Posts Tagged ‘Up to Four Players’

Fanart, food and further

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2016

I’ve started a new illustration project a few months ago, once again fanart-based and following the ABC. It’s a good frame to get me drawing: serialised, with a clear end point, and otherwise completely open; which is why I always add another “rule” or two to get some more focus. In the last one it was two characters per letter, with a secret connection between each following couple. This time it’s a character, a verb, and a giant-sized food item, all starting with the same letter. It’s strange up in my head, but also very organised.

Here are the first five. In days long past I would upload each one in its own blog post, but today, with so many quick channels for sharing things, it feels more cumbersome than ever to start a new post for every single piece. That’s my long-winded way of inviting you to follow my Facebook page if you want to stay up to date.

ABChow: A ABChow:B ABChow: C ABChow: D ABChow: E

Let’s see, what else is new…

Up to Four Players

We’re just starting a new story arc over at Up to Four Players. It’s one about conventions, fandoms, cosplay and family, and it has a lot of colourful hoops. Like, A LOT. Many more than I would have put there had I given some thought to how long it’s going to take to draw all of them in every single panel. But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or at least slightly averse to the colour magenta.

Up to Four Players 76: Comic Can't

Noisy Person Cards

James and Kat, from the podcasts One Shot and Campaign that I must have mentioned before, are in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign for their new game NPC – Noisy Person Cards, a party game for improving your character voice acting. We at Up to Four Players tried the beta version (see us on the Tube) and it’s super fun, so I’m really looking forward to the final product, which will include a lot more illustrated cards from various artists, myself included. Check out their Kickstarter page, and if it sounds like something you might enjoy, consider backing!

Completely unrelated to their game, I’ve also done some more fanart of their Edge of the Empire party on the Campaign podcast, with clear Zootropolis influences. How awesome was that movie?

Furry Crew of the Mynock

See ya in…a few months, evidently!
Aviv

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Merry Christmas!

Friday, December 25th, 2015

It’s customary to upload all holiday-related content before the actual day of Christmas, but this is a whole day when no one works, everything is shut down, and the chance of rain is too high to risk going out for a walk (also, that would involve getting up and going out for a walk), so what better time to compile some recent artwork into a festive blog post?

So first with the Christmas-y stuff: this is a pack I designed and was released for free on Viber as a holiday gift to our users (you can download it now if you have Viber). The idea was to steer away from the usual sugary, kitsch Christmas stickers, and show both sides of the holiday: the annoyingly enthusiastic and the bitterly cynical. I don’t even really celebrate Christmas, but having had my fair share of family dinners, long holidays and festive atmospheres, I could absolutely relate to both.

Viber sticker pack: Christmas Elves

Speaking of festive atmospheres, our two recent posts in Up to Four Players are all about Christmas, from the (quite autobiographical) point of view of foreigners coming into this strange wonderland. I’ve spent three Christmasses here, and I’m still discovering new things; for example, how many times a person can hear the same Christmas song before losing their mind. (Clicking the thumbnails will take you to the full-size strips in Up to Four Players.)

Up to Four Players #50: The Meaning of Christmas Up to Four Players #51: Festive Perspectives

Speaking of players, next Saturday will join several of them, in a 12-hour-long roleplaying marathon for charity. It’s in Hebrew, so if you’re into that sort of language, do check it out. Eran will be running a victorian monster-hunting adventure in the Savage Worlds system, with 3 brave heroes who’ll stick by him throughout the day, and several guest players who’ll pop by for a spell (me included!). I drew portraits of all our characters.
Rippers character portraits

Speaking of guest-appearances, I made one in Leigh Lahav’s recent video about Star Wars’ rising star, BB-8 the robot. I also helped her design some of the characters, but I’m much more excited about my small voice-acting role. See if you can guess which one it is.

Speaking of…umm…roles, I recently sketched the characters from our ongoing roleplaying campaign in the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying system. These are, in order: Evyatar’s character Brioche, the slightly crazy religious fanatic; Dassi’s character Marion, the slightly mysterious gold order wizard; and my character Agnes, the slightly criminal apothecary.

Warhammer: Brioche Warhammer: Marion Warhammer: Agnes

I think these are all the segues I can come up with this morning. Have yourselves any kind of very merry holiday that you’re prone to celebrating this time of year, and if perchance I fail to write my “End of 2015” post before the end of 2015, a very happy new year!

Aviv

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Summer Art Dump

Sunday, August 23rd, 2015

Oh, it’s been ridiculously long since I last posted, hasn’t it. With a full-time illustration job and a weekly webcomics I hardly have any creative juices left for extracurricular doodling, and when something does finally let itself out onto the canvas, I usually rush and post it on Facebook or Twitter for the immediate gratification of audience feedback.

Some things have accumulated, though.

Commissioned Work

My good friend wanted to surpise her roommate with an original Kyrandia-themed poster (one of her favourite games) for her birthday. How could I say no to that? Do you know how little Kyrandia fan art there is online? Well, now there’s a little bit more.
Kyrandia poster - work in progress Kyrandia poster

I was approached by an Israeli publisher who’s translating The Dresden Files series to Hebrew, and wanted my illustrated Dresden on the cover. It took a while to get me on board (so busy, no time, what stress etc), but I’m a big Dresden Files fan, and have already done some character designs a while back that the publisher liked, so now Hebrew Dresden has my art on the cover!
Dresden cover - sketch Dresden cover

My new obsession in the realm of content conusmption during work is the actual play podcast One Shot. Actual Play podcasts are recordings of tabletop roleplaying game sessions, and the group in charge of this one is full of improvisational comedians who make every episode an absolute joy to listen to. They try different roleplaying systems and settings every month, so you also get to learn about new games and get a glimpse of how they work before trying them yourself. Their other podcast, Campaign, is a single ongoing game set in the Star Wars universe and played in the really cool system Age of the Empire. I’m not a Star Wars fan, but I adore this story and the characters in it. So much so that I couldn’t help but do some fanart for one of the episodes, which happily led to also being commissioned to draw a T-shirt design for their Patreon’s T-shirt club.
One Shot fan art
One Shot T-shirt Design sketches One Shot T-shirt Design

Doodles

Whenever I feel like doodling something but have no place to start, Sketch Dailies is still my go-to place: if the daily topic tickles my artistic fancy, it’s a great trigger to get sketching.
Sketch Dailies: King Arthur Sketch Dailies: Heman Sketch Dailies: Wonder Wombat

There’s also an Israeli group on Facebook that serves the same function, but focuses on hand-drawn sketches, with a time limit of 30 minutes. Awesome for getting back to classic media sketching and practising quick execution of ideas.
Daily Sketch - Binoculars Daily Sketch - A Gentleman

And when all else fails, one can always resort to a quick fanart or a bunch of random face doodles. Or, uh, an illustrated daily food diary (lovely idea by a Twitter friend, but unfortunately I lost interest after just one (albeit yummy) Sunday).
Attack on Titan Food Diary
Face doodles

The usuals

I’ve also been doing some fun new stuff at my day job. After drawing my “Freddie and Friends” characters almost exclusively since I started working with Viber, I recently designed a few new characters, slightly less furry this time. I love my foxes and panthers, but it’s cool to shake things up and do something a bit different.
Viber sticker pack - Summer Girls

And if you’re into webcomics, gaming or general geeky stuff, I hope you’re following Eran’s and my webcomics, Up to Four Players. Here’s an exclusive peak at the sketchy phase of one of our recent strips. See the final here (is that considered clickbait?..).
Up to Four Players #32 - Mana Burn sketch

That’s it for now! Hopefully next time will be before 2016…
Aviv

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Up to 4 Players – my new webcomics!

Sunday, January 18th, 2015

I’ve mentioned it briefly before, and now it’s up: Eran Aviram and my new webcomics, Up to 4 Players.

Up to 4 Players

You can read the first three strips here: www.uptofourplayers.com

and for our Israeli readers, we have a Hebrew version: www.uptofourplayers.co.il

Follow us on Facebook and on Twitter to get updates, and I will greatly appreciate any comments, Likes, Retweets, Shares and any other buzzword that will help spread the word, because in addition to the satisfaction of creating new content, knowing there’s an audience to consume it gives us loads of motivation.

Let’s hope this is the beginning of a long, wonderful and funny journey.

Aviv

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See ya 2014, Hiya 2015

Sunday, January 4th, 2015

Ah, New Year’s Eve. That magical time of the year when I remember I have a blog, and it might be a good idea to update it every once in a while, even if it does take more effort than just throwing images on my Facebook Page (which I recommend following for more frequent – if less verbose – updates).

Lots of things happened in 2014, but everything also stayed the same. Like every year. I started a job, left a job, started a new one; made new friends, drank new beers, made cupcakes; we got used to our flat, found a new one, learned to despise one specific UK gas and electricity supplier; got married. Same as always.

And like always, work and every-day life tried to steal away my time and energy, but occasionally I showed ’em and managed to draw something, and this year several “support” groups helped.

I’ve mentioned Sketch Dailies before, and here are a few more drawings this group pulled out of me in recent months:

Sketch Dailies 15/07: Frau Holda Sketch Dailies 29/08: Dr. Strange

Sketch Dailies 13/09: Poison Ivy Sketch Dailies 15/12: Loki

The Israeli Daily Speed Sketch group lets its members pick from three different subjects (or combine them) every day, but the twist is that you have a time limit of 30 minutes, and must draw on actual paper, like in the days of yore. It’s a cool challenge, and even if you don’t read Hebrew it’s nice to see some of the interpretations – and try to work out what the daily subjects are. I haven’t been very good with keeping up and had to scroll way back to find these three sketches of mine from the group’s page…which, curiously, all feature birds.

Daily Speed Sketch: Artistic Gryphon Daily Speed Sketch: Wagtail School

Daily Speed Sketch: Drunk Turkey

But what made me draw on paper most – and even get a new set of inking pens – was INKtober, a whole month (guess which) where you draw a small piece every day, using only inks. The only prize is feeling part of an internet-wide art project and flexing those inking muscles; and it’s apparently enough, because people created some gorgeous stuff, some of which can be found in INKtober’s Facebook Page. With superhuman efforts, I managed to ink about half the days of the month, and you can see the results in a dedicated album on my Facebook Page. Here’s a small selection:

Inktober 31: Nosferatu Inktober 2: Lizard Inktober 05: Bard Inktober 09: Fairy market Inktober 11: Moustache comb Inktober 12: Gravedigger

Not sure if I mentioned on the English version of the blog, but good friends of mine are running an Israeli podcast about roleplaying games (“On the Shoulders of Dwarves” for you Hebrew speakers), and they recently ran a very successful crowd funding campaign. I donated two character portraits based on supporters’ descriptions, and here are the results, Connie and “Gentle” Gorthang:

Connie - character portrait Gorthang- character portrait

Teaser!

One of the stretch goals of said campaign was for me and Eran Aviram, one of the podcast hosts, a good friend and long-time creative partner, to start a webcomics about gaming and gamers. It’s been brewing in the background for some time, and will go live in a couple of weeks. Here’s a small sneak preview:

Up to Four Players - Initial character sketches

The webcomics is called “Up to Four Players” and will be updated weekly in both Hebrew and English. More details coming very soon!

Have a wonderful and creative 2015, and here’s to updating more!

Aviv

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