S&F Extra - December 2023 (Patreon)

It's S&F Extra time! Which means: time for another behind-the-scenes look at what I've been up to in the last month. Here we go!

Rudolph
Sadly, I don't have the skills to build my own Rankin-Bass style models. So the colours have to do a lot of heavy lifting in this piece! I attempted to use a combo of filters and shading to at least partly evoke the look of the old tv special. But if you'd like to see what the original inked piece looked like before that, here it is!

Shovel Knights
Earlier this month, someone was kind enough to nab the full quartet of my Shovel Knight originals, and got me to marker colour 'em, too! So I busted out the copics and got to work!

First off, we've got Shovel Knight! This was the oldest piece in the bunch by far. I think I drew the original line art in 2020!

Plague Knight proved to be the trickiest of the bunch to colour. I had to layer quite a few different shades of marker to get the specific colour I wanted for his cloak! It's a combo of Sky Blue, Mint Green, and two shades of Cool Gray.

Specter Knight! I think this is my favourite of the four pieces. I just really like this pose!

And last but not least... King Knight! King was the star of the final Shovel Knight expansion, which was also my absolute favourite of all of them. If you missed this one, I heartily encourage you to check it out!

I love these games, so it was fun to get a chance to revisit this crew. Thanks!

Texts from Bunsen Vol. 2
Bunsen (the social media science dog) and co. have released the second volume of Texts From Bunsen, which means I can now show y'all this timelapse of the making of the cover! 

Many of the jokes in this book revolve around Bunsen's quest to build an "eternal winter machine", so we decided to go with that as the cover image. It's quite a busy composition, so I tried to use colours to help visually separate all the different components and make sure the characters popped. I think it came together nicely! Here's how it looks all finished up:

Platformer Heroes
Here's one more batch of recently marker-coloured gaming pieces for y'all! This time, we've got:

Tails! This piece is based on his mostly forgotten solo game for Sega's old Game Gear handheld: Tails Adventure! Unlike most Sonic games, this one was a slow-paced pseudo-Metroidvania style game, in which Tails acquired a remote-controlled robot and (inexplicably) a broad arsenal of bombs.

Wario! This dude is probably best known for the Wario Ware games these days, but in this drawing he's sporting the Dragon Hat from the Wario Land series for the Gameboy.

Madeline, from Celeste! Gosh, this was such a good game. (Even if some of those strawberries were pretty cruel, haha!)

Snow Jess
And last up, here's a look and the colouring process for my recent "Snow Jess" comic. As you'll see in the last step of the timelapse, there's a light texture applied to the background in this piece, but it's subtle. Did you notice it?

Like the Rudolph piece, I drew this one on paper first before colouring it digitally. Here's a photo of the original piece:

That's a wrap for now, friends. See you next time!