Making art in Fall 2019

I said I would post more often, and then the biggest gap in posting occurs. Well, I’m still alive and I’m still making art. I’m just also still not quite as focused as I’d like to be, but I’m always working on something.

Currently I’m redesigning my https://jonathanpriceart.net/portfolio/weapon-combat-league/ characters to update them and to practice working on my own creations more. My goal is to produce a WCL Compendium featuring as much detail about the characters and the concept as possible. I’ve always had a sense that the characters could look better. I want to find a nice balance between making them stronger/sexier while keeping the detail low.

I’ve done three characters so far:

Keith Pierce (Rapier) of WCL’s Hunter Team
Genevieve Steele (Stratus) of WCL’s Polaris Team
Jennifer Halberd (Deluge) of WCL’s Polaris Team

…And I’m pretty happy with what I’ve done so far. I also made plans to make sprite rigs out of each of the characters, not necessarily for game development, but for displaying the characters in action. For example, here’s a work-in-progress of some poses for Keith (Rapier):

It’s actually kind of fun, and efficient, without including any shading or what not. I used to make up games as a kid. My friends and I would act them out (since I had no computer or any way of coding back then). I used to doodle up the special moves in a similar fashion. For my WCL Compendium project, I’d like to include the characters’ signature attacks. Since I first conceived WCL as a fighting game in the first place, it makes sense.

I’ve also decided to attempt Inktober, but the less said about that, the better, at least right now…I started, but I am so extremely rusty with traditional art that I’m almost ashamed of my first image. Still, I’ll use that as fuel to push me forward. Hopefully by Day 31, I’ll be a decent traditional artist again.

If I make it to the end, I’ll post all my Inktober 2019 drawings in a gallery here. I’ll also post them to my Facebook page https://facebook.com/dualmaskart.

It pains me to admit that the Jet Dancer game has not moved much since the last time I posted. I’ve been thinking lately about what I should do to accelerate my lifelong goal of becoming a professional artist.

I love making art, and I wish I could make a living from my own creations. But it helps to actually finish them and then market them…and deciding what to finish is a struggle for me. Finishing things seems to take forever, but the time is passing anyway, and I’m getting older. I suppose I should just pick something and see how I feel about it in a year or something.

It’s sounding like if I’m going to pick a goal, it might as well be WCL. That is what’s foremost on my mind right now anyway. I don’t think anyone is checking for the Jet Dancer game anyway…