Intermission: Pirates - SotD 140, 141

Been a slow day and if I get around to the next mario enemy it won't be for awhile longer tonight. So here's some quicker paintings I did in the last few days as warm-ups and just for fun off the top of my head for the most part.

Spiny - SotD 139

Not too happy with this one. May need to do touch ups, but I have to post or I'll be breaking my new posting habit. But for now I'm callin' this guy done...

Link - SotD 138

A small break from mario today, but not from nintendo characters. I'm actually more of a Zelda fan myself. A really crappy fan. I'm incredibly loyal to the series, but I've never completed the big ones. The only one I think I've seen to the end was the very first on the NES. And that one still remains my favorite in the series. I feel pretty alone in that opinion, but I really did enjoy that one the most... and now it's so steeped in nostalgia, no other Zelda can measure up to it in my book.

I put together this Link a bit ago in the vein of the mario redesigns. I don't love it and I want to eventually take a wack at an actual zelda illustration. Something I can hang up on my wall... hopefully that's not too vain sounding...

Goomba - SotD 137

A classic Mario enemy. No mario game would be complete without them. To be fair though, if they skittered like little spider mushrooms, like I've depicted here? I'd never play it.

I've had an issue with a lot of these in the design process... little ball-like feet don't really translate to how I'm doing these, and I'm trying to find way around the issue. So far the solution seems to be insect like legs. You can stick them on anything. Looks awesome.

Pokey - SotD 136

Another Mario enemy. Been working pretty steadily so I do have some variety on the horizon, but it's time to paint out another batch of these guys. Got some more popular ones planned.

Bob-omb - SotD 135

Was really looking forward to doing this one even though I wasn't sure how I was going to adapt it for a long while. Definitely one of my favorites so far.

I finally watched Suckerpunch last night, and got this totally unexpected emotion when I watched it: I got so angry. And that emotion sort of blindsided me. I'd heard some of the reviews, which were horrible (22% on rotten tomatoes) but I still had some high hopes for some good illustrator porn in a way. Let me define that real quick: Anything that illustrators would love to illustrate and work on for fun e.g. Steampunk WW1 concepts. I hadn't considered that the story and tone would be so colossally horrible... so wrongly wedged into the film, that it could sully the very fiber of my favorite things. Things to know about me: I love astronauts, robots, war history, alternate universes, and snow. So when this film took all that, except for astonauts, thank goodness, mixed it all up into this gruel and I sat down and took the first taste I only felt the same sort of emotional reaction you get when you are horribly offended. It was like "How dare you!?" Zack Snyder, to ever take all these wonderful things and disrespect them with this, this... THING. This script, if I dare call it that.

It is just baffling to me that I walked away from Suckerpunch not utterly loving it. I just can't believe he managed to mess that up. So I sat there, with my flag at half mast... because after seeing what he had attached all the wonderful art assets to, those artists had to have gone and jumped off buildings. What a waste of talent.

Whomp King - SotD 134

The Whomp King, I'll admit, made me so nervous in mario 64. Have what seems to be another fan favorite coming tommorrow...

Complete side tangent here: I need to quit under estimating toast. I'm sitting here eating this delicious piece of toast with some jam and butter on it, and it's just never that food I wake up and want. It's the last resort, the lazy choice, or there isn't anything else to eat. Every single time though, it is so good. Cereal is sort of the same way, but only at night. I can't be alone in thinking that breakfast food feels absolutely wrong late at night, like you sort of pass that 10 o'clock mark and all that food goes from tasty to disgusting. Just this abhorred nightmare situation. Cereal though, it gets the lazy late night treatment that toast gets, and I swear it tastes better at three in the morning. Of course I usually skip breakfast... I sort of see it as a reward most of the time or an experience. Like if I can't get eggs over easy, some slightly burnt bacon and some hashbrowns at a diner... why I'm a bothering? 

In conclusion: toast is good, cereal is good, and I apparently have "up in space" expectations of breakfast food and I'm a bit of a snob about it.

Edit: forgot to change the subject title.

Porcu-Puffer - SotD 133

This particular mario enemy I feel like was the bane of many childhoods. Everyone knows that one stage in Super Mario World where you had to jump from dolphin to dolphin, as the porcu-puffer here patrolled under the surface of the water.

This one has been the quickest somehow... even though it's the most detailed. So irritated I forgot to hit record on the stream for this one.

Czar Dragon - SotD 132

The Czar Dragon may not be the most familiar of Mario characters as he was only featured in Mario RPG on the SNES. The story to this one is, it started out as Blargg, but as he turned more dragon-like it no longer fit, and I'll have to come back to Blargg some other time. So I took the Czar Dragon notion and ran with it.

I streamed a bob-omb painting last night and I just want to thank the people who watched because I was pretty tired and it wasn't the most exciting cast. But he'll be posted later this week.

Lakitu - SotD 131

Hello Reddit,

I would like to wave hello. As I just checked my google analytics and I looked at my now severely broken graph. The Traffic spike was just... insane to say the least. I honestly thought it was a glitch until I looked at the scale it had revised. I am absolutely blown away. So I hope you guys saw some stuff that you liked, and to keep checking back because I have a new one to post every day this week.

Flabbergasted,
Mike Puncekar

P.S. I'm also going to continue streaming as I make them. Today's cast is done, but I'll be back tommorrow. Keep checking twitter, or the new widget I have installed over there.

Piranha Plant - SotD 130

Another Mario enemy for today. Not sure which one is next, but I'm leaning towards Blargg, the lava monster from the later Super Mario World stages. I was gonna save this one for later, but I failed my first attempt at the kuribo's boot with a goomba in it. Just a crap drawing at first. Coming back to it.

Koopa Revamp - SotD 129

I wasn't really happy at all with the last version, so I wanted to just throw some new colors onto it, then i realized I had lost the file yesterday when the electricity surged again and my comp turned off. So I sort of repainted this almost entirely. Base is still there though, and I am 500 times more happy with this.

Got a few more of these lined up on a list.

Shy Guy - SotD 128

I always thought Shy Guys in Mario really got screwed, so I decided to beef them up a bit. For the most part, they were just a useless level one enemy in, that literally got taken advantage of when ever Mario and crew rolled into town. They really are bullied little things. Highly creepy though. Those faceless masks sort of freaked me out when I was a kid.

Also, reading through the first Game of Thones book... so just as I got sick of armor... and medieval things... not so much anymore. So picture me shaking my fists emphatically as I yell "More Direwolves, more ice creatures... MORE SNOW."

Koopa - SotD 127

Sorry for the no post the last two days. Got incredibly distracted by all the e3 happenings and the weather and just sort of forgot to do my sketch. I'll try to multi post soon.

Here's a Koopa from Mario I made while eating my breakfast this morning. Nothing too fancy

Hellboy Doodle - SotD 126

Bonus Sunday sketch! Now, I will make sandwiches where the only topping is bacon. Good day.

Landscape? - SotD 125

I'll admit, not really sure where I was going with this. Sort of an alien landscape, but I feel like that's the easy excuse, when in reality I was just farting around in photoshop. Wouldn't mind trying something like this again, but with more of a goal in mind...

Cowgirl - SotD 124

Here is another oldie since I haven't gotten to any sketching today yet. This was, I think, the last thing I painted in a classroom. And by painting, I mean lugging my intuos tablet and laptop into a classroom. This was cool because everyone in the class had to take some sort of picture of themselves, posing with a hat on, then the pictures were dispersed randomly for each student to draw as a short activity. While I don't think I got a likeness, C.F. Payne (who taught this class) said a likeness wasn't the point of the assignment, so I happily cranked out a cowgirl that sort of looked like the girl it was based on.

Sun Giant - SotD 123

This sketch has been a long time coming. I sketched this out in pencil on a car ride over 2 years ago. Went digging through my sketchbook and came across it again- just had to color it. I miss this sort of cartoony, style I used to use, but I leaned towards the realistic so I could learn a bit faster about value and color.

Not a whole lot of story on this one, but I believe the over arching idea was just to put down the sort of image I saw while listening to the Fleet Foxes's Sun Giant. Drew it while going home for a weekend from school, and since I'm in ohio, the fields all around the highway had an effect.

Not sure if this is still a sketch-a-day, since I think I took it a bit further than that, but I'm putting it in that category anyway.