The Art of Tim

I’m just making it in under the wire here. Technically it’s Wednesday, but I started this art on Tuesday, so it still counts. I haven’t missed a day yet.

I honestly didn’t start out with the intention to keep doing JLA members. However the goal of this excersize is to a) force myself to find time to do some fun art and b) with that time, push myself artistically, experiment and practice different things. And super heroes are lots of fun to draw, but they also have personalities that give me ideas for styles in which to draw them.

For Bats I went with a negative space sort of thing. Took a layer of black, and cut into it with the lasso and eraser, until I had carved out his form. I then colored on a layer behind it, using highlights sparingly. It was fun.

I’ve really got an itch to do Supes again too.

  

Tried something different today. Doing a piece with no lineart. It was tough in the beginning, it was like riding a bike without training wheels for the first time. I think for a first attempt at a new technique, it’s not too bad. It could be improved in a few areas, but it was a fun little project.

  

No evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might, BEWARE MY POWER … Green Lantern’s Light!

I decided not to bother with an “after” picture of my office. I cleaned all yesterday, but to anyone but me it probably doesn’t look much different. But it is much cleaner in here, and I have much more space to move around.

I’ve also made myself a promise, to try and do one non-CAD piece of artwork every day for the next seven days. Today I had an itch to draw Hal. <3 Hal. One day down, six to go.

  

So today is my day off, but I’m going to spend most of it cleaning my office. Things have been so busy over the last few months that shit just keeps piling up and piling up, and it’s driving me nuts. I can barely move around in here. I was going to just take some before and after pictures for myself, but I decided to take it one step further. I haven’t been posting much, so I decided to give a little tour of the CAD office here. Then after I clean I’ll post some pictures.

Here’s the office. It’s currently a mess.

01- A KL-ZE V6 Intake Manifold. I need to get it bead-blasted and powder-coated this spring. It’s very heavy. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tripped over this fucking thing.

02- A 19″ CRT Monitor taking up space.

03- Junk. Boxes, notebooks, bills and tax stuff. There also appears to be some CD’s in here.

04- More junk taking up space. Some prototype shirts and other CAD Merchandise, as well as shirts I’ve ordered from Threadless and haven’t worn yet.

05- A closet. Mostly books and stuff in there that I don’t have room for. Been in there since the move in 2004.

06- Old shipping supplies and envelopes, from when I used to handle my own shipping.

07- A box of some of the stuff I get from fans at conventions. Fan art, free games, cards, etc etc. Some networking gear on top there. Underneath the box there is a big stack of white Bristol Board. It’s raw artwork from CAD from the last three years.

08- Everquest 2 box. Underneath, some black CDs or DVDs.

09- Some paper and crap, and also one of my old inventory logs from when I used to ship my own merchandise.

10- What’s left of a spool of CAT5 cable.

11- Some “returned to sender” packages. I imagine they’re Volume One from the very first printing. People who gave a wrong address and never responded to emails about it.

12- Guild Wars Collector’s Edition

13- My Postage Meter. I’ve finally decided I no longer need this, and am sending it back to the company.

14- Some first print copies of Volume One.

15- Some Star Wars Minis stuff.

16- A box of computer parts. Also, all of the empty boxes from the latest gaming rig I built. I dunno why, I hold onto those for ages.

17- My drafting table. Where I do all of my sketchwork.

18- Art junk.

19- Some games and some trash.

20- My filing cabinet, where all the boring, tedious, business paperwork goes.

21- An unopened box containing comic book art boards, for a project I’m working on.

22- Planetside, and some hardcover copies of my books.

23- An unopened box from Newegg. A small little mobo fan I need to replace.

24- Games, paperwork etc. I think I see Black and White 2 there.

25- My gaming rig. I may bring this to Digital Overload.

26- Some toys and junk. A World of Warcraft troll priest, General Grievous transformer, and one of my girlfriend’s My Little Ponies (she collects them). Dunno why that’s there.

27- My Zboard Keysets.

28- Empty SoBe and water bottles.

29- My Zeke statue.

30- Under the desk, some binders filled with PC games, and some sketchbooks.

31- Books and sketchbooks.

32- More books.

33- My printer.

34- A bunch of the raw artwork from the comics. Once the page is filled up I throw em here on this shelf, until I move them over to the other shelf.

35- My scanner, down on the floor because there’s no room for it elsewhere.

36- My Wacom Cintiq. It’s a beast, but it’s one of the best investments I’ve made. <3 the Cintiq. behind the Cintiq are some video game boxes. Empire at War and EQ2: Kingdom of Sky, I think.

37- Receipts and business paperwork.

38- Junk. My desktop is covered with it. Trash, receipts, random bits. Even a Death Star desktop ball.

39- More junk.

40- My work/utility computer.

41- A case of unopened Star Wars minis booster packs from the Revenge of the Sith expansion. I think there’s also a Mazda RX-8 transformer down there.

42- Dog beds, for when my girlfriend brings her puppies to visit.

43- Books, tools and junk.

44-More books, including my Song of Ice and Fire hardcovers.

45- A couple of video cards, and some old retired CAD t-shirts

46- Comic books and art books. Underneath them, the World of Warcraft collector’s edition

47- Junk.

48- My Jayne hat. Also, a bunch of CD’s and some junk.

Ok, time to get cleaning!

  

This is one of the BSG designs I want to do. Rough copy. I think I’ll still have to cut down on ship detail some to avoid… complications. But I’ll look into it.

Man, I should be working, and I’m goofing around on this.

Bad Tim. Bad.

  

I haven’t been doing much sketchwork lately. Most of my time is spent on focused projects, like the third CAD book, etc. I haven’t had much to post here. I did take a little time late last night “off the clock”, so to speak. I did a quick portrait of my EQ2 character for a forum sig. I figure I can at least show you that. It’s something.

I don’t usually do this, but I’m really enjoying EQ2 (when I get a few moments to play) and I felt like “geeking out” a bit.

I’ve been getting enormous amounts of positive feedback over this last little CAD mini-arc, which is great. It’s something I’ve been planning for a few months now, so you can imagine I was anxious for Valentine’s Day to hurry up and get here. It was a lot of fun to write/draw, so I’m happy people enjoyed it.

Britanny and I postponed our Valentine’s Day until Thursday, because we’re both really busy. On Tuesdays and Wednesday she has “clinical”, where she’s working at a local hospital as part of her curriculum. Each week she has to do a 20-ish page care plan for the patient she’s working with, and it’s a lot of paperwork. I helped her out a bit last night by researching a bunch of medications for her. By the gods, it was boring. But informative. I feel comfortable that I could now prescribe any of three different medications to loosen a patient’s stool. Wonderful.

I’ve got us dinner reservations tomorrow night at a nice italian place. It’s always fun to get dressed up and go somewhere fancy once in a while.

Toby came up last weekend, and that was a nice break. We went “extreme bowling” at the local AMF lanes. Back home in Falmouth they called it “Disco Bowling”, but it’s the same concept. Loud music, blacklights and flashing spotlights, and beer. The rest of the weekend we played DOA4, the Fight Night demo, andwatched The Office.

I’m now into the second half of the second season of Battlestar Galactica (just finished the second part of Resurrection Ship) and this is fast becoming one of my favorite shows, not just right now, but ever. Come early March I’ve got to put out some new T-shirt designs, and frankly, I think one of them will be Galactica related. However I can swing it to not infringe on any copyrights. It may not sell well, but I really want a BS:Galactica shirt. Maybe a Viper Squadron theme.

Digital Overload is coming up, and that should be loads of fun. I need to do some artwork for the badges, and I want to try and come up with a mini-poster to give away to attendees. Everything looks to be coming together well, which is a relief since it’s our first year.

Ok, enough rambling. Back to work for me!

  

So EQ2 has a neat command that lets you take panoramic screenshots. You can then take the screens into a .gif animator and make a little 360 degree movie. I made one for my Inquisitor, but kept it small (only 36 frames). You can see it here, but it moves pretty fast, so don’t watch it for too long or you’ll get dizzy.

I’ve been getting a lot of people asking me what made me play EQ 2, especially a lot of WoW players curious what the other side is like. It was a combination of things. Perhaps at some point I’ll write up a little review or comparison.

For now I thought I’d take a moment and just do a short list of things I like and don’t like. We’ll do five of each just to keep it simple.

5 Things I enjoy about Everquest 2

Class Freedom: Any race can be any class. Want to be an Ogre Necromancer? Go for it. A Froglok Monk? By all means. Some races may be better suited to certain classes stat-wise, but the point is that the choice is there. You’re free to play the combination you want to play. Also, the classes aren’t just copies of eachother if you choose good/evil. In WoW, if you’re a Horde Priest, you have all the same spells and skills of an Alliance Priest. In EQ2 for the good guys you’re a noble Templar, focused on healing with group buff spells and enemy pacification. But for the bad guys you’re a fanatical Inquisitor, focused on healing but with divine wrath of a more offensive medium.

City Betrayal: This is a wonderful little feature. Certain races are restricted to good or evil. But what if you’re playing a Dark Elf (evil), and you realize you don’t agree with the tenets and goals of your city. At between level 14 and 18 you can begin a difficult series of quests to betray your current city and attempt to gain acceptance with the opposite faction. Imagine if in WoW you could defect, and play for the Alliance as an Undead. That’s what this is. City Betrayal also allows race/class combinations not available at character creation. Let’s say you have a Dark Elf Shadowknight (a cross between a Warrior and a Necromancer), and you betray your city. When you come out on the other side, your class converts to the good guy equivalent, in this case a Paladin.

Nostalgia: I’m not going to lie, a huge part of my attraction to EQ2 is nostalgia. I was a huge EQ1 addict back in the day, and being back in Norrath (albeit a very different world, taking place some many years later) is a lot of fun. Little things like the exact same “level-up” ding and coin sound that were used in the original bring back lots of fond memories. But also the quests mention the past a lot, referencing things I was very familiar with in EQ1. Norrath has been torn apart by war and natural disaster in EQ2, but that flavor and nostalgia is definitely there, and warm and welcoming.

Superb and Realistic Graphics: Granted this can be a blessing and a curse. The system requirements for EQ2 are pretty hefty, and downright astronomical if you want to run EQ2 at it’s prettiest settings. But when you do, the graphics are amazing. The lighting, bump-mapping etc. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Blizzard’s artistic style, and WoW is a stylistic orgasm from start to finish. It has such an awesome look. But for me, personally, after a while I started to tire of the “cartoony” feel to things. EQ2 offers a great, distinctive look all on it’s own that I find very attractive (now that the SOGA models are in game. I think you’ll agree there is just no contest).

Guild Structure: The guild system in WoW is nothing more than a group of members, with ranks you can assign that don’t really mean or do anything. EQ2 blows it out of the water in every regard. Guilds earn levels entirely independant of it’s members, based on the actions the members are doing to benefit their aligned city. Members and guilds also earn prestige for performing beneficial acts for their city, competing against other guilds. This prestige can be accumulated to afford benefits to the guild and it’s member, such as reduced pricing on housing and special items. Guilds in EQ2 have built-in guild vaults, amongst other features that greatly help organization.

5 Things I Miss About World of Warcraft

Instanced Dungeons: I don’t miss the fact that they were instanced, because I enjoy running into other adventuring parties in EQ, helping eachother out, etc. But I do miss WoW’s scripted events inside their dungeons. They really added to the dungeon crawling experience. Though after your twelfth time through the instance they did become a mite tedious, they were still fun implementations.

Rolling for Loot: While EQ2 does have a lottery system for items dropped, WoW’s just seems more polished and easier to use.

Great Dancing: The dances in WoW were awesome. The dances in EQ2 are just embarrassing.

Battlegrounds: Battlegrounds were fun. EQ2 is just on the verge of launching head-on into the realm of PVP, but only on specific servers. Which I will not be on, so I won’t be doing any free-for-all PvP. I know EQ2 has an Arena system whereby a player can create an Arena zone of his own to personally battle other players, or if you have purchased/found a fighting pet, you can pit your pet against someone else’s pet in the Arena. But I haven’t touched any of this, so I can’t really comment on it yet. I certainly don’t miss the queues.

Weapons and Armor: Albeit cartoony and low-polygon, Blizzard has wonderful armor and weapon designs. EQ2 has cool stuff, but it seems to be focused more along the lines of what realistic armor and weaponry would be like, where as Blizzard just went crazy fantasy.

  

So the other night, a good friend of mine Rob Balder (www.partiallyclips.com) dropped me a line to let me know about a new project he was working on, a bartender’s guide to drinks named after webcomics.

He wanted to know what I would recommend for a “Ctrl+Alt+Del”. Here’s a snippet of our conversation:

[21:48] Rob: So in a spare moment (ha) think about what would be in a Ctrl-Alt-Del.
[21:48] Tim: Oh wait, I’m supposed to come up with this?
[21:49] Tim: isnt that your job?
[21:49] Rob: You can, or you can let me and just give it a thumbs up.
[21:49] Tim: just choose the ingredients from an existing drink, but call it the ctrl+alt+del. then everyone can bitch at my drink for being a ripoff
[21:50] Rob: LMFAO
[21:56] Rob: So you really want me to make that joke in your drink? I think it’d be funny.
[21:57] Tim: Yeah sure, go for it
[21:58] Tim: Make it like Vodka and Orange Juice
[21:58] Tim: haha
[21:59] Rob: “Use cheaper ingredients.”
[21:59] Tim: A Penny Arcade + 1/2 water
[21:59] Rob: ROFL, yes. A watered-down Penny Arcade. God, that’s hysterical.