Sketchtober Update - Not Quite

So October is over, but Sketchtober staggers on. I'm down to the last few days, the XBox 360 games. Recently, I've noticed I've been liking my concepts initially, but then I run out of steam on them quickly. Part of it comes easily, and then the rest is a struggle, if I even get it all the way there. I might just be getting tired of the amount of free time this is eating up each night in general. I can't really read or play a video game or do anything else while I'm sketching. I could solve that problem by being better at drawing.

This time around, Gamecube stuff, Days 16-20. Not one of the better stretches. A couple of them turned out miserably - in one of those cases, my inability to draw people throwing stuff reared its head again. The other three, we'll look at below.

Day 17, Metroid Prime. There isn't a point during the battle with Ridley where you can scale the ceiling to drops bombs on him. Mostly because you fight him in a big open area with no ceiling. Still, I had other pictures where I thought I was too beholden to the specifics of the game in question - see Kirby's Adventure - so I decided not to let that restrain me here.

All of which sounds better than admitting it was just a lot easier to draw Samus in her Spider Ball form than as a person in a suit of armor (armor falling under the category of mechanical stuff as something I don't draw well). Ridley's missing the connective tissue or energy that forms his wings, because if he could fly, climbing the ceiling wouldn't be as advantageous for Samus, would it?

Overall, not too displeased with this one. Got lazy on drawing the walls of the cave, though, which is typical. I rarely have the patience for that sort of background detail work.

Day 18, TimeSplitters 2. I struggled most of the day with what to draw for this one, before opting to focus on the random nature of its multiplayer. The variety of different characters available to play, the varied locales and weapons. Thus, a monkey firing a rocket launcher at a robot, while a third character ambushes the monkey. It's not a spectacular picture, but it turned out better than I thought it would when I started. The Spanish Mission level is one of my favorite multiplayer settings, along with the abandoned hospital.

There's a guy outlined in the doorway in the upper right corner, with what's meant to be the light reflecting off a scope. One of those times drawing things larger would have been advisable. Originally, he was going to be a dark shadow against a bright opening, but I was drawing all the other doors and windows as being dark, so I decided to go the other direction, have him be a white form standing in a dark doorway. Plus, the character I was thinking of was a gunman who dressed all in white, anyway, so it fit.

Day 19, Super Smash Bros. Melee. One I definitely drew too small, probably because I got too ambitious again. The original idea was just going to be Starfox fighting Giga-Bowser. I was going to draw an immense Giga-Bowser, with Fox darting about raining high-speed punches ineffectually. Think that cover for the "But Bork Can Hurt You!" story from the old Brave & the Bold, since that's what I was picturing. But once I started, I got the idea of a team effort, really sell the threat level. So maybe closer to the Justice League vs. Starro cover? It really needed to be bigger for that, but Giga-Bowser felt like such a daunting thing to draw I reverted to my default, tiny sketch mode. Also, he probably shouldn't be that much larger than all of them. Donkey Kong should at least come up to the knee. Eh, maybe he grabbed a Super Mushroom.

I would love it if that game would just let you fight Giga-Bowser whenever you wanted. Not as part of an event match where you fight him, Ganondorf and Mewtwo. And not at the end of a run through Adventure mode, if you can beat it fast enough on a sufficiently high difficulty level. Just pick him as an opponent the way you can any character, and go at it.

Next time, whenever that is, maybe next Friday, the XBox games. Which I was actually pretty happy with, overall. Even the one that didn't go well, I liked part of.