MarkKB

I really need to be doing this more often, ne?

Askblog artyness

You might have noticed the flurry of activity I've had of late. If you haven't been looking much into it, it's because I'd decided to upload a bunch of images related to my askblogs. Askblogs, for those who don't know, are kind of like interactive webcomics - readers submit questions or prompts, and the characters "answer" them.

I myself have two askblogs, which I'd been using to practice drawing poses, not procastinating, and doing art solely on the computer (as opposed to sketching and scanning it).

One is for a Friendship Is Magic original character named 'Floam':



And the other is for my Lilo & Stitch OC experiments - 419, 426 and 628:



You can visit the one for my experiments at theexperimentaltrio.tumblr.com…, if you are curious enough. As for the pony one, I'm not confident in it as is and kind of want to work up the story arc I have planned for that one, but haven't had time recently to do so, so I won't be linking it yet (although it's easy enough to find if you really want to.)

"Proper" art

For the most part, the askblog stuff was all drawn last year or the year before at various points in time. In my last journal I promised I'd be drawing more in the future, but, apart from a bit here and there I've had not a lot of time to do it.

I will be submitting one more piece that I'd done a while back, the first page of a multi-page comic that I'd been holding on to for the completion of the rest of the pages, but I've since realised that if it's going to take so long I might as well submit the first piece now. (For those who have been following me since literally years ago, the title, Exchange, might sound familiar. ^^ )

There are also two more artistic pieces that I've worked on this year that are now finished, both of them character reference sheets. One of them I'd been procrastinating on for a while, and the other's a lot newer. Be warned that I tend to write somewhat long notes (even for me!) with my character sheets (you only need to look at the reference sheets for Experiment 419 and Experiment 426 for proof of that!)

Other works on the horizon include:

• A Series of Tubes, which depicts a scene from one of my fanfics
• 99 Red Balloons, a Lilo & Stitch pic inspired by the titular song
• a couple of pictures intended to depict scenes from a animation I'm working on
• Triumphant, a picture for the (fairly crazy) animé Kyouran Kazoku Nikki
• The Oncoming Storm, a Doctor Who pic
• Some additions for the Stuff I Like series of pics
• Some "poster"/"cover" art for various fanfics
• Some original art I still haven't gotten around to
• Other things I'm not planning on talking about right now.

I put this list here partially in order to put pressure on myself to actually commit to finishing these.

Adding art to groups

I've also been adding some of my old stuff to relevant groups. If you're watching a group and have already seen some of it, sorry!

Extra-Curricular

I've recently unleashed upon the world a beta version of The Askblog List! It's kinda bare looking, so if on the off-chance you have an askblog or Tumblrpon, be sure to click on the "Request an Invite" link so I can add your askblog to our list.

I've also released the first version of a program called Flash Card, which acts like, well, a virtual flash card program. You can create your own card sets, and it comes with three sets for Japanese characters.

Thanks for reading!
--MarkKB

Jeez, I kind of fell off the map for a while, didn't I?

Website woes

Last year had a number of things that took up my attention. One of the big ones were problematic webhosts for my website, which is now located at the spiffy domain of www.markkb.com/. Thankfully I am now with one that seems to be a) communicative and b) stable, so that shouldn't be a problem going forward.

New fanfiction section on website

Speaking of which, I've finally launched the Fanfiction section of my website, which you can visit at www.markkb.com/stuff/fanfic/. It features author's commentary talking about my memories on writing the fics, what I was trying to do with some of the chapters, and comparing them to later versions. It also has, for the first time on the Internet since its random deletion back in 2005, the first ever version of Lilo & Stitch's Star Trek, so you guys can witness how much I sucked back then.

Right now it only has Starlight (nee Lilo & Stitch's Star Trek) and A Trip To Japan (nee Lilo & Stitch Go To Japan), but more will be coming soon.

Askblog

I've been also busy running an askblog! (An askblog, if you don't know, is when people ask a character questions and they answer them, to put it simply.) It's been running for a while, and it recently hit 300 followers, which is more than I can say for anything else I've ever done, especially since I initially only started it just to work on my digital art skills as well as working on a schedule, and the story kind of bloomed from there.

I'd prefer not to show it off right now on deviantART because it hasn't really gotten into the story arc I've planned for it yet. Once that's underway, I'll link it then.

A website for askblogs?

I've also been working on a website called "The Askblog List", which aims to be a voting site/catalogue of, well, askblogs. We're currently in the invite stage, so if you have an askblog, we'd love you to request an invite so we have at least a few askblogs up when the beta launches.

(It also helps us to know what kind of categories we should create initially!)

You can visit the website at askbloglist.com/, and to request an invite, simply click on the big purple button that says "Request an invite".

More art coming soon!

While, as you can see, I've been quite busy (not to mention fitting in time to write chapters for my fanfics) but rest assured I will be making time to do some more art in the future, so hopefully you'll see some more art from me soon!

Alright, I officially have regained Internet access!

Also, it seems my old website host is down for good. I've found a new one, and now my website can now be found at markk-b.fii.me!

Because of about NZ$1000 worth of fees, most of which came from a friend of my brother making several long phone calls to mobile numbers, I probably won't be on the Internet for a while - at the house's current income, it'll probably take around four months to pay it off. Hopefully we'll manage something before then (I don't think I can stand four months!) but until then, I'll probably be able to only come on every now and then via Internet café (I'm using one right now to type this message. )

Until then, toodaloo!
-MarkKB

Okay, for some artwork I've noticed I've been writing really long 'summaries' for, since I want to cram in lots of little infos abou how I made it. So, to keep from making the summary a lengthly mess, I've decided to put them in journals instead.

This one's the first, for this year's Christmas pic, I Felt Sorry You're Adopted.

Artist's Notes

A quick aside: I only realised after I posted the pic that the date I'd posted it on was four months to the day after Christmas Eve, and only a few days after the first anniversary of Portal 2.

 

Specs

This is the highest resolution image I've ever done - the dimensions of the image, before cropping and resizing, weigh in at 5650x3650. Because of the size and number of layers I had, my computer had trouble keeping track of all the data in memory (it didn't slow down, but some... odd things started happening.) Since then, I've doubled my RAM to 2GB, so that shouldn't be a problem.

 

Changes from the original sketch

First off, I drew all the panels freehand with the mouse, with the help of a grid and guidelines for the slopes. The panels in the origial sketch were inconsistant and uneven  mainly because I'd only drawn them in to get an idea of how it would look.

Wheatley and Pleakley were both redrawn almost entirely - with Wheatley it was everything but his outer outline and his handlebars, while with Pleakley it was everything from the neck down. In Wheatley's case, it was because I'd sketched him from memory, and as it turns out my memory sucks. And in Pleakley's case, I realised that I'd been drawing his clothes wrong for years! In boh cases, I grabbed a ref and redrew the parts that needed redrawing.

I had to completely redraw the the Aperture Science Core Removal Pit®, mainly because I suck at drawing ovals freehand. For that I used some guide...ovals, I guess, while referring to the ref.

Lastly, Lilo got new feet, so to speak. Originally she was barefoot, and her feet were sloped downwards and pointing left. I realised that this clashed with the perspective elsewhere in the room, so I redrew them - with sandals, for good measure.

 

Art Issues

Originally I was going to shade the L&S characters, but I had trouble shading it in a way that looked good to me, so I decided to turn it off in the final pic. (The last month was alternating between havng a crack at the shading and... er, long bouts of procastination. If I'd forgone trying to shade it, I probably would have been able to release it in March.) Being under a spotlight means they have a valid excuse, anyway!

Initially I wanted it to be obvious that Pleakley was shivering at the sight of GLaDOS, but I didn't thinkhis shiver-lines worked too well with the piece so I turned them off as well. I might post the shivering version in my scraps later on.

Annoyingly, after I'd finished painting GLaDOS, my art program crashed, and the autosave file was corrupted, which meant I had to paint her all over again. It also happened again after I painted the panels!

 

Refs

For the layout of the Central AI Chamber, I used this image from the Half-Life wiki. The colour scheme and position of the plates were inspired by an image similar to this one of Chell standing before GLaDOS (the actual one I used I can't seem to find anymore. )

All of the characters were sketched from memory, but for two I used refs to help redraw them in the lineart stage:

Wheatley, from the Half-Life wiki.

Pleakley, from Magic Ears. (I actually used a much lower res version of this image from another website when I actually drew it, but today I tried searching for it on Bing just on the offchance I'd find the original. While it did bring up the small one, the More Sizes feature brought up the link above - something Google's More Sizes feature had not, oddly enough.)