The first trailer for Metal Gear Rising definitely piqued my curiosity but the long secrecy behind the game along with the lack of any solid information on what it was actually gonna play like (stealth? action? both?) and Kojima Productions’ ability to truly deliver on the “Lighting Fast Action” tagline has caused my interest in the title to wane a little bit.
Well, Spike’s VGA revealed a brand new trailer for the game today (above) and, just like that, Metal Gear Rising has skyrocketed to the top of my must play list. Sure, it was an exciting, action oriented and very over the top trailer and it seems much closer to the “Lighting Fast Action” promise than the original trailer was but what really sealed the deal for me was “Developed by Platinum Games.” Bayonetta is easily one of my favorites games of the last couple years (Vanquish slightly less so) and, well, these guys know how to do brawlers and they’re gonna make an awesome game out of this. It was the pedigree that Kojima Productions needed to turn Rising from a “well, they tried a different genre at least” to a “OMG, THIS IS THE BEST ACTION GAME I’VE EVER PLAYED!”
I absolutely cannot wait to get my hands on this now.
This was done for the newly started Drink and Draw NYC weekly challenges. It’s amusing to me that I’m doing these from Barcelona but I loved going to the Drink and Draw gatherings back in the lovely city of New York so these online challenges are a great way to keep in touch with that group of people.
The challenge was to mix Gundam with a superhero and after, a fair amount of deliberation, I went with Cyclops from the X-Men because his power seemed one that would translate well to a robot.
And, once again, I love drawing mechs because you can pretty much throw subtlety out the window. You just have to make it bigger, badder and crazier.
A was a little lost as to how to handle this at first but it’s quickly becoming one of my favorites now.
Two things I like about this one:
1) It’s actually the first one where part of the figure is cropped which is a result of me thinking a little more about composition from the beginning instead of creating two floating figures and then throwing a background behind them.
2) I changed the shading up a bit in that there is different colored light being reflected on the figures instead of just gradually darkening of the base color.
The background is obviously inspired by the cover to the first BioShock and it was nice to be able to put a little storytelling in there. I like how it’s the calm before the storm and it just made sense to have the fight be over a Little Sister, even if Mario ends up looking like a dick in the process.
Ryu is up next and the line art is done but I’m gonna wait a bit before I tackle it because there are still other things I want to draw (and commissions too). I’m trying to get these to be a weekly thing at the very least though.
I saw this tutorial and I wanted to try out the technique shown at the very bottom of it. That guy is really good and he has a bunch of other tutorials which should be quite helpful in future pieces.
I like how this turned out all things considered but, I have to admit, I didn’t want to spend too much time on it so I just covered her face with hair. Lazy, I know.
EDIT: Added the eye. Looked kinda dumb with all that hair.
First of all, if you haven’t heard of The Binding of Isaac, go on Steam and download it for the “we’re giving it away for free” price of 5 bucks (less if you get it during a Steam sale). You’ll get countless hours of fun from the randomly generated dungeons where you unlock more items and enemies the more you play it. . Every playthrough is completely different and there are no lives or checkpoints in this game so you die once (unless you find that one item…) and it’s back to the beginning of the game.
Bottom line, I’ve been having loads of fun with this game and, much like it was when I did Mario vs. Meat Boy way back when, I was just compelled to draw this.
I thought about how best to handle this but it had to be with the image that is most representative of the game which is Isaac curled up in the fetal position. It’s also a little different from my previous Mario fights in that it’s not an all out brawl but rather a “WTF” moment where Mario doesn’t even know what to make of it. And yes, those are all in-game items on Isaac’s head, even the scratches and the flies. The dead bird is actually a pretty good one.
I also started adding Yoshi, Peach and Luigi behind Mario all of which were appalled just like he is. I did the finished line art and even flats but I dropped the idea eventually. It was becoming less and less about Isaac and more about the Mushroom Kingdom. Also, no matter how I tried, I wasn’t getting the feeling I wanted from the digital line art which makes me glad to have waited for a scanner all this time instead of going fully digital. I really like how the line art on these comes out when I work them on paper.
Now the only question is what name to use when I get to Dead Space’s Isaac…
I’ve had this sitting in my sketchbook for what seems like ages but it’s finally done. It’s not bloody or too violent but the prospect of Mario’s hand exploding should leave lots to the imagination, I think. The background is my nod to the Atari cover of the game. And yes, the Dig Dug protagonist was renamed Taizo Hori at some point but Wikipedia says he was actually called “Dig Dug” in the first game so that’s what I’m going with.
Because of scanner woes (and just regular ol’ woes as well) it has been literally half a year since I posted scans from my sketchbook. That’s much longer than I would’ve liked but, to be honest, there hasn’t been much activity in the sketchbook front anyway. I aim to change that and this post is just the beginning of the catch up process.
Below are scan of pages dating back to June of 2011. There is figure drawing from the June Drink and Draw in NYC, the usual monster and naked/semi-naked ladies as well as one character from a larger, personal project of mine (bet you can’t guess who it is).
With only a handful of pages left to fill in this sketchbook, these updates will go from monthly to bi-weekly until I catch up with the scans completely. The full set of scans for this sketchbook can be found here.
That being said, I’ve always liked the look of it and one day, in my laziness, I was watching some videos of the game on YouTube and I started to get that itch I get when I want to draw something so I did.
I tried to go with the polar opposite of my last piece and this is perhaps my most stylized piece to date. It’s not as bold as some other stuff out there but it was fun to look at my drawing and just keep simplifying it again and again.
