~recurring

Xancsia is newer member of deviantArt, a keen writer and a community spirited individual, judging by the number of comments she has left for other works on this site. While I focus a lot on my digital art right now, Xancsia asked for some poetry to read through and comment on, seeking something above par. I was a far busier writer years ago and have currently three poems in my gallery, and I was quite excited to see she enjoyed two of them enough to feature them in her journal! The entry in question is a neat one, collating some of her favourites in a very accessible, categorised structure. Check out the rest of the favs she's collected and, before you leave, read through her own gallery. Plenty of thought provoking material.

She favoured these two:


I felt honoured that she made use of the same rhyming structure I built 'A Blasphemy' in her own excellent poem with a twist:


You know how to make a guy feel special!

Following this, Blacklava featured two of my llama inspired digital art pieces in her news item The Animal Kingdom in Art, which was another reason to feel all glowy today. This news feature showcases how animals have inspired all kinds of art, from makeup to gateaux! Look through the collection she's made on that page for insight into some remarkable imaginations!

The two pieces she found the most apt were:


Thanks to them both for the attention and for going to the effort of publishing such excellent collections. You do the community a great service!

I really should spend more time reading journals and news items and spending serious time on other people's galleries. I browse regularly and get updates on quite a few galleries... I should talk about them more often.

It was a desperate hour in LlamaLAN-land. With the populace practically entirely assimilated by the Cyberllama Queen, what hope was there?

Enter the Super Llamas!

So, the next LlamaLAN, the tenth edition, takes place this August 15th - 17th. LlamaLAN IX was such a massive success and it looks set that X will be no different. Well, if it's different in any way it will be in a good way.

Interested in a fun LAN party in Kent, England? [link]

My latest two deviations are the artwork to promote LlamaLAN X - one with titles as the official poster, one without which I've posted only here.

While the latest bit of work took a lot of time and effort, it was worth it. When I'd completed the inking work I thought a few of the lines looked far too heavy. However I'm very happy with the final result. You can read far more detail about it all on the works themselves, if you're at all interested. There's a link in there to the uncoloured lineart as well.

The next project is something quite different, at last. I've been invited to join a games mod team called The Wolfpack. My job will be to help with conceptual artwork on their Crysis mod 'The Creation'. However, my first job is to provide them with a 2D logo. Seems I'll be producing quite a bit more work more often in the coming months...

Oy.

Well, this made me go all warm and fuzzy inside!

[link]

Shcaradeus has made the effort to collect a gallery of what she considers great work by unnoticed artists. The focus this time was on Adventure and Fantasy. There's a lot of excellent work in her selection and I fully recommend viewing all of it. Meanwhile, I'm chuffed to bits to say that my latest (our girl the Assimilator) is one of her selections. Made my month, that has!

I thank Shcaradeus for the attention, but more importantly for the effort she's gone to promote so many different artists of different styles who deserve a bit more attention. Nice job - I look forward to the next one.

Check the news item and spread it about yourselves. Let's get these artists some attention.

The chicken has landed and the llamas have been assimilated!

I really needed a mental push to crack on with these projects. The LlamaLAN IX series was a behemoth, and to be honest it would not have been such a slog had I organised my time properly. But for both of these projects I just had to tell myself that I will never have enough time if I don't decide to just get on with things.

What was it Muse said? "Don't waste your time or time will waste you."

The results are fantastic. I rarely speak well of my own stuff but I am still very happy with the final part of the five piece LlamaLAN IX series.

Now let me share the advice I used to help me acheive it. The techniques I studied and learnt from these guys were adapted to these projects, and I'm sure if you're a digital artist, you can make use of their methods.

Photoshop Colouring Techniques - An excellent colouring method: [link]
CGing Tutorial: [link]

These links were originally picked up from Princess-Of-Shadow's report:
[link]

And the chap who inspired me to start this kind of work in the first place:
[link]

There's a project I really must get started on, concerning chickens [link] from the game known as Crysis [link]

I shan't say more for now.

Beyond that I have more llamas to crack on with. The LlamaLAN [link] organisers have a date for LlamaLAN IX AND LlamaLAN X. Jeepers. The last poster [link] took me so long to do mostly because I was mad enough to draw an entire scene full of far too many details. My plan for LLIX is to stick to characters because I'm going to be drawing rather a lot of them. Nine, to be exact.

Whenever a theme for each event is being conjured, one of the organisers suggests a ream of titles, cultural references, anything recognisable that relate to the numerical order of the next event. For example, LlamaLAN VIII was inspired by Lost's Dharma Initiative [link] and its logo's references to the eight steps to enlightenment, hence the Lost references, the Llama Initiative, and that the next hyped up game was Crysis, set on an island not dissimilar to the one in the TV show.

I suspect using numbers as inspiration will become impossible eventually.

Still, an idea for LLIX was 'Seven of Nine' [link] , everyone's favourite Borg. Another of the organisers and I rather like to maintain the sci-fi influence of the artwork. Of all in the list, the borg idea had potential, and so the gears and cogs in my head started whirling and haven't stopped since.

I like to layer references upon references in these LlamaLAN pieces. I noticed that many "Lord of The Rings" wannabes (Eragon anyone? [link]) like to release character posters amidst large cinema complexes, so I'm going to parady this practice. My plan is to draw characters that relate to all previous LAN parties [link] , most of which had characters anyway. They'll all be brought up to date and they'll all be assimilated into the borg collective. At the same time, the latest gaming craze is the excellent Team Fortress 2 [link] . There are nine character classes in TF2 and this is coincidentally the ninth LlamaLAN, so each llama character will map to both a LAN party and a TF2 character. Another fine coincidence is that the primary character for LlamaLAN VII [link] was the first female llama - hence, seven of nine will fittingly be female.

I'm hoping that the release of each character poster, in chronological order, over the course of nine weeks, will create anticipation for which TF2 character will represent which LAN, and most of all what the final character will actually look like.

Sorry guys, I'm not going to say here either. Wait and see.