Ialfa

Let it hereby be known that Cantata in Coral and Ivory by L. Shelby (aka Yours Truly) is now available for purchase at Air Castle Media and Amazon. And maybe other places too that I don’t know about yet.

I’ve finished the last of the art for the faction I was working on. These final few took the longest, but were also the most fun to do. Camelriders and rocs. 🙂

I’ve still got a couple special units to do for the campaign that my game developer has been working on, and maybe a few more tweaks and fixes. Then I can move on to the last faction.

Because all these little pictures I post are for units in a game, and those units “level up” they often come in first, second and third level variants, as so:

Usually the units get more elaborate costumes as they go up levels, but on very rare occasions I do the opposite, as in this line of magic users who get increasingly consumed by their magic:

But fancier and better armored and so forth is what most often makes sense. Unfortunately, my game developer doesn’t think it’s working with the following set. He says that with the chest muscles covered up, the higher level versions actually look less “beefy” than the first level. OTOH, having higher level guards dress simpler and wear less protection doesn’t make sense either. ::sigh::

Edited to Add: That last set has been altered slightly since I originally posted this message due to advice from a friend. My game developer says it’s “somewhat improved”. But I don’t know that he actual copied the changes into the game.

My game developer reports that two more people have posted enthusiastic approval of the Battle for Wesnoth expansion Era of Four Moons (which is based on one of my story worlds).

This is more to his credit than to mine, of course, but it does make me happy to hear it. I’m not sure that’s why he told me though. I have this sneaking suspicion that he’s trying to encourage me to get more art done faster.

I’m just not seeing may way to doing that… but I did get some art to him yesterday.

I started a while back to work on the next Era of Four Moons faction, which I decided would be the “Whites” because the borrowed art for the other remaining faction, the “Freemen” wasn’t nearly as hodge-podge and “just wrong” looking. I got as far as doing a couple base figures for the faction, one male and one female, before Across a Jade Sea took over my life.

Doing the base figures is usually the hard part, (at least, it is if we don’t mention animation), once you have them to work from, making the rest of the figures is just a matter of adjusting their pose and dressing them up different. So with Across a Jade Sea starting to lose its grip, I thought I was finally ready to get on to the easy stuff.

Then my programmer up and said: “I’ve been writing a campaign that features the Freemen, and doesn’t use the Whites. Could you…”

So it was back to the beginning all over again!

I am one step closer to having the fancy artwork I’ve been wanting for the Ialfa Horoscopes page. I now have images for each of the constellations. Like so:

Yesterday I was doing something on my website.

And while I was working I realized that only half of the links on my A Writer’s Sketchbook page actually led somewhere, and so I started to fix that. And while I was fixing that, I realized that I had created a link to a Sketchbook page for “Ink” and I didn’t actually have any artwork done in ink on my website anywhere to be displayed on that page. So I went and added some “Ink” art to the website. And since I don’t have a lot of ink art, most of it ended up being the line drawings of the Borgim signs of the Zodiac, that I had inked and scanned, but never incorporated in the site in any way. (I was actually hoping to use the inks as the starting point for something much fancier done in Photoshop, which would end up on the Get Your Personalized Borgim Horoscope page, but that’s going to have to wait a bit longer.)

Because it seemed silly to have art that only showed up on the sketchbook page (which nobody in their right mind would ever look at anyway), in addition to putting them up on the server, and getting them into the database, I also added the drawings to the page that lists the signs and their major meanings. And I created an Art Gallery Page that would show images from the entire site all together, instead of only being able to see the ones from each different world.

Finally I went back and finished fixing the Writer’s Sketchbook (I hope!).

But I can’t remember what I was doing BEFORE that. Which means I can’t go back and finish it. Which means that in order to fix one half-done page before I forgot again, I have probably created another! Waahhh!

A few representative sprites from the set I just finished…

My latest sprite artwork for Era of Four Moons:

The Era of Four Moons expansion for Battle for Wesnoth now has a new campaign available for download called the Panther Lord, and I have just got another project off my to-do list. (Until we start getting player feedback with requests for fixes, of course. But hopefully there won’t be many, and none of them will be in my area of responsibility.) ::crosses fingers::