Thursday, November 13, 2008

A Leisurely Drive

I was more than an hour late to last night's Grudemath, which ended up having a pretty severe impact on my ability to follow what was going on. To put it lightly, the match had devolved into utter, gibbering chaos. Cars blustering through the air like kites. Sarksus noclipping through the stratosphere. Stalkers losing their brains. And garden gnomes -- oh god the garden gnomes.

For one thing, it turns out they don't like to stay put inside the car. They slide around like mad, clipping right through the seats and tipping out at even the slightest turns. Ramp up the speed and steering even moderately, and the gnome rockets out of the front of the vehicle at dramatic angles. Not suprisingly, progress towards the White Forest base has been frustratingly slow.

A note on the artwork: I took a brief break from ripping off Ashley Wood so I could rip off Makani, a ludicrously talented cartoon artist. You may have seen her fantastic interpretation of the TF2 announcer floating around on sites of note, and her gallery is stocked with even more Valve-inspired goodies. The Gordon and Alyx in this sketch are directly based off of her Half-life 2 drawings.

Anyway, let's hope the contestants can soldier ahead and wrap up the Grudemath later this week. It's going to be awfully hard to concentrate on futuristic dystopias once the zombie apocalypse hits.

Bonus sketches:

3 comments:

sarksus said...

Thank you *so much* for doing these sketches and speed paints. They made this entire journey one hundred times better. Our inept story has been immortalized!

Brian Belida said...

Incredible as usual Patrick! Really love the style of this one (and all the other ones, it's been neat to see you switch it up).

It's true though, your sketches are the glue that holds together the slowly deteriorating grudemath. Thanks :D

Patrick said...

Hey, thanks guys! The pleasure's all mine -- this has turned into a really fun project, so it's just icing on the cake that people happen to dig it so much.

I think you're giving me a little too much credit, though. I've always thought of the sketches as a fun extra; they pretty much owe their existence to the spirit of the Vent community and the general wackiness of the competition.