Wind Sprites

As the light of the early morning sun hits the pods, they start to emerge,weak from their long confinement and struggling against the tough shells that kept them safe throughout their time of change.
Soon their new wings will be strong enough for the breeze to lightly lift them off their perches and carry them far away.

FANTASY XXIV: "Metamorphosis"

Brief: Things change. You are to depict as fantasy image of things are changing, or how they have changed over long periods. Transformations, transmutations,emerging, polymorphing, evolution, whatever you can come up with, as long as there is some sense of a before and after, it should be fair game for a subject.

Closeup of the first, second and third sprite.

Animated Work in Progress (About 450Kb)

Sources

It's amazing how things work sometimes. I usually struggle for ages to find some kind of workable concept. This time I almost instantly knew what I wanted to do. I even made pre-sketches. On actual paper.

I also found the perfect source for my main sprite in Marcus Ranum's DA gallery, so without too much fuss, she had taken (a rather nice) form. I even tried a new technique - painting on highlights instead of using the dodge tool, to give her a much more glistening / surreal look. I'm also quite proud of how well the wings turned out.

Then it got a lot harder. I wasted almost 2 days trying and discarding different backgrounds, but nothing would work. I knew what I wanted, of course, but just couldn't find it. Since time was running out, I finally settled on this one, but it isn't really such a perfect fit.

Most of the critiques I got was about the busyness or distracting quality of the background. Even though I had cleaned the original picture up considerably, I tend to agree with them. Who knows, maybe I'll find or take the perfect picture to use somewhere in the future. Then I can finish this one properly.

Final Score: 8.999 (I can't believe how close this is!! Just a mere 0.001 more and I would have had my very first 9!)

The Scribbler

A cool way to waste 20 minutes, The Scribbler lets you jot down a quick sketch and then takes over to create weird and wonderful things like this creature above.

10 points to the first person who can actually guess what it is!

Doggie Doodles

This is what happens when a 2 hour power cut created such boredom at work that doodles of toiletpaper puppies was my only relief.
Afterwards we resorted to making paper airplanes and trying to see if they could reach the balcony on the building opposite ours.

At least I was able to take away the awful blue lines that was on the only paper I could find, so he looks a bit better now.

Doodling

I started doodling while waiting for my computer to finish installing a Windows Service pack (because of that jpeg vulnerability thing) and this is what resulted.
I still don't know what it is though.