I've been playing a lot of Resident Evil lately. Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 to be precise. Ever since I first played Resident Evil 2 on the Nintendo 64, I was hooked on the series. I had never played anything like it to that point in time. I have many fond memories of running around the Raccoon Police Department and being hunted by Mr. X and of the numerous confrontations with constantly mutating William Birkin. Resident Evil 2 was actually pretty short once you knew where to go and what to get. It debuted a concept in the form of a relentless hunter that was much stronger than your regular enemies and able to pursue you at seemingly random times (though once you've played through the scenarios once, you'll know exactly when to expect Mr. X to show up).
The Mr. X concept was essentially ramped up and intensified to become Nemesis in Resident Evil 3. Nemesis was much tougher, faster, and smarter than Mr. X in RE2. Whereas Mr. X could only attack you at scripted points in the game, Nemesis could strike you almost anywhere in the game in addition to the regular scripted encounters. There's only a few times in the game where you must fight Nemesis and don't have an option to escape. The rest of the time you can choose to run rather than fight, but he will chase you until you take him down or you advance forward to certain parts of the game. Though I still hold the Gamecube remake of the original Resident Evil to be the best game the series has ever produced to this point, Nemesis had its moments when it was pretty slick.
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The main protagonist of RE3 is Jill Valentine, one of the original characters from the first game. Pretty much all of the Resident Evil ladies have developed their own fan bases in a way, but Jill still reigns supreme as the most popular of them second perhaps only to Claire Redfield of RE2. Nevertheless, all the time spent playing RE3 lately inspired me to draw this pic on the right. It's a simple concept of Jill posing in a very sexy manner with a silhouette of the Nemesis behind her serving as a semi-bodyguard as well as a convenient placer of tentacles. For anyone wondering, the "X"s all over his silhouette are marks used to indicate sections that should be all black. Sometimes artists will choose to shade those spots in pencil and sometimes they use the "X" mark to indicate to an inker what it should be colored in.
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In an earlier post (this one as a matter of fact) I posted a sketch of Claire Redfield I was working on. This was what the final colorized version ended up becoming. Fans of the RE series will no doubt be able to recognize all the nods on the monitors behind her.
Been testing out a new arena these past couple weeks. I've been dabbling in coloring other artists' works. I don't typically do that, but I decided I wanted to improve my coloring skill set and the best way is to first find something worth coloring.
When coloring somebody else's work, I view it as kinda interpreting their intention. With my own stuff, I have an idea already of what colors would look like. With someone else's, I piece together the details and suggestions they worked into their lines and go from there.
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I've colorized a few pieces from the highly talented LCFreitas (you can view his work here). The first collaboration was this piece featuring Supergirl. I thought it came out well all things considered. As with anything in life, there is a learning curve. There is always room for improvement and I know I will improve as I color more and varied images.
Every story needs an antagonist and every hero needs a villain to face. When I wrote the short story, Twilight, there wasn't originally a dedicated villain. The story was just about one woman's terrifying encounter with a werewolf and the unexpected ending to that event with the heavy implication that she was now to become one herself.
The Lobos family grew out of that event as the story and its universe expanded. After I penned the short story sequel to Twilight, Dusk, I began formulating who the primary enemies would be. Michael was the first since he is the owner of the company where Laurel works at the beginning. Victor was the next one, whose debut is in Dusk. Nicholas, Helena, and Luna came later to fill out the current incarnation of the Lobos family.
I had the numbers down. It was time to figure out what their relationships with each other were. Michael is the oldest followed by Victor, Nicholas, Helena, and then Luna. Michael is generally considered the smartest, Victor the most conniving, Nicholas the loose cannon, Helena the smart and beautiful sister, and Luna the baby of the family and the one who needs protecting.
Michael has a more annihilistic view of the world in that he believes mankind would seek to wipe out all werewolves were they to learn of their existence. As a guard against that inevitability, he wants to merge the Lobos and Dawn bloodlines and create a potential generation of superwolves. When Legacy begins, he thinks that Laurel is the last surviving Dawn woman and his last chance to realize his goal. In early drafts Michael was a somewhat more cut-and-dried villain, but later edits would seek to humanize him a bit more and suggest that although he does a lot of bad things, he may not be all bad.
Whereas Michael has a somewhat "good" intention to his plans, Viktor only desires power and he's willing to do whatever it takes to get it. He has no problems with undermining Michael or even killing his own siblings if he must. The power struggle between the two isn't something explored much in Legacy, but it is something that I touched on somewhat in previous drafts.
Luna was an interesting character to write because she doesn't technically start the story as an antagonist. At the beginning, she's just caught in the middle of the conflict between Michael and Laurel. She puts her life at risk to save Laurel during a scene in the first half of the book. However, her own feelings of jealousy and her inability to cope with them ultimately lead her down a dark path.
Dawn Chronicles: Legacy is available here in both printed and Kindle formats!
After flirting with the concept for a few weeks, I finally went ahead and ordered a number of small posters of my art in the 11x17 format. They came out pretty good! I was concerned at the time how they would show up because I wasn't getting consistent color reads on my own printer at home, but thankfully the skin tone on the image came out just right to me.
Now that I've dipped my toes in the water of larger format printing, there's a couple of images I have in mind that I want to also be able to offer in 11x17 size. I would need to essentially redo them at least partially to ensure that they would print crisply at the bigger scale, but I don't think that will take me too much time. My only real obstacle at this point is the necessary funds to do so. However, it's good to have a plan. Executing said plan is the real trick...
I watched this episode of the Twilight Zone a couple of nights ago. I was first exposed to it a number of months back at my work (my locker is in the team center, so they usually have something playing on the TV most of the time). I wasn't able to finish the episode at that time, but what I did see of it had me intrigued. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the basis of the episode is simple: A man obsessed with being called the best pool player around gets his chance to play for eternal glory when the spirit of the best pool player in town comes back for one high-stakes game where victory means life and defeat means death.
The concept is simple, but the theme is universal: Sometimes being the best comes with unintended consequences. In the case of this episode, the man does ultimately become the legend he always wanted to be, but in doing so becomes tied to the burden of being the best even in the afterlife.
I think in any field there's a price to pay if you want to be the king of the mountain. The man in this episode has allowed his life to be completely devoured by his obsession of being the best pool player in history. The spirit, "Fats" Brown, tries to warn him at numerous points throughout the story that there is more to life than just the game. He was the best not just because he put in the time, but because he also lived outside of the game too.
I think it's easy to forget to actually live life sometimes when we're being consumed by the daily minutia of our Facebook-infused and Internet-lined lives. That status update will always be there when you return. Get outside and enjoy the sun.
