Hanashiba in the Weapon Shop

August 14th, 2007 Pekk

This is another picture of Hanashiba (whose name I’m still contemplating changing), she seems to be in the weapon shop and confused… Really I don’t know why but I think it came out kind of nice. I used drawing pencils and a kneaded erased for this one. The erasers are a real pain in the ass to get used to and some of the pencils I have are too hard and I don’t like the way they feel… I liked the softer ones… HB and 2H I believe.

Also I had to fix up a line in the sketch in photoshop but that’s ok… and some black dot removal (still haven’t cleaned my scanner’s surface yet, I really gotta get on that. ^^;)

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More Hana!!!

August 11th, 2007 Pekk

Here’s more of the Hanashiba character (whose name is still subject to possible change). I wanted to go to bed but I felt like I did nothing productive today since I had to drive around all over the place, so I drew this picture. It’s a chibi (super-deformed) version of Hanashiba. Hehe looks like our mercenary needs some work

I will probably try to colorize this tomorrow or the day after… We’ll see what happens

Tomorrow I am going to pick up some pencils and pens at Michael’s so hopefully my drawings will be better quality, and I can start inking soon, too.

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More Girl!

August 10th, 2007 Pekk

Another ridiculous title, but what can I say? I’m pretty ridiculous.

So here’s today’s art drawing (since I wasn’t feeling up to the programming challenge of finishing the MenGen GUI or going to sleep… Both challenges are fraught with peril.. *Shudder*…)

It’s the same girl. No name still… I’ll come up with something… I was thinking of something like… Hanashiba, which I stole from the japanese words, “hana” 【花】and “shiba” 【芝】meaning lawn… I’m not a master at japanese but together I would assume this means something like “lawn flower” but I would like to play it off as a joke using the second definition of “hana” 【洟】which means, “snot” making the joke “lawn snot” for a name… Sounds kinda funny… Also I’m not sure if I got the snot kanji right.. Small font it’s hard to tell… I’m assuming that’s right…

Well here she is, Ms. Lawn Snot… er… Ms. Lawn Flower. Looks like her axe broke

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Pekk’s Plue Game Program! Pekk is a HUNGRY Plue!

August 9th, 2007 Pekk

While drawing wasn’t the only thing I did today during Qt4’s incredibly long compile session, I also created this funny little program. It’s called the Plue Game.

I found it in the back of my Rave Master manga. The basic rules are the game are as follows:

1. Write your full name on a piece of paper.
2. Convert the letters of your name into numbers, A=1, b=2, and so on.
3. Add up all the numbers in your full name and take the right-most (ones’ place) digit. This is your “Plue Magic Number” as I call it, this number is used to look up in a table what type of Plue you are (since it’s quite a bit of text I won’t post all of the results up here, you are free to download and compile the program if you wish, or even just read the code to find out what each number means).

For whatever reason, I thought it would be faster to just write a program to do this for me so I didn’t have to do the addition myself. In any case I was horribly wrong, especially since I decided to write the program in C.

I’ll post the file at the bottom of this post, but for now I just want to share some important notes (things I discovered, things I’d forgotten about) pertaining to C.

1. Never ever use gets() or some asshole will call you out on it. (Actually I was already well aware of this, I just wanted to point out how some people have nothing better to do than try to prove they are better than everyone else. Don’t be this guy! Play nice! I don’t want to read your drama when I’m trying to find a function name!!).
2. For strings with spaces (the google search that brought me to the above forum posting) use fgets(). Check the manpages for more details; use stdin as a substitute for the file stream, it will work just fine, but it will append the trailing endline characters!!! (I actually just left them in there and worked around it like that, since this is just small program anyway).
3. To get a character input you can use getchar(). Also it seems as though this is the only way to do the “Press any key to continue” (without the “any key” part) type of pause on all platforms. (Windows users you can use a system(”pause”) call, but this obviously won’t work for unixes). If you’re just waiting for the enter key stroke so you can clear the screen, it’s not necessary to assign the return value of getchar() to a variable.
4. C is fun!! I should use this more often! ;D

That’s about it so here’s the source code, released under the GPL (I’m not sure this is entirely necessary for such a small program, but that’s okay.)

REMEMBER: I DID NOT MAKE THIS GAME, I ONLY CREATED THE PROGRAM. I TAKE CREDIT FOR NOTHING OTHER THAN DIGITIZING A GAME THAT ALREADY EXISTS.

Happy Plue gaming!

Download The Plue Game!

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More of My Sketch Book

August 9th, 2007 Pekk

As I said before in my linux rave about my mouse issues, I was installing QT 4 Designer (or rather, compiling it) for several hours. During that time I was reading my Rave Master manga, and afterwards I started drawing for a bit.

I decided to bring back my girl character from the other day, and try to draw her from different angles in different poses. I came up with this, though it’s not much I’m pretty proud of it… Practice is practice afterall:

I also decided that I wanted to give her a tattoo on her back. Not that I’m a big fan of girls with tattoos, or anyone with tattoos for that matter, but I felt that she needed some sort of emblem; something kind of tribal. So I started messing around with some different designs and I decided I wanted to try something with the number 17. This is what I got in my sketch book (although this is slightly super imposed to remove a lot of whitespace from the image):

I think I’ll place the tattoo on her back, near her shoulders. On her left shoulder blad, or perhaps on her cheek.
I figured out that I can improve the quality of my scans 10-fold by blasting up the highlight levels, it was able to remove a lot of pencil smudges, drawings that came through on the back of the paper, and it made the background color a purer shade of white, as well. Here’s a copy of the other picture I posted of her, but with fixed color levels:

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Drawing Spree!

August 8th, 2007 Pekk

Today when I got home, I left it immediately.

I ran out to the book store to purchase the next two volumes of the Rave Master manga that I’ve just decided to get involved in. After reading about half of the book while waiting on a Slackware 12 download I put the book down, picked up a pencil and started drawing like crazy.

I tried several times to draw one of the characters, Plue, who is some strange kind of animal (everyone in the manga seems to think he’s a dog; personally I think he’s a furry snowman) and this failed terribly, even though he’s very simple to draw. I think I was just too bored with the idea of it. So I started drawing something else — a girl. I don’t think it came out too bad, I probably spent about an hour or so on it.

I like to get very detailed in my artwork even though I’m really not so great of an artist. Since I have the most horrendous A.D.D. in the world, I kept smudging my pencil etchings with my ring finger like an idiot, so I had to clean up some parts by erasing them and redrawing them a few times. I think I’m pretty satisfied with the outcome though. There’s always more room to improve, I just need to practice some more!

And here she is,

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