BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF YEARS AGO, Shax used to draw .

Nah, seriously, you might've noticed, but I haven't been setting DevArt afire with new submissions lately- like, within the last YEAR or so. A new pic every couple months seems to be the most I can muster. Sure, Real Life's been busy as ever, lately- this past month has been especially brutal, but mostly due to new duties at work, which actually brings REWARDS with the added pressure - but make no mistake- there's a lot of good ol'-fashioned lazy mixed in there, too.

It's not that I don't HAVE stuff to draw- if I actually wrote down all the pic ideas I have rattling around in the dusty corners of my brain, it'd look like a small town's telephone book- but for whatever reason, when I have TIME to draw, it seems like that time would be better spent doing something productive like "watching TV" or "playing Wind Waker for the fifth time" or "going to sleep on the couch while watching Robocop 3." It's a matter of motivation.

Enter ~Lee-Ham! We kinda know each other from outside DevArt and have collaborated a couple times in the past- his love for putting Mario princesses into prickly (often vorish) predicaments rivals and, at times, surpasses my own. However, we differ in that he'll actually SKETCH some of his ideas, where I wait for the stars to align just perfectly before throwing myself completely into a project. So it came to pass that he sketched out a quick picture of Princess Peach coiled up in a spring a la Super Mario Galaxy's Spring Mushroom power-up (or, perhaps more accurately, power-down), hurtling towards some unseen horror or potentially grisly fate. He showed it to me a couple months ago, and ever since then, it's been sitting on his hard drive, waiting for him to get back to it.

We were chattin' it up last Friday night when the subject of Spring Peach came up. He mentioned that he probably wouldn't ever actually get back to it, one thing led to another, and next thing I know I have springpeach.psd sitting on my desktop, waiting for further development. Saturday night, I had a finished lineart; by the end of the weekend most of the shading was in place, and I finished the last few tweaks and nudges last night. So hey, let that be a lesson- if you go for months and months without drawing or coloring anything, don't fret, 'cause when you finally DO work on something, you'll wrap it up in record time.

For a quick n' dirty motivational jump-start collaboration, I learned a LOT from this pic. Firstly, there IS a difference between the way one shades shiny metal and the way one shades shiny rubber. That spring was the LAST thing I got to look right, which is weird since it's one of the FIRST things I started shading. Second! Dig that perspective! I dunno; something about the way Lee-Ham had Peach arcing back just BEGGED for a top-down view, and I like to think I came my closest yet to actually pulling one off with that Dino Piranha. Mostly, though, this pic was a clinic in Filters.

For as much coloring as I do in Photoshop, I seldom ever use the majority of its tools- a little Brush Tool here, a little Eraser there, maybe some judicious use of the Smudge, and that's 90% of Shax's style. Given how shiny Nintendo's been rendering the inside of Petey Piranha's (and his variants's) mouth lately, though, and given how... err, large a role it's playing in the picture, I really wanted to duplicate that- and my usual poking around with varied Opacity brushes wasn't cutting it. So i threw a Plastic Wrap filter on there, and after a little erasing, it was PERFECT. Holy cow!

That space background is a virtual parade of Filters and layer effects. Lee-Ham had actually pointed me towards a Planet tutorial done by one Greg Martin a few months ago, and I stumbled across his Starfield tutorial shortly after, and have been WAITING for an excuse to use either of them- what luck that I ended up working with a fanart of a game that'd allow me to do both at the same time!

BEFORE YOU SAY ONE DAMN WORD ABOUT MY NO-PEACH-AND-DAISY PICS RESOLUTION:

1) Technically, Lee-Ham was the one who actually drew Peach in this picture; all I did was do the background (Dino Piranha included) and color the whole mess.

2) As my pathetic output for 2008 has made me realize, I'd really rather be working on yet another Peach 'n' Daisy picture than working on NOTHING.

All that said, with this rejuvenated artistic drive, I'll see if I can't find a way to work on something non-Mario-related next time :3.