Platypus of Truth

So along with a cheep set of colored pencils, I also picked up a set of pastels.  We were taught how to use these in high school and I fiddled around with them a little in college.  This past Christmas, I decided it was time to begin experimenting again and the above is my humble first attempt.  Below is a pastel sketch of Arthur Hughes' "Ophelia" that I did in college (Note: I have used ms paint(rather poorly) to erase my name and some unsightly blotches).

Concept art for a novel in the editing process.

A sudden bout of illness has made normal activity difficult again, so I've had more time than usual to mash buttons.  My play-through of the port of the DS reboot of Final Fantasy IV has taken me right up to the foot of the tower of Babil (gotta love the dwarfs!).  Earlier meditations in this series can be found here and here . I have to say that I like the way that characters pop into and out of the story.  I always felt weird leaving characters behind in FFVII.  In FFIV, there's a plot excuse for why a character suddenly joins or leaves the party.  I've already mentioned in a prior post that this forces a player to keep adjusting their tactics as the composition of the party (and their respective skills) changes.  It also means that when characters rejoin the party, they may do so at higher or lower levels than the other characters and thus make game play more challenging and unpredictable than it would be otherwise.  Finally, not all characters increase their stats as

I've played my way through the DS version of Final Fantasy IV up to Cecil's transformation on Mount Ordeal. Thus far, I've been impressed by the amount of plot material and the careful attention paid to each member of the cast.  The later is something that I felt Final Fantasy VII occasionally fell flat on.  I also enjoy most of the heroic fantasy melodrama and find that it's worn well over the years (perhaps an updated translation of the dialogue helps with that?).  Rosa needs a serious feminist intervention, but her kindness toward Edward and Rydia give her a little counter-balancing depth to all that save-me-save-me-Barbie-princess non-sense.  That aside, every character has a well-established motivation and background that fits in well with those of the other characters and the overall plot. Another difference from Final Fantasy VII (the game in the series that I've played through most recently) is that each member of the ensemble has very distinct skills th

The First Final Fantasy  title was a major event in the formation of my creative imagination .  I was fresh from my first reading of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit  and primed for the idea of exploring a fantastic world peopled with strange heroes and even stranger monsters.  A friend and I teamed up and spent months carefully working our way through the world of the four crystals armed with a whole host of maps, charts, and strategy guides.  We never quite beat the game.  I believe baseball got in the way.  In my mind, only a short time passed before another Final Fantasy  title hit the shelves -this time with a much expanded world and more intricate plot- and we were off again into a world of adventure.  This time, we did beat the game and hang up our controllers with honor.  More Square Soft titles came and went , and I have to confess to never having gone back to either of the first two games in all the years that followed. It was with a sense of delight, then, that I noticed y