Recently, my dad and nephews started watching wrestling clips on YouTube. My 2-year old son, being ever so curious, joined in the fun. A few days after that, we kept hearing him chant this wrestler's name.
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I decided to move on from Hearthstone after so many years. It wasn't because I hated any new mechanic or set that came out. I guess I grew tired of the same gameplay after so many years. The new Battlegrounds mode did injected some new excitement but I felt that I hit my own personal skill-cap brickwall after hitting ~7K MMR.
I started playing Slay the Spire last year during my trip to Taiwan. Since then I have been playing the game on and off. I love the rogue-like gameplay and the card-based combat system. It felt like a natural progression coming from another digital card game. I also created a number of fanart for the game last year which I did not posted here. This year, I returned to the game briefly after the Watcher character was released. I updated the fanart series with on that featured her, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to share it right now over here: Some caricatures I did for my YouTube channel. Excavated this old drawing I did a few years ago from my hard disk and decided to colour it.
Illidan Hearthstone Battlegrounds fanart. In these dark times, I can only say that we are definitely not prepared. Stay home, stay safe!
Started the sketch early this week while I was on sick leave. Managed to finish it over a few nights. I wanted to experiment with a more textural, messy approach for this piece; Paying more attention to the composition instead.
I asked my wife for suggestions on our next destination for the Family Travels series. "Australia" was her answer. We have some relatives and friends living there and it was also where we took our pre-wedding photos with the help of my brother. However, I was struggling to come out with an iconic representation of the place other than the Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge. And then I remembered the Great Barrier Reef. The recent attention on climate change has reminded us of how much we have damaged our planet. Reports have also surfaced on how the Great Barrier Reef was affected by this global phenomenon. I decided that I wanted to do a piece on one of the world's eight wonders. When visualizing the image in my head, I was suddenly reminded of a piece of concept art I did for Mekazoo years ago. It involved the frog character diving into an underwater cave. While the concept was not realized in the final version of the game due to technical limitations (we didn't want to do water), the "underwater" theme survived in the form of an indoor aquarium in level 4-2 and the final post-credit scene where the evil meka-eye sank into the depths of the ocean. In fact, we were toying with the idea of the sequel to Mekazoo being mostly underwater. A Mekaquarium. Alas, history is history and the game did not come to be. But I wanted to pay homage to all that dreaming and incorporated the post credits scene in the illustration above.
Besides the post-credit scene, the saturated color palette of the game also inspired the vibrant chromatic display of the final illustration. Some caricatures I did at the latter half of this year. This is a custom Hearthstone card I made for a colleague who was leaving the organization. He was the only other person I knew IRL that was a Hearthstone fanatic so I decided to create a special artwork for him. Keanu was everywhere this summer: John Wick 3, Netflix's Always Be My Maybe, Microsoft's E3 press conference and Cyberpunk 2077. My wife and I love Stranger Things. In fact, we built the Lego Stranger Things set together for her birthday. The latest season saw the group of kids hitting their teenage years. And just like Harry Potter and his gang during book 4-7, I must say that the teenage hormones have made the main characters in Stranger Things really annoying. The only character that I have actually grown more fond of is Steve.
It's been a reeeaaally long time since I did a Hearthstone fanart. Truthfully, I have been meaning to quit Hearthstone for a while now. Having a kid meant that I had less time to play games. Because of that, I felt that I have to properly utilize that and clear some other games that are starting to pile up on my PS4 and Switch. Besides, I think that it is important for me to play a wider selection of games as an educator in this field. All these, coupled with the fact that the meta went really stale leading up to the recent expansion led me to drift away from Hearthstone.. ... Until the release of Battlegrounds.
I have tried League's auto battler but I prefect the simplicity and familiarity that came with Battlegrounds. It is just more fun for me to interact with characters and minions that I have come to love. I conceived the idea for this artwork one day while playing Battlegrounds. I had the vision of the other minions joining forces to buff a giant Amalgam, much like how the Power Rangers combine their zoids to form the Megazord. Little did I know that the Nightmare Amalgam will be removed from the game the day I am done painting this. Good bye and thank you for letting me win games I wouldn't have otherwise won. |
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