Wednesday, March 31, 2010

[ f f t a ] - from the vault

hello. it has been a while. i've missed you.

last week the .com turned six whole years old, although the twisted, thorny sinews of my sundry and oft-interrupted ventures into the blog-thing extend back very nearly eight. wow. i am getting old.

so, to commemorate this inauspicious occasion i've finally dragged these pieces out of the vault. cave-dwelling animals, they blink their disused eyes at you and, for the first time, feel the warm light of morning on their cold frog skin. they bristle.

anyway.

the top piece was the capstone on the period of my "career" spanning mid-high school through college, in which my favorite practice was taking manga-style art depicting video game characters and rendering it in a more realistic fashion. there are a number of examples in the /art gallery, from sources like Dragon Warrior II, Skies of Arcadia, Pokemon, and so forth. this last drawing honored my clan from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, an impossibly fearsome Krewe of pipe-hitting juggernauts that helped me maintain some semblance of sanity across a particularly troubled stretch of my life. i worked on it extremely intermittently across a year and change. please look at it, wonder why the scan quality is crap, and then read below for the tragedy.

Click to enlarge

i never properly scanned the original art, instead settling for a quick photo. and then. and then. i moved to Florida and realized that this precious parcel - the art, tucked into the game book - had not made the journey with me. before i could return home to claim it, my mother threw it out: the art, the book, even the bloody game itself, in loathsome fulfillment of the inevitable fate of any dork's possessions.

at this point, i was done. i've not drawn anything similar since, and it was my crowning achievement with pencil and paper. i switched to a wacom.

this was also the only piece for which i drew a detailed cartoon beforehand, working out composition, poses and gear.

Click to enlarge

back to work. there is more art on the horizon, between commissions for Phil and the first, almost imperceptible, black light tongues of Hallows Fire licking at the periphery of my soul.

it comes.