Ok, first off, apologies for letting the last one linger for three months. I’ve had this picture ready for a bit, but I felt a little guilty about posting it because it’s not Grrl Power related. It’s another cover mockup where I can practice both my painting and layout skills. But it’s the only other piece of art I’ve worked on besides the comic, and I draw Sydney, Max, Dabbler, and crew every day, so it’s fun to do some other stuff as well. I could practice composition with any of them, they each do present some challenges when it comes to painting. Sydney has such a distorted anime face that it’s hard to practice good facial anatomy, which is something I feel I’m quite weak with after several decades of drawing in an anime style. Maxima has her own challenges. I’ve never felt like I’ve drawn her as shiny as I imagine her, and even if I ignore that stuff, it’s not like I can practice flesh tones on her. Her skin doesn’t do subsurface scattering after all. Dabbler isn’t so hard to paint, but again, I feel like I should get better with human flesh tones before I stray into other parts of the rainbow. Of course I could paint Anvil or Harem or Jabberwokky or Varia or a dozen other characters, and eventually I will, but at the moment I’m having fun with these cover mockups, and I think that this one is a pretty good improvement over the previous one, and that’s what I’m really going for. There’s plenty more detail work I could continue to do on this piece, but I learned some stuff from working on it, and that’s the goal.

I decided to make a stand-alone post about this so people can comment on it if they get around to reading it. Please use the spoiler tag for anything remotely spoilery. Just wrap your comment with [spoiler]Your comment[/spoiler]

I’ve found a new book series I’m enjoying immensely. Star Justice. The short version is; Space Marine gets experimented on and essentially turned into a were-tiger. Hilarity ensues. Actually mostly violence… and technically it’s a harem setup, in the sense that the main character is male and nearly every other significant character he meets is female, many of whom join him on his adventures, and most of whom express sexual interest in him to some degree. Well, okay, that doesn’t sound like I should be saying “technically” at all. That’s flat out a harem setup, but I feel like there should be some sort of asterisk on “harem” because the female characters are significant and important parts of the story, not just notches on his bedpost – and they’re all likeable (IMO) either straight away or after some initial antagonism is resolved. The sex scenes are terse and non-graphic which is really my preference in novels. I like it when characters I like hook up, but I don’t really need the gory details.

I won’t spoil anything, but one night I went to bed planning on reading a few chapters, and I got to a point where there is a rather significant turn of events, and I wound up finishing the book and reading like 30% of the next one before I had to quit because it was 5 in the morning. :P

Anyway, I’ve enjoyed it a lot, maybe you will too.