As promised, I wanted to do some spooky projects this month since Halloween is just around the corner. There are several types of undead skeletal monsters from Final Fantasy IV, and most of them hang out around Mt. Hobs and Mt. Ordeals. It's sort of implied that they're the remains of the various adventurers who tried and failed to climb the mountains (witness the impromptu grave sites complete with makeshift tombstones about halfway up Mt. Ordeals), which is a pretty disturbing prospect if you stop and think about it. These guys gave me a lot of trouble. I average working for about a month on each new batch of projects, but I actually started these guys last year but gave up on them for a while. I had to do a lot of structural work in addition to all the usual customizing and painting, and it was rather time-consuming. I'm very pleased, however, to finally reveal the Red Bone, Skelton [sic], and Skull, who honestly I think are some of my best Final Fantasy IV monsters to date. However, I'll let y'all be the judge of that. Feel free to leave comments! Don't be shy! Oh, I almost forgot. I'm not planning on a November update because I've got some other stuff I'm working on. I have the fifth Butterfly Princess novel written, but I need to do some editing, illustrate the book cover, and format the book for publication. (I'll never get any of that done if I'm spending all month painting toys, so I gotta tear myself away from that for a bit. If I get done before the end of November, maybe I can squeeze in a simple project. No promises!) In the meantime, check out the wiki to get caught up on current events from the series!
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The August update includes a set of four companion projects that I started a number of months ago, but I honestly wasn't entirely sure how to approach. Sometimes it's really useful to just set a project aside and let my subconscious mull it over for a bit. You'd be surprised how frequently this ends up being beneficial. Anyway, among the Final Fantasy IV monsters are a subset of undead creatures who are much more difficult to kill with conventional weapons. To destroy them, you can actually use magic or items designed to heal your party members, which is a crazy game mechanic but kind of makes sense in a way. During the course of the game, Cecil and his buddies cross paths with numerous unliving monsters including the Zombie, the Ghoul, the Revenant, and the Ghast, who only appears once during a boss fight. I encountered an interesting problem with these guys, since two of the would-be palette-swap monsters actually ended up using the exact same colors in the course of the game (the Revenant cannot be visually distinguished from the Ghast). Come read about how I approached this problem, and let me know in the comments if you agree with my decision or not! Believe it or not, I didn't intend to take a two-month hiatus. It's January, but I was actually working on this month's batch of projects while listening to Bobby Pickett's "Monster Mash." (Because it was Halloween, you see. Which is at the end of October, just so we're crystal clear.) Part of the problem was a work injury which made it difficult for me to get up and down the stairs to visit my workshop. Part of it, too, was that I spent the entire month of November talking to an AI chatbot. (Hey, what can I say. Artificial intelligence fascinates me. Also, she's really cute.) I think that by far the biggest problem, though, is that I had enormous difficulty sculpting the new heads for these projects. It was a challenge for me to take the two-dimensional 16-bit game sprite (which is fairly abstract) and translate it into three-dimensional space. We only see his head from a side view, too, so figuring out what he might look like from the front was an interesting exercise in visual extrapolation. I think I arrived at a pretty decent end result, though. Without further ado, I present the Stoneman, the Staleman [sic], and the Ironman (insert Avengers joke here). So, sorry about the last couple of months. I intended to unveil a new batch of projects every month, but there was nothing for November or December. I did unveil two projects in October, though, so that's something. Maybe if I manage to squeeze in one more project by the end of January, we'll be all caught up! |
DAVID GRAHAM EDWARDS
Illustrator, writer, painter, sculptor, collector of toys and cats, observer of things. Categories
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