Animated Troll...

I posted my old sprite sheet for my Troll character Rune a few days back. The good news is I decided to finally make her into a series of animated GIF's. I am really pleased with how she turned out.

I think she looks really good now she is moving and it was a lot of fun making her.

The program used was Photoshop CS5.

I think the ear of the original forward facing one looked a little odd. It looks as if the ear keeps shrinking so I changed it. I think the new one looks a lot better and works better.

Now it looks like she is just wiggling her ears a bit as she walks. Which is something the character does do.

Old Poetry: Vampires Sonnet

Oh sweet the pain that he gives me by night,
Makes my passion burn. The cuts made for him,
Sliced through skin, so my life bloods his lips.
The tender bite of death. In deep midnight
Our romance has breath, we un-dead.

Love's torture dances in the moon's wild heart,                 
And angel wings upon my back stained black.
The mark of evil love upon my neck
Now weeps for him. His crimson lips caress
And carve upon my heart his name.

In night's shroud we indulge the need of blood,
Souls dyed a lustful red by Tears of stars.
My forfeit. Pure flesh cut, you hold me tight
My neck is thine, marked by our bite

Old Sprite Work!

Was looking through old things I have made and found my first attempt at spriting. I must admit to using a human female base however it was an extensive re-colour and the ears and tail are all my own work.

The sprite itself is compatible with the old RPG Maker XP software and is fully working and useable.

So anyway... I am very proud of her as for a first attempt at sprite work she came out perfect. I should really turn her into a moving GIF at some point...

Update: I made her into a GIF check the blog post HERE. 

Rant- Retro Gaming and Nostalgia Goggles.

So wandering the interwebs as I am want to do I have come across a raging debate in the gaming community about retro games compared to the new games. Now I am not above the occasional "in my day we only had three lives and liked it" kind of comment or feeling (being raised in the era of Mega Drive and SNES) but it truly baffles me just how much some people get so angry about the fact games have progressed.

It seems a large amount of the gamer community is just so stuck in their ways that it sparks aggression just suggesting change.

I truly wonder if these people are the same ones that as children dreamed of VR-headsets and having personal robots... If they were how did that spark die?

Now this post was spawned by this YouTube vid:

It's witty and funny and part of me can't help but agree with the some of the sentiment. However having actually played Hart Gold I can say that I give full thumbs up for remakes!

I like the fact that games have and will continue to progress, its a good thing and gets me one step closer to my VR-headset!

Making a Meal out of Data

Just some old work I found to post today. In essence this old project was about:

a) Making a Photo-montage.
b) Interpreting data and then converting it into image.

This is the Original photo-montage made of many of the pictures taken during a picnic in a place called Mount Edgecombe. These are fairly sequential and work their way out as the day wore on in a rough time scale relative to the picnic. There was a lot of raw data to interpret here but I just broke it down into two categories:


1) Light/Shade.

You can see light represented very simply with off-white colour stars and shade represented very simply with dark indigo stars. 

2) Nature Sounds / Man-made Sounds.  

The red and orange spikes represent man made sounds the more orange the spike means the more likely it is to be things such as talking or breathing and the more red means the more likely the noise is to be of the objects making noise like crisp packets rustling or mobile phones ringing etc.
The green leaves represent the natural or nature noises such as the wind or birdsong.

Final Image:

The entire thing when layered together looks like its own mini country. Both the data-interpretation and the photo-montage make for an interesting and busy final image.

So that is how to make Data out of a meal :p

Edit:  I found the initial concept work for this project so I thought I would post it for brevity.

Interactive Rooms

Bit of a random post today... As I mentioned in the last post, due to my beloved computer with all my software going boom, my attentions towards creative summer projects have shifted.

They have shifted towards decorating my best friends house, where I happen to be living to now. :)

Now aside from the normal decorating and us mixing paints to achieve the EXACT pallet we want / need I have been allowed a lot of creative freedom. So it looks like her sons will have an interactive bedroom in terms of paint.  This means: glow in the dark, U.V. reactive and thermocromic paint!

Thermocromic paint and indeed ink has been a passion of mine for a fairly long time now. The basic concept is you have a pigment and a regular acrylic, these are mixed resulting in a paint that at room temp is the pigment colour and when heated changes to the colour of the acrylic. Meaning that for instance little hands will make things change colours, thus making a bed room far more interesting
Here is a bit more science...

There will also be glow in the dark paint to brighten the rooms up at night and UV reactive paint, well, just because I can really :)

Also the hallway may have glitter on the lower half of the wall. In an effort to bounce a little more light around the very dark hall, glitter does move the limited light around a little more and actually gives a really great effect on the walls.

So in short the house is transforming into a interactive, changing space that is very conductive to creativity.

Technology FAIL :(

OK so I haven't been able to do the projects I wanted to do this summer. This is for two reasons, firstly the cost of a good internet service is staggering and secondly the untimely and rather upsetting death of Elecktra my main computer. So I am pretty much technology-less. This coupled with the death of my phone has not left me well. There are plans in place to get me a new computer bigger and far better than before however, also at some point to get my old laptop fixed. Till then all plans for technology based projects have gone on hold.

In other and more happy news I have been very busy, painting and decorating! I have found out that it is actually very arty on occasion and it is good fun. I have moved in with a friend and the house is gradually transforming into something very pretty. It may not seem related but I think that decorating and design on this level is helpful to widen my style and expertise.

Also in other arty news I have now taken up cross stitch. Its very relaxing, yet has proven to be more skill intensive than I had anticipated. However anything arty to occupy myself in down time is all good.