Ryu's Return to Dreamland + My Take on Willy Wonka

I should be updating this blog more often than I have been.  From now on, I'll try to update this blog about once every week or two with one of my drawings or other art projects that I have created.  Maybe it will be fan art, or maybe it will be an original piece.  Maybe it will be something I made recently, or maybe it will be a drawing I have been saving.  Whatever the case, this should give me an opportunity to show what I can do or have been doing.

So let's get this started.  SHOWTIME!

Here is my take on the character of Willy Wonka from the story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  I originally drew this back in February of 2011 with just Photoshop, and it remains one of my favorites to this day.  This holds a firm spot in the portfolio I carry in real life.  My main goal when designing Mr. Wonka was to draw a man with an old body but a young spirit, hence the bright cyan shoes with the otherwise somewhat-formal attire.

Feel free to use the comments section to discuss this piece, as well as any that have shown up before.  Do you like it or not?  What works?  What doesn't work?  Discuss.

Trying Something New...

Been a while, huh?  Well, here's something new I thought I'd try out today, a hand-drawn GIF file.



This Pokemon is Victini, a Fire-and-Psychic-type Pokemon introduced in the Black and White versions. Today I thought I'd just tackle something quick and kind of simple. Maybe I'll try to do something better in the near future, once it actually comes to me.

Lucid: Sakura Miyazaki

Sakura Miyazaki is a Lucid, a person that can control what happens in the Dream Dimension.  She is one of the main characters for the stories about them, although she was originally being used as a figurehead for a cult led by Voy.  Thanks to the interference of Ken Thunder, however, Sakura was able to foil Voy's scheme (for now) and join the Dream Police.  Now she hopes that she can experience everything the Dream Dimension has to offer.

Sakura is generally a sweet girl who is willing to help whoever needs it.  However, she can be suspicious of strange people she meets at first.  Luckily, she can vaguely judge a person's personality easily and warm up to good-natured people rather quickly.  The one thing she cannot stand above all else is being betrayed or lied to.  Outside of that, she gets along decently with most people, although she sticks with Ken on most missions.

This drawing was drawn with regular pencil and paper first and colored in Photoshop.  Sakura's body is supposed to be based a bit off of some concept art I found of Princess Zelda for Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.  Seeing as she's supposed to be a main character and only about 16, she's supposed to appear cute and approachable.  Originally, I thought of making her costume mainly blue, but I decided to dress her in red and pink to make her more true to her name ("sakura" is Japanese for "cherry blossom", which is pink, and its fruit is red).  Her hair was also originally black, but I noticed one cartoon with characters with black hair that was illuminated a bluish-gray.  I decided to try out the dark blue hair on Sakura.

Gardevoir Traced Intimidate

The Pokemon Gardevoir has an ability that allows her to copy the ability that her opponent has.  This allows her to combat certain threats in a rather unique way by turning their strengths against them.

In this case, Gardevoir has traced Gyarados's ability: Intimidate.  This power drops the opponent's attack power when the Pokemon who has the ability first appears on the battlefield.  Gardevoir also has the ability to learn certain electric attacks, and there is nothing a Gyarados fears more than electricity.  Therefore, a Gardevoir calling down lightning must be terrifying for a Gyarados to see.

Pokemon belong to Nintendo.

Don't Cry, Electivire!

I'm a big fan of the Pokemon games, and I play a lot with my friends on Saturday nights.  I've gotten pretty good at battling other people, so at one point, I decided to try my hand at writing articles on the game.

This drawing is meant to coincide with the first article I actually wrote about the monster in the middle of the picture: Electivire.  He's an okay monster to use, but his purposes on a team are basically 1.) throw out a wide variety of attacks, and 2.) absorb electricity.  There are several other monsters that can do both of these jobs more effectively than Electivire can, as demonstrated by the two monsters tying his tails together.

All characters in this picture are in the Pokemon games, created by Nintendo.

Modern-Age Aladdin: The Sorcerer, Colored

A couple of pictures from the post about my version of "Jafar", only they were colored in.

I like the glare on the bottom one, but other than that, it seems a little dark, doesn't it?

Modern-Age Aladdin: The Sorcerer

Of course, what would the story of Aladdin be without the antagonist.  In the Disney movie, you know this character as "Jafar", but my interpretation of this role was nothing like "Jafar".

Christopher Lee was chosen as the inspiration for the sorcerer character, mainly due to him being the evil wizard from Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring.  Eventually, the character worked out to become this:

To juxtapose the skinny but tall Aladdin character, Evil Sorcerer Lee was made squat but with a huge head to match his ego.  As it turned out, I was having a lot more fun drawing the sorcerer than I was drawing Aladdin, so I decided to focus a bit more on him for the assignment.

Inital Pose

Model sheet: Front and side views

The Sorcerer makes his move, dramatically throwing a CD into a computer.

The sorcerer has a number of "spells" at his disposal: all of which are various computer viruses named after snakes.  (All of them were coded in "Python", BTW. :P)

Modern Age Aladdin Concepts

For the same Concept Art class that I took when I drew the cover for "Stray", we also had to pick one of a few stories that our professor had picked out and draw concept art for it.  I chose the story of Aladdin and began to draw after that.

Early concepts for Aladdin.  I started drawing him with Harrison Ford in mind (left), but as I went on, I thought that Luke Skywalker was more appropriate for the role of Aladdin than Han Solo was, so I started drawing him like Mark Hamill (right).  At this point, I didn't know where to take concept, so I just drew them in the clothing of Aladdin from the Disney movie.

Eventually, inspiration struck when I considered the genie.  As Robin Williams said, genies possess "phenomenal cosmic powers" but are trapped in "itty-bitty living spaces".  A modern-day equivalent of that could be some powerful computer program capable of hacking into anything, but he was stuck on a flash drive and couldn't be copied over very easily.  Thus, our modern-day genie was born, played by the original godfather: Marlon Brando.

Stray

This is the cover to "Stray", a game programmed by Patrick Knight and Holly Fletcher last year for a Digital Game Design course they took last year.  I attended a Concept Art class that paralleled that class, and I was assigned to draw cover art for their game.  The game involves the player walking along a path and gathering "memories" as he went.  The player was sure to die at the end of this path.  (In other words, it was like the mini web-game Passage.)

The game, as Fletcher and Knight programmed it, would change seasons as the player went on, so that became the main idea for the cover here, going from spring on the left to winter on the right, and summer and autumn in-between.  The art in the actual game was all squares, as that was the engine the professor of the Digital Game Design course allowed his students to use.  Since the game was so abstract, I chose to represent the "memories" on the cover with that purple flower, another natural symbol to go with time passing as seasons.  Not only is one planted in the spring, but the ambiguously-shaped shadow also carries one as it walks.  I tried to make the person as ambiguous as I could to allow either gender to associate with it a little better.

Building Bashers: Donut Shop

This is the basic enemy for the first level of "Building Bashers", a Donut Shop that rides on and shoots giant glass donuts.  I chose a donut shop for the basic enemy role for a very good reason: Where I come from, they are everywhere.  Seriously, if you are in a city in New England, try driving for five minutes without seeing a single Dunkin' Donuts.