Calling all Tomb Raider fan artists:


Join the Toon Raider drawing competition over at Tomb Raider Forums! Draw Lara using any cartoon style you like. Post works in progress, create as many entries as you want, and be sure to stick around and vote for your favorites

Check it out!


Tentative deadline: Saturday, March 3rd (midnight forum time)

This is a Tomb Raider fan fiction competition with a twist: you will team up with another member to co-write your story!

The theme of your story is totally up to you - it just has to be set in the Tomb Raider universe.

Rules:

   * Each team consists of two people.
   * You can be a part of more than one team, but make sure you have enough time and energy to commit to them all.
   * You may include art (drawings, music, photos, etc.) with your story.
    *How you divide the work is up to you. Maybe you take turns writing scenes, or one person will create art that inspires (or is inspired by) the story, or whatever works for you.

Why are so many Daily Deviations given to photos of naked women? For a while now, every time I browse through the DD page, it's painting, tits, tits, 3D model, tits, fan art, tits, tits, tits...

[link]

^ The first episode of Tombcast, a fan made Tomb Raider podcast is now live!

I've been playing around with the Get Watcher's website. You earn points for viewing (more for commenting and/or faving) work from other members, then each of those points gets you a pageview from the other members doing the same thing.

The most rewarding part is giving and getting comments, and sometimes discovering an artist you want to "watch."

My big beef with Get Watchers is that the points thing doesn't feel very effective for growing your audience. If you really want to gain popularity, you're better off regularly uploading new works and submitting them to specialized groups.

I'm giving myself a new challenge: no more fan art until I've submitted at least 10 non-fan art deviations.

I need a break from drawing TR stuff anyway

How are you going to challenge yourself creatively this spring?

I'm hosting a Tomb Raider Art Contest over at TRforums:
[link]

All forms of visual art are welcome!
Drawing, Cosplay, Sculpture, XNA Lara, Photography

This contest follows the same format as the OSC and FanFic competitions: submit your work within the deadline, take part in the voting, and you'll have a chance to host the next competition!

Deadline: Saturday, March 26th


The grand opening of this competition has a special double feature. The two themes (mood and adrenaline) are inspired by what makes the Tomb Raider games so compelling. Choose one of the two themes to inspire you to create an original piece of art.

Mood:
Create something dark and atmospheric

Adrenaline:
Create something daring and exciting

Rules:

   1. Create up to one entry per theme.
   2. Take part in voting for a chance to host the next competition.

My work on Ciardha (and issue 1 itself) is nearly at an end. I've already made more pages for this project than any of my other comic projects, thanks to having Smog on the team as a brilliant writer. I feel like my workflow is abnormally slow compared to pages by other artists with a similar level of detail because they say it only takes them around four or five hours from start to finish. My attention span is both long and short. I'll get a page done in about two sittings, but I'm flipping between CS4 and forums and Pandora and Hulu, etc. It gets worse when I'm bored or drawing something unfamiliar - typical procrastination. I need to snuggle up with those anatomy books and just draw, draw, draw, practice, practice, practice. Then pick up some perspective books and do the same.

I've learned the following about web comics...
-Presentation/clarity is more important than fussy details
-You have to really love what you're working on to stick with it

It's easy to get bored drawing the same elements over and over. If you don't love the process alone enough to continue, things are gonna go downhill fast. I need to work on some self discipline when it comes to long term projects, but on the other hand, sometimes it's best to take a break or do something different for a while.

Reception of Ciardha has been positive but sparse and slow. If the audience just isn't that crazy over something, I start getting cold feet. Does that make me a jaded asshole? Probably, yes. I don't really get why the comic hasn't been garnering much attention compared to other TR fan comics, but it's hard to see your own project through an outsider's eyes.

I've joined a new team and we've been collaborating on a TR fan comic called Ciardha. Several pages have already been published here: [link]

How do you keep yourself motivated to finish a detailed drawing or painting, or big creative projects in general?

College has got me super busy these days, so it may be a couple of weeks before I'm able to do anything artsy without multiple red-alert deadlines snapping at my heels. I've become disinterested in continuing my Origins fan comic at the moment, but I do plan to start a new one called TR: Eye of Morpheus.

Speaking of TR fan comics, keep an eye on 's gallery. She's also making a comic, and I can already tell it's going to be EPIC! Check out the cover:

Now to rant about a couple of things in the TR fan art scene.
> I am soooooooo tired of XNALara. Unfortunately XNALara creations are clogging up both TR groups and searches for TR fan art. Most of them are pretty much the same: make Lara do a sexy pose, or recreate some pose from an official render or comic, or slap her on some shopzorzed background and call it a day.
> Hand drawn copies of official renders and the official comic books. I get that maybe someone just wants to emulate Andy Park's style, or they want to make a drawing just like the renders, but I'd rather see the artist's personal style and interpretation, even if the anatomy is iffy or it doesn't exactly fit the Lara 'canon'.

It's a wonder some really brilliant fan artists don't advertise their work more. Check out this video (and the others on his Youtube page, too) by TRKO of tombraiderforums:
[link]

So I finally got off my proverbial ass and picked up that fan comic project again. My writing and planning process for this comic has been a very sporadic,by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of thing. Most of it isn't even written down and quite a lot I just plan to make up as I go. I'll get inspiration from a daydream or some random news article, and slowly the mental film evolves.

I got a wild hair and actually planned the first bit of the storyline in an old sketchbook. An outline for the prologue and the first two chapters slowly crawls onto the paper. A few days after that, a thumbnail sketch. A week after that, I bang out a new page in a couple days. The same day I finish that page (today...well, technically yesterday), I've got three more pages planned. The fourth page is a PSD file with the paneling and some photo references in the layers. I'm going to download XNALara again to set up a reference for an extreme perspective shot in one panel.

Turning an ephemeral daydream into something tangible is pretty cool. An assload of work, but cool.

Melonie ( ) and I are collaborating on the artwork for an upcoming TR fan comic. We've just released the test page!

Full view, comments, and suggestions welcome here: [link]

"There are no artists better than you, just artists who are more experienced and well practiced."
-picked up from CA.org, can't remember from who exactly

I think it's a mistake to tell any artist, especially a young artist, that they are talented. It makes them lazy. It made /me/ lazy. I don't actually draw or paint much outside of what you see posted in this gallery, unless it's for a formal art class. I've only taken a handful of those in the past few years.

Lack of practice has come back to bite me in the ass. I've hit this block where I feel I must learn everything all over again. I look at tutorials, stock, works from artists whose mastery I hope to aspire to, open up Gimp, turn on the radio, try to mimic the particular 'look' or technique I'm after. Force myself to work from general to specific. Move on to details, see there's still some underlying structure that needs to be corrected. Paint over, paint over, adjust colors, gaze at more tutorials, start all over, don't look at it again ever.

I just don't have the patience.

What freaking mind**** art can be. You find yourself jealously comparing your work, success, and popularity with those of other artists. When a person says "so and so is the best" or "so and so is my favorite", and it's not you, it bugs you. Deep inside it does. Doesn't it?





lol.

[link]

What do you think?

This is gonna come off as kinda hypocritical and snobby...because it is!

One of my big DevArt pet peeves is wannabes. Folks who try to style themselves after artists who get more faves per work than most of us will see during our entire membership here. When you try to be just like someone else, you can only be second best. You lose your identity as an artist, your personal style.

Sometimes the wannabe-ism veers dangerously close to downright plagiarism. If I see one more counterfeit Andy Park Lara, I just might puke. Or fly into a rage.

Embrace your quirks, they will give your work a unique charm as your technical skills progress. This is called style. Experiment. For goodness sake, don't settle for being a mere copycat.

I've long toyed with the idea of creating my own fan comic, especially after perusing such sites as OnlineComics.net. Not only is really cool to see your writing come alive, if your art or writing or both is good enough, you gain a huge following.

Praise and feedback is like (crack)fuel for the fan artist. For some of us, it's likely to be the main drive behind continuing to make fan works. We're entertainers at heart. If we've made someone laugh or think 'wow!', the time behind the tablet was all the more worth it. But it's not enough. You've got to have fun creating fan works, too.

There are two barriers keeping me from starting the first panel.
1. No script, no story yet. Working on that. With TR fan fic, the best strategy seems to be creating an interesting artifact/treasure first, then giving Lara a foe, and finally deciding on some scenic places for her to visit. Then you have to make sure you haven't created something so rambling and convoluted it'd take years and hundreds of pages to communicate in comic form, which leads me to my second point...
2. I lose interest in long-term personal projects fairly easily. Stuff remains in work-in-progress limbo or never makes it past the daydream stage. I'm going to plan and polish the story first, repeat the process for panels and pages, and finally when I've got a healthy amount done, I'll publish it here and on the forums.

My headache is making me draw a blank now. Ta.

It was totally worth it.