eller | Entries tagged with dev

So, shadow theater is a thing again! :D I haven't done this at all for over a year (and I never did this very often, anyway), so I'm seriously out of practice, but I got an invitation to an event (amazing this person remembered my existence at all), and I have kind of missed this, so... Yeah. I'm accepting though the conditions are not ideal. And, since a shadow theater performance like the one I'm going to do ideally looks spontaneous but is, in fact, very carefully prepared, I'm taking this opportunity to write down the process.

( Behind a cut because I guess not everybody is interested in the specifics of preparing a shadow theater performance. )

....okay, wall of text again. Whatever. I expect no one to read this. LOL

OC questionaire meme, found in the journal of

yhlee. I decided to answer the questions for my characters Dev, Deeyan and Koh (because they appear most often in my stories) as well as Ruon (because he's in the story I'm currently working on, so I should think about his characterization more). ( Behind a cut because not many people will care. XD )

And another Dev fanart, this time by Ismael. It's Dev on the search for minerals, and in a lovely b/w style with gold accents. (Looks even better on the original ATC, I assure you!)

I feel very lucky that I get the bestest fanart from the bestest people! :D

Look at this! I received absolutely wonderful fanart again, this time from Sockenzombie, who drew an ATC featuring Dev, some very large and very suspicious translucent chess pieces, and... an ocean.

Title of this masterpiece is "The Ocean Edge" and is, of course, a little joke about the fact that my characters believe they live on a tetrahedron. (This is not the case, but gives me the opportunity to include really weird math into my stories. It makes navigation so much more fun!) Basically, poor Dev has to assume that somewhere in the distance the ocean is dropping over an edge. :D

Maybe interesting for the artists among you: Sockenzombie wrote a detailed blog post with WIP steps and explanations.

Anyway, I'm suuuper happy!

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Today's art is not by me, but by the wonderful serenity025 who is the nice soul responsible for my advent calendar of this year! :D She drew a wonderful ATC featuring Dev!

Aaaaannnnd... Not only is this an AWESOME drawing (featuring lovely details like a fountain pen, crystals, and a math-y chart), but she also wrote me she wanted to contribute a book title! That's a Kolthainn thing: it's canon that Dev has some really weird titles on his color-sorted bookshelf. See the (in)famous "50 Stones of Grey" in the background? XDD (Also, nice detail that Dev's erotica are right next to "Minerals", which is likely something his fellow students will want to borrow occasionally. LOL this is VERY much in the spirit of things!)

Anyway - Dev is reading something called "Game of Stones". Which is AWESOME. Up to now, this book did not exist in Kolthainn, but now it does. (And it's a huge bestseller, too.) I have to write it. (Yes, Kolthainn works a bit like that: if it were a commercial project something like "fanfic for fanart for origfic" would be an intellectual property nightmare, but hey, it's all fandom, so no one minds. Also, going by what serenity025 wrote, I can safely assume she wants "her" book title to become canon.) Game of Stones... She did not provide me with any additional info about this masterpiece, but in my mind it's a crossover between geology textbook (simply because Dev owns mostly geology textbooks ~~and porn~~), Go book (you play that with stones, right? Right. XD) and, well, Game of Thrones. I did not watch that series, which is actually good: any fic I produce is very unlikely to infringe on anyone's intellectual property there; I'll just add boobs, dragons and gratuitous violence?!? (That's what I got from the trailers, anyway.)

...heh, I even have an idea of how to write the beginning. :D

Sooooo I received this lovely little sketchbook from

yhlee. (Thank you sooooo much!!!) It's really tiny: 5x5cm (that's 2''x2''), blue, and it has watercolor paper. Niiiiice! It's just the kind of thing that makes me immediately want to start drawing! Also, the paper is so rough that I can't work with too much detail, which is an actual relief.

00-The-Book-kl

...but what to do with it? I decided to make it a personal thing and draw the characters from my own story/project/software/thingy (it's complicated LOL), Kolthainn. And while I haven't done any actual watercoloring yet, here's already the first five sketches! ~~I just took a relatively broad ink pen and scribbled.~~

sketches-1-to-5-Kopie

So, uh, what do we see here?
- Deeyan, of course, is working on her telescope. Not visible in the (bad) photo, but she's actually holding a screw-wrench, and I'm sure interesting things are going to happen to that telescope!
- Dev looks at some crystals rather sceptically. That's all right: I'd be sceptical, too. I just scribbled something without paying attention to symmetries or angles or anything, so these crystals are highly dubious! Dev, of course, knows enough about crystals to see everything that's wrong with them.
- Yora wins at chess. What else?
- Ruon is playing the lute. That's an instrument I wish I could play (I love the sound!) but I'll never be able to: my hands are too small. The neck of these lute thingies is really broad. Fortunately, Ruon doesn't have any problems like that.
- Koh ~~does what he does best~~ cuddles a cat. He does that sometimes. XD (I think I've mentioned how Koh pictures ended up involving cats? It stuck.) He may be a demon, but he's all cute and cuddly! Really! XD

...and there's 18 more pages to fill! And then I get to color everything! :D

This is FUN.

Okay, I had promised to show the awesome piece of modelling paste art I received in my advent calendar from the awesome Nil! :D (Thankyouthankyouthankyou!!!!)

Isn't it awesome? It's this huge metal frame (with five-fold symmetry; bonus points for that, it's a nice crystallography in-joke) with a whole modelled landscape inside! Cave, tree, leaves and characters are all FIMO, I believe (modelling paste that's very popular around here), the "water" is actually transparent so it's probably resin or acrylic paste, and inside the cave there's an actual rock. :D The characters are, of course, from my story/art/project thingy. The young lady relaxing on the water is Deeyan. The guy dangling his feet in the water is Koh. The guy in the background, ignoring everything else but the rock, is Dev. :D

Here's a view from above. Isn't all the detail amazing? One leaf and one tree unfortunately fell off in the mail (the whole thing was packaged really well, but, ahem, German mail services...) but I'll glue them back on; the positions where they were are really obvious by the indentions in the ground. And I do own acrylic paste, so... no problem.

This is my dad holding the whole thing in the air, the way this piece of art should be installed. Unfortunately, I still don't have a technical solution for that yet: due to solid metal, solid resin and solid rock the whole thing is really, really heavy. I don't want it to fall off the ceiling. I mean, I care more about potential damage to this piece of art than about any potential hole in the ceiling but the landlord might feel otherwise. Maybe I'll install hooks and put chains between them in pentagram shape - that would be very much in style but would also prevent me from ever having "generally normal" visitors again. (My personal version of "normal visitor" won't mind.)

And oh yes, transparent water is awesome. So is backlighting. This is so... AWWWWWW. Like, one of the coolest pieces of "fanart" (if it can be considered that; it's not as if there's something like a fandom for my commented program code, except it looks as if there is...) I've ever received. :D Anyway, THIS IS AWESOME.

I absolutely HAVE to show you what the wonderful Q-ni made for me! :D (Q-ni, in case you read this, thank you so so sooooo much - I have already told you how much I appreciate this but I can't say it often enough!

Not only did Q-ni draw a wonderful ATC of my favorite autistic ~~dark mage~~ geologist who happens to be the protagonist of ~~a piece of program code that went awry~~ my story - I really love the picture - but... She did the same picture as a sculpture!

A tiny sculpture!

Made of FIMO!

Mounted on a lovely tiny piece of crystal!

...come on, isn't that cute? :D I can tell you this totally made my day! Also, I love the medium - the whole story is whimsical enough to be not quite "serious" enough for illustration, so I personally usually portray my characters in collage pieces - but of course FIMO sculpture is also perfect for the mood of the thing.

And I couldn't resist, I simply had to make an icon featuring him. I mean, he's not quite my alter ego, but... I can totally identify. Ehehe.

Current Mood: ecstatic

May I introduce? This is Dev. He's a geologist (although most people think he's a dark wizard - there's not much difference in his world!), and the main character of a story series thingy I'm doing. He doesn't like to talk to strangers, so he'll just ignore you watching him while he's working. Those sparkly crystals are a lot more interesting than YOU!

The painting is an ATC i made for a swap called "Cheap Art Supply Challenge". I had to paint this with something cheap, so I used one of those crappy watercolor sets for students, which I now kind of regret, because apart from that, I quite like how the picture turned out. I've always liked the mood of old mines and tunnels (if you've ever been in one, you know what I mean!) so I wanted that particular setting.