Random Things I Have Been Drawing
Just a bunch of stuff that I've been drawing other than my main projects.
It’s been 14 days since I’ve posted, time can get away from me really fast. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing and drawing. World War 1 aviation has been new interest for me. At the start of WW1, there wasn’t much of a concept of a trained fighter pilot, so many of the first pilots in WW1 were either aviation enthusiast or aviation hobbiest. I find that idea to be fascinating, but things did change, as the war went on trained and enlisted pilots became the norm.
One plane that really grabbed my attention was the Rumpler Taube.
The strange bird-like appearance was intentional. Early aviation designers followed concepts called, biomimicry and bioinspired design.
Biomimicry is when humans try to emulate natural forms, processes, and systems to solve design problems. If you have seen those black-and-white videos of people trying to fly with homemade wings, that is an example of biomimicry.
A bioinspired design is something you see in the Rumpler Taube. The engine is man-made and functions nothing like any organic organism, but ideas similar to tail feathers are used to try and improve the plane’s efficiency.
Thanks to the biomimicry and bioinspired design in the Rumpler Taube, I couldn’t help but draw the plane a few times using a limited color palette of three colors.
Tokusatsu in a Game Boy World
Something else I’ve been drawing is the what-if idea of if suitmation and other traditional tokusatsu techniques could be done in Game Boy graphics.
When the first Godzilla suit was designed, it was too heavy for the actor to use. So they cut it in half and used the bottom half for closeup shots of the kaiju’s legs. They would later go on to build a second version of the suit the actor could move in.
Using the Godzilla sprite from the Japanese Game Boy Godzilla game Kaiju-o-Godzilla, I tried to recreate Nakajima-san stomping around in just the Godzilla legs.
Another idea I had was the first-person point of view from the suit actor inside the Godzilla suit. While inside these kaiju suits, the actor normally only had small holes in the neck to see out of. This makes the dangers of tripping or ruining a shot particularly high.
Scaled model planes on guide wires were usually flown at these suit actors. They would have to use the small holes in the neck to not only see the model planse coming at them, but they had to knock them out of the sky for the camera as well.
This is what I thought it might look like using the Game Boy’s limitations. I do like my plane animations. I had more frames of animations for them, but it was too many for the Game Boy hardware to handle.
That’s it, it’s been a long two weeks for me. Another semester over and another beginning as well.
Coming up I have a short story about a world where you have to watch a personalized ad before doing anything, a blog about the Poseidon Adventure, and another indie kaiju movie called Midnight the Era (what a name).
Until then, thanks for reading, later.