Herderrrr! I forgot this!

So in the post I did earlier, I meant to post this as well. The problem was, I'd forgotten to finish it by drawing the guy on the far right. Watch me herpaderp, everyone!

Here is what I've been up to on either side of preparing for Shuto Con. The middle two were supposed to be part of my Intentional Practice but I got carried away and finished them a tad more completely than I'd originally planned which threw it all off. I'll start back with that next week.

These four are the main characters and their best friends from my long-standing story, Rain of Fire. From left to right they are MaiTeia, lady-in-waiting to the short woman next to her, who is YuKia Fuenoia or Firestorm, Princess of War. Next is Andiago, Prince of the Alliance and fiance' of Firestorm, though the poor girl isn't allowed to know that little bit of trivia until an hour before the wedding. Last is Majene, Andiago's best friend and comrade in arms.

To finish off the trivia before I go into more about the art part of the deal, their ages are, respectively, 30, 20, 21 and 32. The three tall ones are part of an alien race the came to live peacefully on earth when their planet kicked the bucket, known as Ye-Ap.

Name Pronunciation (as I imagine you are lost) :

Note: There is no particular accent on the syllables, like in Japanese. The Fu is also pronounced in the Japanese fashion, more Hu than a hard F.

Ye-Ap = Yay-Ahp

MaiTeia= My-Tey-Ah

YuKia Fuenoia = You-Key-Ah Fu-En-Oh-Ee-Ah

Andiago = Ahn-Dee-Ah-Go (this is the easy one!)

Majene = Ma-Jay-Nay

Okay so now that the formalities of character introduction is over, I'm VERY happy with how they turned out. I'm still getting the hang of my tablet but seeing results like this makes me thrilled. I'm rather heavy-handed with graphite so its nice to be able sketch and erase cleanly for the most part.

Firestorm seems the most solid but that makes sense since I've been drawing her since 9th grade which is 12 years so it makes sense that she is so easy for me to just whip out. Andiago is pretty good aside from being stiff because I was primarily focusing on proportions and design with him, less on gesture. I've been drawing him for almost as long as Firestorm but he has undergone a recent revamp due to freakin' James Cameron's tall blue people (The Ye-Ap used to be blue...).

I'm particularly proud of how Mai turned out. I've only drawn her once before and that was before Cameron crushed my blue Ye-Ap dreams. Seeing her so well fleshed out and adorkable makes me seriously happy. I think I sped through Maj a bit though. He still looks good, better than I expected, thanks to Kristie's fabulous proportion-focused panel at Shuto Con. I just didn't finesse him as much as I did the others.

Well, I think it may have been a good thing I posted this on its own. This combined with the other would have been waaaaaaaaaaaaay too long.

Thwarting Awesomeness

Have you ever been working on something with the potential for major Awesome and then something horrible happens that prevents you from working on it?

Here is the my potential awesome:

It was going to be amazing. I've never tried to color my work while omitting the lines before and was therefor stoked that it seemed to be working well. But now I'm stuck at this point, with Lark halfway colored and nude, while Alfa(on the left) and Drew (on the right, as you probably deduced) remain sea foam green and some strange orange-brown.

So what happened that stopped the awesome from become more so? The cord to my graphic tablet shorted out. The only reason I didn't cry hysterically is because it isn't a lost cause. My husband is going to see what he can do about it, and I plan on reinforcing it with embroidery floss, which also prevents tangling. It also looks pretty but that's not the point. Hopefully, my magic man can fix it any will be back in awesome business. But for now, I'll look for references and resources while "watching" episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

While I'm waiting, I hope I don't go all Mrs. Nesbit on everyone.

But mad props to this guy for dressing up like this