I forget periodically that I built most of the site when my from-scratch HTML and CSS skills were in their infancy, so I don’t look at it with a critical eye as often as I should. There’s still a lot of wonkiness I want to address with alignments and whatnot (my original stylesheet is an exercise in horror).

Will I actually fix these things? Probably. I may just do a whole site revamp and save myself the trouble of fixing what’s going to be rebuilt anyway.

But these are thoughts for men who don’t have another 10 characters to unlock in Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3.

Edit: I can’t stand this being the first item in my blog any longer. The comment below is referring to the image that used to be here.

Ending with a whimper, like usual. I cleaned up an old sketch, and began to lay down my flat colors when the bottom dropped out of my intestines. I’ll try to make it presentable soon, but in the meantime, this is all I can manage. Longer post coming up where I reflect on this batch of weeklies and plan for the next.

As always, thanks to the 12 of you who visit this site.

Unit 939-ZX's primary directive: to hug

You’ll note that the name of the contest with myself isn’t “Make Awesome Every Week 2011″ or “So Good it Hurts 2011.”

Just a reminder.

The band went on to produce such hits as 'Pegusain't' and 'Look at My Horny'

Hardcore.

To be completely honest, this is another loophole entry because I am exhausted and behind in my work. Also, I really wanted to see if I could do a “metal” logo, and I’ve been dying to say ‘unicorns’ in any context for about 5 years.

This monstrosity was created with a warped version of the Josselyn font, which I then split to a few layers, applied a couple gradients, and hand-painted the shadows on a stroke to mimic the bevel (because I was not savvy enough to automate beveling).

Oh, and lens flare courtesy of 1992.

"I regret nothing!"

Large parts of my being are still 9 years old, so for the half hour of painting time, the sound “PSSHSKOOOOOOOOOOOOOM” was on repeat in my head. I gotta work on my spacecrafts; they suck.

Saving Mike's ass since 1998

Ouch.

Multiple things:

• Turns out drawing clouds around the viewer (vs. in the distance) is a totally different game
• I haven’t done a full landscape with any success before, so that trend continues
• Factoring how much time it took to try and fix the problems (above), I ran out of time to put in my figure

I’m going to continue to work on this tomorrow. Yes, we all know it’s not done, but if you don’t know that I wanted more out of it, you could look at it and say, “Oh, it’s a finished piece…it’s just really boring.” So technically, I still made it in under the wire.

By the way, did anybody grasp that this is the sky, and the landscape below contains a lake reflecting said sky? Me neither. I’ll work on that.

The importance of tighter roughs is getting more and more obvious over time. I have a tendency to move forward, convinced I will be fixing things on the fly, but usually it just results in collisions with unforeseen obstacles. Like geese.

God my bomb is lumpy.

Caption unavailable due to unseasonably warm weather

Busy week. Didn’t touch the witch picture at all, and I still have high hopes for it, so instead of trying to half ass it, here’s a chunky alien. 2 hours, where 1 of them was randomly drawing stuff hoping to hit upon something I could draw in an hour. This is full size.

I, for one, have never posed like this in my life.

Yeah. Still no witches.

"I can't hold on to ANYTHING with these hooks."

I really liked Alan Wake. I also thought Thomas Zane’s diving suit was adorable. That’s how things like this happen.

In case you saw last week’s post, this was supposed to be another witch-related piece (slated for last week, originally), but I had to scrap that idea AGAIN because I simply got too busy to devote the time it needs for completion. I am looking forward to knocking that one out little by little this coming week, though. We’ll see if I actually make it or not.

In the meantime, give Mr. Zane here a hug.

"...and for the record, no, it looks nothing like you."

Amusing and a little sad: this is one of the best things I’ve ever painted, and it was A) an “easy” piece to make sure I got in before the deadline, and B) three-quarters shorter to complete than last week’s trainwreck*. I have another drawing in the roughs stage for next week featuring the same witch. I didn’t know she’d be in this one at all until about 10:30pm.

I am narrowing in on my cloud drawing technique, so you’ll probably see a lot more clouds in the coming weeks.

Speaking of which (and the 12 of you may have noticed), I’m attempting to include backgrounds in every piece I do this time around. It’s hard, and I have to struggle to work up the energy to try it, but it’s probably good for me.

Not unlike flax.

UPDATE 12:12am PDT: The witch was drawn much larger and then shrunk down to fit in the cloud composition; initially this was just supposed to be a skyscape, then I started feeling fancy. You can see her full-size here.

^{*And now I am intent on doing a poorly done drawing of a trainwreck.}