93. Schedule change!

This post is a bit of a media update.

I have an Inktober post coming in a few days. 
Inktober is a ink based drawing challenge in October, where you do a picture every day.
I posted them all on Instagram while I was doing them, and I'll be posting all the pictures I drew throughout Inktober on here so you can view them at your leisure.
I'm happy to say that I managed to 'technically' not miss a day.

The main point of this post is about my YouTube.
Up until now my weekly 'Free For All Thursday' Twitch stream videos have been uploaded twice a week (Monday & Friday).
I felt that this is a bit of a slow pace of uploads, especially when we're recording 4 to 5 a week while I stream.
So from now on I'll be uploading 3 of these videos a week.
The new release schedule for these videos will be Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Hopefully reducing the gap between videos will help folks who want to watch them feel less distanced from each episode.
I'm also hoping it will allow me some freedom to make different videos, and some YouTube exclusive content too.

Anyway, if you haven't checked out the Pokémon Uranium episodes yet head over to my channel, or just check out the Pokémon Uranium playlist.
If you catch up, them join me live of Twitch!

That's it for now.
Peace!

-DH-

77. #TeamJigglybutts

Hi guys, whats happening?

A smol update for y'all today.

Recently I've been busy doing stuff... nothing noteworthy for the most part, but I thought I'd let you know about a new show I'm running on my Twitch channel as of this week!

If you've read some of my previous entries, or watched my channel before, you may have noticed that on occasion I am joined by my friend Andrew aka MyWallet (MyWallet the Butt Knight).
He's a smash player who mains Samus, and labbs for the Samus discord.
In addition we've recently started to compete in local tournaments (by compete I mean get destroyed in).


Well, as of this week we'll be starting a show on my Twitch channel.
Every Wednesday he'll be joining me to play stuff... mainly retro(ish) Nintendo games.

So, I'd appreciate if you joined us there!
So make sure to follow me on Twitch and Twitter to be sure you don't miss it!

PS: Here is the shows Twitch banner :D


See you tomorrow!

-DH-

General update.

Nope, nothing new to report really.
Just ramblings.

I've been working on stuff.
I've got a thing that has taken up a fair amount of time, but that will have to be fully completed before I blog about it.
You can catch some glimpses of it on my instgram as always!

Other than that I've been doing some painting, which you can check out on The Underhive Hero.
The most recent project is my Escher Gang for Necromunda, so go check that out.


I've been spending a fair whack of time on Twitch too.
I'm up to 8 followers, which is cool!
I'm still giving away a digital copy of the first Starbomb album, so if you're interested on that, or just want to support the various thing i do, then follow me on there :3


I'm attending my third Smash Bros tournament on 18/05/2016!
I'm still crashing our very early in the competition, but such is life when you want to main Jigglypuff in a world full of Fox and Falco mains.
I did improve on my HawxX Nest performance, by actually advancing in the knockout round!
Bu tit's not enough, so more games to be played in preparation for that!


Next weekend is Slam Dunk, and the week after that is the Uk Games Expo, which I'm looking forward to immensely.


That's pretty much me summed up to be honest.
So, yeah, until next time...
Peace.

-DH-

68. Super Smash Brothers!

While I was in high school we had a tradition.

A couple of my friends, my brother and I would, almost every Saturday, order 2 extra large Pizzas from Castellos (Buy one get one free!), and spend pretty much the whole day playing |Time Splitters 2 and Super Smash Brothers Melee on Gamecube.

We played for years.
It wasn't until we all hit the age where you stop going round your friends to play video games that we really stopped playing.
In our group of friends, even in our extend groups of friends, I was pretty good.
I mean, we were all decent, but my brother and I played so much that it would always come down to the two of us.

This was before the internet kids, so I had no idea of all the crazy shit you could do; wave dashing, crouch cancelling...
I just knew that I could probably take on any 3 of my friends and come out on top (unless my brother was involved).

So fast forward to the modern day.

Trash Bros is out now (Smash Bros 4/ Wii U) and it is a totally different story.
I'm terrible at it.
I mean, I've gotten better in the last months or two, but I'm nowhere near the level I was at Melee, or the level of my friends who play it now.

I remind them of this often.
When we play Melee, we have decent, close games.
I'm out of touch, and they're not bad themselves.
But I still do fairly well.


So, a few weeks back, one of my Smash Bros fanatical friends informed me of an upcoming Smash tournament(I've mentioned My Wallet the Butt Knight before, no - check him out on YouTube).

We decided to go, thinking we'd be do okay.

How wrong we were.

We all got knocked out in the first round with no wins.
And the same happened in the Knockout round.

I manged to win 1 game, and really should have done better in the knockout rounds.
My Wallet should have smashed it, but lack of sleep, nerves and general pressure because of the first tournament setting saw him get knocked out too.


While we were a bit salty about it, we're definitely up for another one.
I have no idea when it will be, but stay tuned!

-DH-

66. Elvis. Custom Marth Amiibo part 1.

Yep, it's another custom Amiibo project.

I have a few of my own on the go now, and I really should get round to finishing them off.
If you read my last post I have started to make some progress on them again.

In the meantime I've been pottering about doing other projects here and there, which you can check out over on The Underhive Hero.

While my Custom Amiibo stuff is fairly common knowledge amongst my friends, it dpoesn't really do much for the majority of them; not a great dela of them own the WiiU/ 3DS (which in my opinion is a crying shame!).

However, in one of my circles of friends the Nintendo hype is real, and recently one person from said group approached me with an offer.
He would provide a load of Amiibo's for me to pretty much do whatever I fancied with them.
This way I could widen my palate so to speak, with different style, concepts, colour schemes and so on.
As cool as this was, I insisted that he have some creative input too, so that he was happy with the stuff he got back.
Also, it gives me a 'working for commission' feel as apposed to off my own passion, which is a different mindset entirely.


Since then we've discussed several ideas, and through that process I've come up with some great concepts for Amiibo repaints and sculpts.

A few of those are some time off, and in the interim I wanted to get started on something right now.

So we decided to start with Marth from the Fire Emblem series.


While some other projects are going to involve sculpting and stuff, we just went with a simple repaint option with this guy, and it was one we both agreed on immediately (albeit for different reasons).

We decided to go for Marth's white outfit from Super Smash Brothers


Marth has been my main since Melee, an I've always played in the white scheme and called him Elvis.
No idea why.
My friend just thinks he look fabulous in white...


So he's currently being base coated in grey, ready for many, many layers of ever lightening grey to white.
Fun times ahead.

Stay tuned for more updates.

If you are curious about said friend, his handle is My Wallet; short for My Wallet The Butt Knight, and you can find him on YouTube where he posts videos about Smash Brothers.

If you want a sneak peak of my work, I tend to post pictures of the things I do on instagram as I do them, so you can check me out on there.
I'll also post about it on Twitter form time to time @DarKHaZZl3.

Feel free to message me on here, on Twitter or Instagram if you have and comments, constructive criticisms or other feedback.
Alternatively, I am open to the concept of commission work; both for Amiibo's and other Miniatures, so feel free to contact me regrading that.

Peace!

-DH-

65. The return of Pichu Senior. Pikachu Amiibo part 3 (I guess?)

So this project hasn't been updated for a while...
But I'm working on some Amiibo stuff right now, so I thought I may aswell finish this one off too.... one less project hanging around!

Pichu Senior, now with buckle!



I'm pretty happy with this guy overall.
I've applied the varnish ready for painting, but OI just haven't decided if I'm going to add a rim to the goggles yet...

Anyway, keep your eyes peeled here and on my for more progress on this one, and hopefully a swathe of other stuff too!

Peace!

-DH-

51. Rubber Ross Kirby Amiibo complete!

I finished my Rubber Ross inspired Kirby Amiibo project!



It was just a case of adding a final layer of blue to the shoes, covering up any slip ups on the body and defining the mouth.
Also, scraping the the paint of the base. Note to self: More masking tape next time.

It was all finished off with a coat of satin spray varnish (purity seal)


You can check out the whole project from start to finish in pictures over on my Flickr account.


All constructive feedback welcome!
If you'd like to know anything about the project then feel free to get in touch.
Also, if you have any custom Amiibo's you'd like me to do, then throw a suggestion/ request at me.

Either way drop me a comment, or tweet me @DarkHaZZl3


That is all for now.

Check back for more projects, both old and new coming soon.

Peace
-DH-

47. Moar Amiibo stuff!

Yup, I've been doing some more work on my creative projects, namely my Amiibo's.

Most time has been spent on Kirby so far.

So I started with the base layer...







I know it looks totally odd, but it does get better.

The first layer of light blue;



And with the 'final' shade of light blue with the cheeks and eyes done.




I'd like to throw out a thanks to my friend Mike who helped me pick out the paints to paint this guy.
As far as colour selection goes it looks pretty sweet.

I know the cheeks are not totally symmetrical which is annoying, and the paint finish is a bit rough due to one too many layers, but that is the purpose of trying these things out.

I know the mistakes I made this time round and how to correct them for the future.

Kirby isn't finished yet mind.
I've just applied a layer of satin varnish before I start work on the feet and then it is on to the touch ups.

I also did a little more work on Pikachu.
I glued the goggles into place and sculpted the straps of the goggles.






Need to sculpt the buckle, fill in the gaps under the goggles and join the lenses to the straps before I start painting this one up.
Not actually going to change the colour of Pikachu, just paint the headgear so it shouldn't take anywhere near as long as Kirby to paint.

That's all for now.

Let me know what you think in the comments, tweet me  @darkhazzl3 or follow me on instagram @darkhazzl3 where I'll post sporadic updates of whatever I'm doing at the time.

Peace
-DH-

46. New stuff and a Gallery

So after the last post I've been trying to crack on with some more creative projects.

First port of call was to find a way to share these with you.
I created a personal Flickr account so I can share pictures on here. It can be found via the Gallery link in the navigation bar.
Alternatively you can click here.

With that out the way, I set about doing some drawing, painting and other stuff.

The later is what I want to show you today!

Sometime back I bought some Amiibo's with the sole intention of customising them and selling them.
While I still think I'll do this, it wont be with these ones.
These are more of a test for personal use.


So, first up we have Kirby.


My Kirby Amiibo is named Rubber Ross in honour of Ross from Game Grumps. Therefore it had to be blue!

I set about prepping the Amiibo for painting when I noticed the horrendous mold lines.


If I'm going to do these things, I'm going to do them right, so that had to be filled.



Much better.

While that dried I thought I'd get started on the second one.


My second Amiibo is Pikachu.
I was slightly disappointing to find that Pichu was not in Smash Bro's Wiiu.
While browsing the different colours and costumes in the game I noticed that there was a Pikachu with goggle, much like the Pichu with goggles from the older versions of the game.
Therefore Pichu Sr was born!


This one would require less painting, but more sculpting to create the goggles.
Luckily the Wiiu has a stage with a mirror so i could see all the angles I needed.


I started out by marking a rough set of goggles using a pen and some low tack modelling masking tape.


I then took a piece of plasticard...


...and cut out some goggles.


Using this method again I started to make templates for the straps.


To make the straps I used some expoy putty. I rolled it into sausage shapes and then smoothed those shapes over the templates.

When these are starting to dry I'll attach them to the Amiibo and start shaping them.

That is all for now.

Until next time

-DH-

45. Watercolour

So there has been some inexplicably high traffic of late (at least, high for me at least).
This blog is asserting its existence it would appear.

 I have given a lot of thought to writing many an article. 
There are many topics which have been scratching at my mind, begging to given form. 
A lot of these topics are divisive, which is great! It would allow me to rant about something, which is always a cathartic experience for me.
 On the flip side my philosophy over the past couple of years has been 'don't be a dick' (unless it is while gaming, obviously). 
This is not only advice I would give out to both competing sides, but also myself, thus preventing any real structured debate to form in my mind. 
However, with the general election looming I don't know how long I can keep a lid on it. 

The Cardboard Cartographer is doing well. 
So far I've put up 3 issues covering some gaming news, Kickstarter previews as well a some reviews. In issue 3 we talked Five Tribes and the controversial 'Slave Card.' 
You can read about that (in two parts) here - The Cardboard Cartographer Issue 3 - Five Tribes 

Issue 4 will come out this weekend so be sure to check back on Sunday!

In other news, I've been trying to do more creative things again.
This process has been somewhat delayed due to preparing for future house redecorating , but I am doing things. And stuff.
So far it has mainly been sketches and thinking about ideas, but today I had a lot of time to kill so I did this;



I haven't used water colours in over 10 years.
It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, but to create an authentic watercolour 'feel,' may be a little more challenging.

Anyway, that is all for now.
Thanks for checking this out,

Peace
-DH-