrange them, because of how easily i'm able to simply push them into the wall.

that's it for now. the next shots will probably be the final product mounted in her room.

... patenaude