Tetris Attack Music Album Cover

I eluded in an earlier post about a Tetris Attack project. I have been working on a few drawings for the project. I got an okay from Xaleph, the project director, to post work in progress, so I'm posting my progress with the front album cover.

Inked cover

The project re-imagines music from the game Tetris Attack. What would the CD cover look like? I started exploring ideas with the sketches shown below. The front cover would showcase the characters, while the back cover would elaborate on the game and album's vibe.

The album will pay homage to Panel de Pon, the game from which Tetris Attack was developed. Drawing the main characters from both games was a start: Yoshi the dinosaur from Tetris Attack and Lip the flower fairy from Panel de Pon. The first 2 thumbnails were basically my getting familiar with the characters. I added puzzle tiles from the games in thumbnail #3.

First round of thumbnails

At the end of the first round, I concluded that the cover must have the following main elements: (1) the 2 characters and (2) the puzzle tiles.

The second round explored placement of these main elements. #1 added musical instruments as requested by Xaleph. #2 portrayed the characters as conductors (typical for music CD cover, I think). #3 was all about dynamic angle and spiral shape.

Thumbnails round 2

#1 was picked, so I proceeded with pencil sketch. The swirls were music bars with notes, another request from Xaleph. On actual size, however, the background looks rather empty. I needed to add elements that looked like something from the games.

I added a rounded rock for Yoshi to jump from. The foreground and midground looked empty, so I added flowers from Panel de Pon. Adding fluffy clouds to background sky felt natural. As final touches, I added bubbles from Tetris Attack title screen and some pollen from Panel do Pon title screen.

Pencil sketch

At this point, I recalled Xaleph's request to add the music instruments to reflect the musical nature of the album. So, as one extra final touch, I added the notes coming out of the trumpet. These notes are the tune played in game when there are enough matches to send a penalty block to the opponent.

It looks elaborate and complicated in pencil form. Once inked, it looks much simpler. With colors, it feels too simple! Yes, right now I'm working on coloring with cold sweats. But that will be a story for another post. See you then!

DennyIsk Art Website Ver 3

I just updated my website, DennyIsk Art. Please take a look, I spent quite some time on it.

DennyIsk Art website ver 3

I wrote down the requirements for this update:

• must show personality
• NOT sterile
• use handwriting for select labels 

To achieve this, I started with a rough sketch.

Rough sketch of the concept

I want to capture my childhood in the concept. This time around I attempted to do so by drawing things I remember liking: birthday cake, car, Nintendo controller, ballons, cassettes, playing cards, marbles, multi-color ballpoint pen, 6-sided die, Nintendo cartridge, paper plane... The last two items are video games: cherry and key. The tiled path under the logo was supposed to be snake and ladder path.

I was happy with the sketch, so I set out implementing it.

Work in progress

I was surprised to find how effective straight lines are at making the page look boring. To improve the look a little, I thought I'd add a CSS pattern to the header. The pattern ended up competing with the logo for attention, so I settled with a simple checkerboard and reduce the color contrast.

Next, I did not expect that for tall pages, the side menu results in empty space as I scrolled down. So I moved the navigation items to the center, making the page look plain. I tried to add some personality by applying "random" rotation to navigation items.

Finally, I created thumbnails that link to full-sized image pages.

Let me know what you think about the website in the comments! :)

Suddenly... an OverClocked project!

I often reminisced about the time when it was relatively easy for me to get involved in an online community project. Online forums were aplenty then. One community project I took part in was "The Sound of Speed", a music rearrangement  project at OverClocked Remix.

Last weekend I logged in to OC Remix forum on a whim. To my delight, there is an ongoing project for the game "Tetris Attack"! I used to play this game; then many years later recommended it to my wife and spent many weekends playing versus... Plus the game visual style fits the cute look I have been practicing.

So I tried my luck expressing my interest to be involved. And I got an okay! So now I'm happily drawing Tetris Attack images. I will post my works when the album is ready, which is still a long way off. Now please excuse me, I have thumbnails to draw :)