It came from the colossally disorganised memory stick!

Some more doodles and old art today, rustled up while I was attempting to tidy some folders of doom. Maybe someday I will get all these bits of external storage properly organised and backed up in a sensible, logical manner that would be easy to navigate, but today is not that day. Anyway, onto the art...

Starting with this impromptu scribble from a couple of years ago. This is an idea for redraw of issue 2 of Facts About the World. It will see the light of day eventually. I am determined.


 Jonesy and a bit of art style practice, which I am keen on in terms of all the texture and what-have-you... would've helped if I'd actually written down which brushes were used for all this, really.

More Facts stuff, with a logo design for the Nautilus Technology Expo. This one was inspired by some retro Sega designs, mainly the PAL region logo for the Dreamcast (the blue version, superb) and the STI logo, as in Sega Technical Institute. Quite an unfortunate acronym, to say the least...


 A little warmup doodle, mucking about with stylised scenery.

A redraw of an older thing that never ended up being finished and in a rare moment of restraint (given my track record for getting rid of art that I'm not happy with), the original version of this does still exist, so we have something to compare it with. Brace yourself because this next one is fuckin' awful...


 To be fair, this is from when I was A: getting back into art after a few years off (i.e. catastrophically out of practice) and B: still working out digital art, so part of this was done in Paint.net and the rest in Rebelle, which I had no idea how to use at the time, evidently. (To be fair, there are still certain menus that I wouldn't touch with a bargepole but that's like the granular little menus for making fiddly adjustments to brushes, and I don't want to break anything...)


Alan, the King of the Jungle!
 

 One lonely surviving bit of art pertaining to the second version of Ichor, wherein Farren is doing a bit of doodling of his own. The motifs in the border represented different aspects of the story, some of which have been recycled in Wade in the Flood (the monolith is probably the most immediately obvious one - that's been a staple from the very first iteration back in 2018.)
 

 The original version of a cross-stitch pattern inspired by the cult of maneki nekos in Control. This is still in the house, but I have no idea where...
 

Also found the pixel art for it in another folder, with an attempted CRT effect on it. 
 
 
And in the interest of being complete, the original doodle on an envelope. 
 

Now for something rrreeally old, this is going back about 2013! It was at one point the back cover to a sketchbook that completely fell apart (crappy glued binding, go figure) and all the pages have long since disappeared, but I kept this collage.
 

 And more Control-themed cross-stitch; this one was the second pattern that I ever designed (the first was the cat off The Evil Within because of course it was.) This one was meant to be fit one of those hexagonal flexihoops (hence the weird text layout) but it just would not go into the hoop without the design ending up distorted, so here it is in a circular format instead. It's also been waiting in the wings for a redesign for ages; I fancied a more ambitious effort with more stylised lettering and some hazy shading, like the glow of the astral plane but as it is, that still hasn't been done yet, although we like/tolerate the idea very much.
 

 Speaking of, here's my first ever cross-stitch design! This one was designed in Paint.net and the backstitch was improvised on the fly. The threads contrast better in person, it's just impossible to get a decent photo of this bugger.
 

 And to finish up, some more old art from 2013, a little watercolour postcard, which Sebastian Catstellanos is giving a rather honest critique. Well, you can't please everyone.

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Further rambling

Twa Thousand Corbies

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Going to start this post with an illustration, because of this blog layout, posts lacking images tend to look a bit pants. The art here is by G. Howell-Baker. A while back, I was joking about gathering together as many versions of Twa Corbies as possible, and finally, here we are. This is going to be a continually evolving list, so if you know of a version that needs to be included, or if you've recorded one of your own, then by all means, let me know. You can put a comment here or e-mail me at looksinnocuousnenoughchaps [at] gmail [dot] com. Part two, with versions 50-100 can be found here . Let's begin! 1.  Folly Bridge - My personal favourite, performed completely a capella with some beautiful, eerie harmonies. 2.  Hamish Imlach - A live version, and a very close second favourite. Hamish's distinctive voice works wonders here and we're treated to some elegant sitar as well. 3.  Ayreheart - This one features the lute and a passionate vocal performance, it's qui...
'Ave a gander 'ere

Some doodles from last night

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I went on a bit of a spree last night, trying out some different brushes in Rebelle 7, trying to work out what approach I might want to take for reviving Facts About the World, and here are some of the resulting doodles. First, a swoonicorn investigating Blarglflorp, the tiniest comet in the cosmos. Ara, done entirely using ink brushes with varying degrees of water. It's been a bit of running joke that their markings are different every time I draw them, and this time is no exception. (They were initially based on a striped dolphin but at this point, it's anyone's guess. Cynosure was a futuristic thing with cyborgs anyway, so what kind of dolphin Ara resembled wasn't exactly a pressing logical concern.) And one from the end of the night, which didn't end up being coloured because I'd been up since 3am again and needed to go to bed.
'Ave a gander 'ere

Fridayposting

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It is Friday, continuing the theme of the spooky video games, I'm currently revisiting Still Wakes the Deep and trying to finish up the blog post about that (it's a good job this isn't an audio effort because noone needs to hear yours truly going "Fuckin' 'ell, McLeary!!!" in an incredibly questionable Glaswegian accent whenever the mood so takes me.) Sod's law, I completely forgot to actually get the pictures off of Mariner... it was late at night. For now, it's time to return to the comfy slippers of The Callisto Protocol, not in chronological order and not really with a theme in mind either, just a bit of fun for today. Starting with these artfully arranged Crunchy Creatures, with a bit of an HR Giger kind of vibe. I also appreciate the elegantly flowing mist around here. Hmmm . (This one's off the PS4 version, I redid it on the PS5 but a big cloud of mist was obscuring one of the monsters and we can't have that.) This hexagonal effort...
'Ave a gander 'ere