The seeds of this project began from starting my daily drawing routine back a few months ago on October 4th. I kept it up each and every day and found that I was getting more and more inspired about illustration again.

Illustration is what I originally went to art school for even though I never finished that degree. It has been very rewarding to reawaken a latent passion of mine to tell stories and jokes visually.

I’ve been focusing lately on the one-panel style of comic, usually with a line of text beneath the drawing. Similar to the Far Side in format.  I grew up on a steady diet of off-the-wall Far Side calendars from 1986 onward, though until recently had completely forgotten about Gary Larson’s masterpiece.

I have been creating a new offbeat cartoon each day and have been having so much fun.  It is my hope that this is something I can grow slowly over the next year or two as the fan base and content increases.

I’ve gone ahead and setup a facebook page for Morbid Holiday so fans can get daily updates as well as leave posts or comments on the wall.

I’m also starting to build out content in an online store to offer greeting cards, prints, t-shirts, and other products to the folks requesting them. It has been very touching to receive requests for various art and designs of mine and I look forward to creating even more humorous content that will let people get a glimpse into my twisted view of the world.

I haven’t stopped working on games. I actually have two games finished and currently moving through the sponsorship and licensing process over at Flash Game License. It is also the holiday season so things get hectic and jumbled for myself and the portals and contracts I work with.

Well, I hope you check out the Morbid Holiday comic website and add the RSS feed to your reader or follow the facebook page.

I’d greatly appreciate any help reaching a larger audience for sure, so if you like what you see please share with your friends and followers!

I also created an animation of the five drawings called “Five From Five” as an interesting way to present how all the drawings relate to each other:

You can click on the thumbnails to enlarge them.

Here are the starting lines	“Yellow Dog” – Oct 10th, 2011
“Southwest” – Oct 11th, 2011	“Horncordion” – Oct 12th, 2011
“Hold On Tight” – Oct 13th, 2011	“Just Keep Swimming” – Oct 14th, 2011
“Fall” – Oct 15th, 2011	“Eggplant” – Oct 16th, 2011

For Saturday and Sunday I decided that five days of using the same lines was enough and just drew whatever I wanted. I’m trying to experiment a bit more with light and color as demonstrated in “Eggplant” above and I’m pretty happy with how it came out. I’ve spent so many years mainly drawing in black and white pen or pencil that I’m really excited to finally be pushing my color skills and learning.

Not sure what this week holds for the daily drawings. It was really nice to have some constraints or guidelines so I may have to think of something to provide a bit of structure. We’ll see!

Now I do use a Wacom tablet and I normally do all of my drawing in Photoshop because for whatever reason I’ve never really enjoyed drawing in Flash. I felt I spent most of my time fighting with it in fact. Well it turns out a lot of the problem was just some basic misunderstandings of the brush tool along with also learning some nice simple coloring, shading, and highlighting tricks using a few basic layers.

I corresponded a bit with Marcus over G+ to ask him some further questions about things I saw in his tutorials but then it was time to put my learning into action!

Below are the results of my first week. Six drawings in total since I started on Tuesday. I figure I’ll post the montage once a week on Sunday with the week’s drawings. I do post the daily drawings over on Twitter and G+ though.

You can click on the thumbnails to enlarge them.

“Banjo Farmer” – Oct 4th, 2011	“Loquacious Mime” – Oct 5th, 2011
“Focused Frog” – Oct 6th, 2011	“Red Robot” – Oct 7th, 2011
“The Loneliest Puppeteer” – Oct 8th, 2011	“Tree Beast” – Oct 9th, 2011

Some of these drawings just came from my subconscious when I sat down with my coffee in the morning and tried to imagine something to draw. A few of them though came from friends when I asked on Facebook for some random character prompts to do some improv. My friends suggested both “Loquacious Mime” and “The Loneliest Puppeteer” and I’m pretty happy with how they came out.  The other interesting fact is that “Banjo Farmer” came from a creativity exercise that Marcus posted about where you draw a random squiggly line and attempt to build a face out of it.

There was another creativity exercise Marcus posted a few days ago where you draw five squiggly lines and attempt to build an entire composition using them. I think as a challenge this week I will be using the same squiggly lines all week long but drawing a different drawing from the same lines each day. I’m excited about this challenge and we’ll see how it turns out!

Continuing with my recent drawing streak I decided to pay tribute to my love of banjo by setting up a nice still life in my family room with my banjo and case.  I drew for two hours and captured a screenshot automatically every 5 seconds to create a time lapse video.  The music playing with the video is an old classic piece called Arkansas Traveler. Enjoy!

Yesterday I took an hour and sat down with my drawing tablet and a small hand mirror which I propped up on my desk.

I have been feeling like I wanted to do more drawing lately from real life things since it has been too many years since I used to regularly do that. I’ve felt some of my illustration skills slipping a little and I am going to try to draw at least one hour a day.

For fun I took a time lapse of the drawing. I took shots every 30 seconds and turned them into the following video:

I’m continually amazed at the both the flexibility that my drawing tablet offers as well as the way it lets me get every pen effect I used to be able to get with an actual pen and paper.  I use a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet and it has really changed the way I approach drawing.  Instead of having to labor over storing and scanning my drawings in order to post them or use them in a game I can now work directly in a digital environment.  Plus I have become accustomed to the nice tweaks you can do when roughing out the initial drawing’s form.

If you watch the time lapse video you will see where a few times in the beginning I am able to resize the initial shape and size of my head.  It is a pretty common thing when drawing to get some of the proportions a bit wrong. In my case I often tend to make things elongate too much vertically.  I was able to squash the vertical dimension down and then later resize my facial features to more accurately represent what I was seeing in the mirror.

Once the proportions were right I was able to start defining the shape by laying down the shading.  Another nice benefit of digital drawing is I can use the pen set to a white color to come back in and hatch light areas. In a traditional drawing I would do this by erasing an area if I was using pencil or by carefully laying out pen over pencil guides so that I would leave the area white to begin with.  Being able to just come back over with white pen and flip to black pen again and again can really let me focus on getting all the form and feel right without worrying about the logistics of meticulous planning and allows me to flow along with the drawing in a way I enjoy a lot more.

I was trained classically as an illustrator way before things like tablets existed. I was initially quite worried when I bought my tablet if I would be able to adjust to looking at the screen while my pen hand drew on a different surface. What was striking was how quickly I did adjust until it became like second nature to draw while looking at the screen. I didn’t need to watch my hand anymore. I think a lot of that has to do with getting a tablet that is large enough and in the right proportion to your screen’s aspect ratio.  I have a fairly large landscape tablet and the pen is mapped from the relative position on the tablet to the same relative position on the screen.  I think this helps with the transition and learning curve a lot.  The pen has so much sensitivity and angle sensing that I can pretty much get every effect I could out of a traditional pen or pencil.

Anyone else out there have thoughts or experiences to share on drawing with a tablet?

AVOIDAL placed 14th out of the 172 game entries submitted to the the competition.

Ludum Dare is a solo game making event where participants have 48 hours to create an entire game with all content from scratch after the theme is announced. This time the theme was “Enemies As Weapons.”

I wrote up a detailed post mortem about my experience creating AVOIDAL and created a timelapse video of the entire process.

This was my most successful Ludum Dare yet and I am happy to continue to meet my goals when I participate as I try to raise my personal bar for success with each event I enter. I wanted to get a top 10% finish again and I was able to get top 8% so my goal was met.

I’ve been able to predict pretty well how my games will place each time which I think is a good exercise in trying to be self-aware about your game and the potential audience for it. This can matter when you are trying to make a Flash game that you want to stand a chance of being enjoyed by millions of players rather than thousands.

I can see a definite trend with the games I have entered over the years in Ludum Dare. This is my fourth game submitted to the regular competition and I feel it is my best so far:

• Ludum Dare 11 – Minimalist – 2008: MinMo 32nd overall out of 71 entries (top 45%)
• Ludum Dare 14 – Advancing Wall of Doom – 2009: Fleedom Flies 19th overall out of 123 entries (top 16%)
• Ludum Dare 15 - Caverns – 2009: Angry Caverns tied 10th overall out of 144 entries (top 9%)
• Ludum Dare 18 – Enemies as Weapons - 2010: AVOIDAL 14th overall out of 172 entries (top 8%)

I believe this not only shows how participating in regular game development competitions can help you create better games but also that it can teach you how to work better within constraints so that you can make better games outside of competitions too.

I am really happy with the way AVOIDAL has come out and I look forward to it finding a sponsor before I release it globally. I have a good feeling that it could be my most popular game yet.

I have the new polished up post-competition version over for bidding on Flash Game License and it is already receiving good bidding interest of which I am most thankful.

I have been playing this game quite often as I worked to improve it after the competition and it has been in my subconsious a good bit.  On Saturday I spent about 3 hours creating a concept art illustration based on the game.  I decided to have fun creating it in a very different style than the one I used in AVOIDAL. I also recorded a complete timelapse of creating the illustration since I’ve had a lot of people contacting me lately that were quite curious about my drawing process and tools.

Before I can really talk about what games mean to me I think it is important to provide a brief amount of background on where I am coming from on this personal subject.

I began developing a love for both drawing and programming as a young child and have spent countless enjoyable and priceless hours on those activities over the years. I caught the art bug bad in the late 70s after encountering Speed Racer on TV and the first Star Wars movie.

I filled page after page in my father’s art journals with little car race and space battle scenes. I remember him taking a lot of time showing me how to draw and even how to do flip book animations on the corners of the journal pages.

Even before we had a home computer my parents started sending me to Radio Shack computer camps at age six for programming in LOGO where I would get very familiar with that friendly drawing turtle and pen up and pen down. Then when I was about eight years old my parents got our first home computer. It was a TRS-80 but we only had it for one night–the salesman from Radio Shack called back to say they had received something better and wanted to know if my father wanted to upgrade.

That is how I ended up with a Tandy 1000 and a great book on BASIC by David A. Lien.  I will never forget noticing the author’s middle initial and last name could form the word Alien and would always wonder if that was a joke or not. I would use that book on BASIC along with numerous Mother-chaperoned trips to the Public Library to spend all my free time filling floppy disks with hundreds of BASIC computer games.

This dual exposure at a young age to both art and computers ended up having a very lasting effect on me. I have equally split my time between science and art related pursuits. I remember piling on the art and math classes in high school and always being frustrated at how both subject tracks wanted to exclude access from the other. Teachers always wanted you to pick your path. They couldn’t seem to comprehend why you would want to do both. This made no sense to me. I’ve always seen art in science and science in art.

I have attended four different colleges trying to get degrees first in Illustration and Painting, then Film, then Psychology, and lastly Computer Engineering. I always did well in college but would eventually get too impatient with what I felt was a slow pace and drop out to pursue various self-employment opportunities either by myself or with other like minded people I’d meet in college. I still have no degree but it hasn’t really slowed me down any. I have been self-employed full time for over ten years now even though the types of businesses may have varied.

I feel this background I’ve shared critically relates to what video games have come to mean to me. I believe the frustration I found when I was younger in having to pick between either “being an artist” or “being a scientist” drove me mad. I didn’t understand why someone couldn’t be interested in both. I eventually decided to stop trying to pick and realized that I just love learning about anything that interests me.

It wasn’t until the past two or three years that it finally dawned on me that the only career and passion of mine that has existed since I was a child and that could encompass everything I was interested in was video games.

I believe you can make a video game about anything at all and it can utilize aspects from every art form yet created by humanity. This realization absolutely blows my mind with excitment.

I love creating the art, the sound effects, the music, the game mechanics, solving the math problems, engineering the software, writing story or dialogue if applicable–the list is endless as to what a game can contain. This inspires me beyond anything I have yet found in my life so far to create and I’m quite thrilled as to the possibilities that await people in general for both what games will continue to teach us and where they yet have to go as a medium.

All this debate I’ve witnessed over the past few years as to whether video games can be art or not makes no sense to me at all.

I am a person that truly believes a life well lived can be art.

Life is art.

Games can be art.

This is what games mean to me.

I think I’ve been getting pretty cooked because most of my time these past few weeks has been spent learning all about various performance optimizations and graphical rendering methods in an effort to get Flash to run better on the iPhone via CS5 Beta.  I’ve learned a virtual truckload of information though and it will help to improve my games both in the browser on older computers and on mobile devices for sure.  This is information I’ll be sharing in a different post at a later date though.

As another way to wind down I’ve also been watching a good bit of Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately as a few of my friends have been cranking through episode after episode–season after season.  I watched it back when it had originally aired but it has been fun to see it again years later.  The themes, scenes, and stories have rubbed off on my subconscious though and clearly inspired the above drawing from last night:

This drawing is from a week or two ago.  Just one of those drawings that is stream of conscious style.  You just let the pen flow and move and you try to figure out what you want to draw as you see it.  I find that is the kind of state I like to draw in when I am just trying to relax and day dream a little.

I have done a few illustrations for this game working through various game mechanics, styles, and ideas.

This is a useful creative tool for me to rapidly try out different concepts and see what they might look like before I even write a single line of code or start creating any game assets.

Creating concept art becomes a way I can immerse myself in the world and atmosphere of the game ahead of time because as I am drawing these illustrations I am imagining the various aspects of the gameplay occurring.  This can even include me making hand gestures and sound effects without me realizing it as I try out the game in my mind’s eye.  As embarrassing as that might sound for some people it has been something I’ve done unashamedly since I first started drawing as a child.  It makes the experience that much more involved and creatively useful for me.

The mechanics of the game are fluid and easy to change when I am prototyping with illustrations so I can work through many ideas quickly as I form my plan about what to implement in the first prototype. It also serves as a way to get myself psyched about the game and really feeling the emotion and experience I want to try and create for the player.

This latest game has been inspired by a specific title I came up with yesterday.  I’ve been brainstorming various game ideas for it and think I’ve finally settled on a concept I want to implement a prototype of. I’ll keep the title in reserve for now but I expect to make a few more updates along the development cycle.

If you are a game designer feel free to let me know a little about your creative process when you are beginning with a new game.  I have used many different approaches and there are obviously many ways to do it.  I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has used a concept art driven approach to good effect with their games.

Just a little drawing I did tonight while I was taking a break from a game project I’m working on.

I’ve been drawing a lot of variant image styles and slice types to use with the new puzzle game I came up with last weekend during the mini LudumDare #7 friendly competition.  I’m trying to explore the potential space of the game mechanic I created since it seems fairly original so far from what I can tell. It was also pretty well received by most people who have played it so far.

As opposed to a lot of the other image puzzles out there this one seems more rare.  I have searched around and I have found jigsaw piece image puzzles, find the difference image puzzles, and spin the 3d object till it matches a silohette type puzzles.  I have not found any slice based image puzzles yet.  I would guess they are out there but who knows?  My searching has yielded nothing so far. Perhaps one reason they are not as popular are they take a lot of work.  For the current version of the puzzle I have to first draw an overall image in Photoshop.  Then I use four more layers to break that image down into different image slices that will eventually interlock to form the original image again.

I am currently exploring all the ways I can vary the styles of the art before moving onto more slices than four.  I have been listing possible image genres as well for helping to inspire various drawings.  So far I have listed things like food, animals, people, places, scenes, machines, and architecture. It is a lot of fun to create these sliced images and then see them come together as people play the puzzle.