Working hard!!.. Just not on the comic so much...

I've been working pretty hard, just most of it hasn't been on the comic. And that's had me thinking what are my goals here? The comic is important to me yes. But more than anything I want to support my family through art. That's my primary goal. Why limit this blog simply to a comic? I can't think of a reason anymore.
So instead I'm going to post all of my progress as an artist here. You get a view into all of my different little projects and yes that includes posting elements of the comic as they come.

I do want to take this time to thank all of my friends and family who've been supporting my dreams! Don't know where I'd be without you guys, but it definitely wouldn't be here.

Here's some of the work I have been doing the past few days I haven't been here. The PiCraft Texture pack is slowly coming along but surely I don't want to put a date on release because honestly I have no idea how close I am to done yet.

 This shows off the ores, dirt, stone and basic grass textures. does the stone look stoney? Does the grass look grassy? Does the dirt look dirty? I love redstone... do you? Actually funny story about the grass. I wanted to put a subtle Pi symbol in the grass and after it tiled it looked more like hearts.

 I'm trying to get a very... hand made and rustic feel for a majority of the items you get early in the game. I especially wanted the workbench to look that way.

I've most of the work I've done has been with MineCraft's inventory items. My goal here is to get rid of the outline but still have the items be recognizable at a glance. Working with such a small space (this is a 16x16 texture pack) is actually teaching me a lot that I can use in; lets call it "macro art". The big shape, big blocks of value, these are so much more important than details.

Please Let me know what you think so far about the PiCraft texture pack. I'd appreciate feedback on this project!


I've also been doing lots of value studies put a hours into the both of these.

 Despite having it for almost 2 years I'm still getting used to my tablet and Photoshop. That isn't really an excuse for this though. I got really frustrated with this one. I started with a line drawing of the model and tried to work over that with little success. I figured out a lot about optimizing time and it really helped bring to light what I was mentioning before about big shape over detail. I got so focused on small portions of the picture that I lost a lot of overall value and proportions for it.

BIG SHAPE > little shape.

This one is much better in my opinion, yes the flaws are there. I still need to darken some of my darks, her posture is a little off.. But what I learned from that first piece help huge amounts in this one. I skipped the line drawing phase and went right into blocking out the big shapes and values first. I probably spent about the same amount of time on both. And you can see that this piece is much closer to something you could call finished.

Whelp, that's it for today! With any luck we'll have more to show tomorrow. As always, thanks for your time. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave them below for me.

-Pi