Tried something a little different from my usual drawing style for a Yoast article. Been practicing color and blending on the side courtesy of Ctrl+Paint.
Year: 2015
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Import-Export
A recent illustration for Yoast, for a post about their plugin. I’ve always been enamored with dockyards circa the 1950s (blame it on TinTin) so this was a nice opportunity to do something with that imagery.
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2D water reflections in Unity
Some people asked me how I’m doing the water reflections in Last Voyage Of The Orlova, so here’s a quick look at the shader. Download at the bottom of the post.
The solution consists of two components: a shader for the groundwork, and a script to render it on a quad.
The shader has a texture slot and a color picker. The texture is optional, you can just change the water color using the color picker.
The script has settings for the reflection resolution, offset, and which layers should be reflected. I keep the resolution intentionally low (256) because otherwise the reflection is too perfect and it doesn’t look like water anymore. And I like the way it shimmers when you walk.
I’ve packaged the files up so you can try this in your own project right now:
Click here to download.To get started, add these files to your project’s Assets folder, and drag the reflection prefab into your scene. You can adjust the size and position of the prefab to your needs.
Let me know here or on twitter if you use it, I’d love to see it in action in other places.
If you’re looking to add waves (with physics!) to the water surface, the Zippy Water 2D asset is pretty good. I applied this shader to their water prefab and it works.
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Maintenance Men
This here’s an infographic I made for Yoast website reviews. I’m happy with the layout and the colors, but the most fun part was making the car and the guys inspecting it. It’s made completely in vectors, something I don’t often do.
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Spectrum
I’ve started schooling myself in using color recently, and this was one of the first test images I made.
I used to do it on gut feeling mostly, like I do with perspective – I mean I know things about bounce light and indirect shadows and color temperature, but when I have a bunch of colors that don’t work well together I didn’t really know why.
So I started watching Sycra and Ctrl+Paint videos again to get a handle on some kind of technique. And the biggest shift in my thinking came when I installed a color wheel for Photoshop. I use Coolorus, and once you learn how to use it it’s a great tool.
I recommend these videos on the subject if you want to learn too.
coo
https://vimeo.com/35951005
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Week 120 – Change
This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.
This is the last weeknotes blogpost.
Because I am changing the format. Like Ive said in previous posts, now that I have a fulltime job I won’t have something to write about my own projects every week.
So instead, like I mentioned before, I’m launching a newsletter.
I’ll be sending the first one soon, which has updates on all my current projects with some exclusive images. Sign up for it now so you don’t miss it! Follow this link and leave your email adress.
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It’s been fun writing these posts for the past two years, and I look forward to browsing through some random ones to see what I was up to back then. I’ll miss having this moment with you guys every monday though, but instead I’ll use that time to draw off-stage again and work on some backburner game projects, and fill this blog with art again, like it was intended. And then I’ll let you know how things are going about once a month via the above newsletter. It’s better that way. And I can’t wait to talk to you guys over there. It’s gonna be fun.
Catch you on the flip side.
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Week 119 – penultimate
This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.
Last week I drew more artwork for Yoast. It’s a change of pace from game development where you’re focused on one project and draw lots of assets for it, while here each blogpost is a little project and has a turnaround time of a few days, so there’s lots of small moments of completion and release, which is nice.
I also drew some assets for Embodied Games and made a few mockups for some new interface elements in Vrije Vogels, the Hubbub museum game. It should be appearing in the App Store in the coming months so I can finally show you what we’ve been working on.
Doing the work was hampered by the fact that I don’t yet have internet in our new apartment, so I went down to the restaurant around the corner to mooch off of their free wifi. Staying connected proved to be a real challenge though, and when it was finally stable and I was doing a pull from a Git repo my laptop crashed with a BSOD. Sigh. Getting a photoshop file from the Creative Cloud account I use at Yoast proved to be an equally cumbersome process. But eventually I got everything done.
Then came Moving Day at the end of the week. It took the better part of the day but we managed to squeeze everything into our new apartment. Incredible how much stuff we had amassed. Now one more week until the girlfriend is done with her job and we can start putting everything together again.
Next week: home improvement and the launch of the newsletter.
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Week 118 – orchestrated chaos
This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.
As M-Day (moving day) draws nearer, it occupies more and more of my thoughtspace. I didn’t really accomplish much between working my last two days at my side job (hooray!) working two days at my new job, and cleaning the new apartment. We received the key on thursday and I slept there overnight. Going to work and especially coming back from work to this new place definitely feels good. All the shops are closeby, so it’s easy to grab whatever I need and forgot at home (which is a lot, turns out).
I completed my first illustration at my new job this week, which was published over here. Hooray!
As for the poll from last week, the results so far are unanimously telling me I should go for the newsletter idea, so I will. More on that soon.
Next week: Free birds, alien foods and wifi woes.
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Week 117 – new apartment, newsletter?
This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator. For illustrated depictions of these events, visit my daily comics page.
Last week was quite eventful. We went to look at a new apartment on monday, claimed it, signed the lease on thursday, and rented out our old apartment to someone new on sunday! Finding a new place is kind of a pain, but sometimes you get lucky and things move really quickly. Now I get to focus on the slew of things to take care of for the move, like internet, parking permits, etc. Fun! It would be nice if moving became more like restoring an iCloud backup.
Other things happened last week too. I did some tweaks to the food icons I made for the Radboud game last week, and I worked another two days at Yoast, getting around to doing some actual artwork. On thursday the staff went for drinks and I got to know them a bit more. They’re very diverse in terms of backgrounds and expertise, but somehow it all works well together.
On a personal level I thought about the future of these weekly work updates. When I start working at Yoast four days a week there won’t be that much to report on probably, so I considered starting a newsletter to keep you guys in the loop on personal projects, once a month or so, whenever there is something to say. Would that be interesting, or should I keep doing round-ups like that on the blog here? Let me know.
[polldaddy poll=9122467]
I also did some groundwork on the Off-Stage website. I plan to (finally) continue updating that strip once I’ve settled into my new work routine.
Next week: Last week at my old side job, finishing up my freelance projects, and moving my ass to a new city.
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Week 115 & 116 – Track of time
This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator.
So I see I forgot to blog in week 115, oops. That week contained my first workday at Yoast, where I settled in quickly and mostly just spent the time setting up my workstation, adobe creative cloud, checking out the publications backlog and getting a feel for the style I’ll be working in. Compared to getting up at 5:45 for my side job, walking into the office at 9 felt very comfortable (even though it takes me 1h45 to get there), and I had one of those moments where you really feel like an adult.
At the end of the week I looked at a place that was a 5-minute walk away from the office (we’ll be moving too, see aforementioned commute time), but it didn’t really meet our standards so unfortunately I had to pass on it.
This past week was more of the same for that matter. Though on tuesday night I went to INDIGO, the annual dutch games industry expo. I had a great time there, if mostly because of catching up with friends and setting appointments to have drinks with them. It was weird to think that last year I had a booth there myself, but I didn’t envy the exhibitors’ aching feet.
On friday I stopped by the Vechtclub here in Utrecht to have a quick drink with Kars from Hubbub, to kind of cap off our project together. Though it seems it will get a small tail this week. It feels like a weird moment in time, because the project ended perfectly timed with me moving away and starting a new job, and he is moving all the way to Asia! (for half a year). We only worked together on a freelance basis, but I feel more of a connection with Hubbub than any of my other freelance clients. I’ll miss this point in time.
https://instagram.com/p/8WMzfLrZkj
Inbetween it all I lit up Photoshop to finish drawing assets for the game I’m helping out with at Radboud. They were all food items, drawn in a fairly realistic way. I did it that way to match the style of the game without really thinking that much about it, but it was oddly satisfying, and the assets turned out real good.
On saturday I stopped by the birthday party of John Gottschalk, designer on Westerado, and felt invigorated by our shared passion of narrative games. On sunday I saw The Martian, and it was everything I ever asked for in a sci-fi movie. I loved it.
Next week: inktober and a new apartment.
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Week 114 – A new job
This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator. For illustrated depictions of these events, visit my daily comics page.
After finishing the crunch for Vrije Vogels last week, I spent the first few days of last week embroiled in Metal Gear Solid V. It’s a wonderful and weird game, I dig it.
On wednesday I visited the Yoast offices again for my second interview, and I was practically hired on the spot! So starting soon I’ll be illustrating their blogposts and ebooks four days a week. It’s fun that I’ve been using their wordpress SEO plugin on the Off-Stage site for a while before I even knew they were dutch.
The next day, after my (soon to be ex-)side job in the morning and a sprint retrospective at Hubbub, I went by Radboud again, where I spent most of the afternoon in a meeting to sort out the work I have to do. The deadline for it is the day I start working at Yoast, so that schedules together really nicely.
Next week: First day on the job.
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Week 113 – Snap back to reality
This is a weekly recap of what has been going on in my professional life. It’s to keep track of what I’m up to and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independent creator. For illustrated depictions of these events, visit my daily comics page.
Last week I returned from vacation to find a bunch of things I had to do had accumulated. Eventually I spent most of my time on the final sprint for the Vrije Vogels game, culminating in me going to the Hubbub office at 5 pm on a friday to work out the last few bugs before the deadline. It was fun though, having everyone in the (virtual) office and punching out the last few things, improving things for a few hours and seeing it all come together. Especially marking off everything on the todo list was a satisfying way to start the weekend.
Inbetween I did some logo sketches for a client in the UK I had worked with previously, and I added a few things to the lighthouse keeper game, with the intent of showing it off at friday night’s PlayDev meetup. Eventually I couldn’t attend due to the aforementioned crunchtime, but working on it was nice, it’s been on the backburner for too long.
Over the weekend I finally finished The Witcher 3 with over 100 hours on the clock, and immediately moved on to MGS V, which I expect will eat my free time in a similar amount.
Next week: more interviews and working at the university.