Unlike most of the blades I've posted, I don't have a story for North Star. It wasn't inspired by a TV series, movie, or life event. I was finished with it in maybe an hour. It just came together very quickly, which was great because most of them take quite a while. I even came up with the name in a few seconds. But when it came time to turn it into a vector, it was too plain. I always put off designing a pattern, and I got stuck on the original handle wrap for weeks and always got bored with it. After a few minutes I would move onto other things, like writing about The World's End and The Wolverine and the endless parade of great shirts from TeeFury and RiptApparel. Eventually I realized the wrap was not worth the effort. When I make the real thing one day, then I'll know what works.
Original: September 20, 2007
Woohoo, it's finished! At least on paper and digitally. This is my second knife for Almost Human, a new JJ Abrams show premiering in November on Fox. Yes, I am already a fan. Why? Because it was created by Joel Wyman, a showrunner and writer for Fringe, an all-time favorite. In fact, the name Brave New World is in tribute to it, not to Aldous Huxley. I should probably read that book sometime.
The hardest part of this by far was the lettering. I was originally trying to come up with some of my own and had done something similar to the A and L. While I was trying to figure out the O, S, and U, I got my answer in the first official trailer. Except for the T and H, the lettering comes directly from Almost Human. I had to reshape those two, because you can't have a Wyman show without heart.
@Reinbeast Nice! Sensational!!!
— JOEL WYMAN (@JHWYMAN) June 13, 2013
Over the last two months I've had pages of ideas from which I may be able to scrape together a third knife for this show. But I need a bit of a break. The last two out of three projects have taken just too long. This one I was obsessing for days over the letters being exact, even though the half millimeters of difference would be seen by no one at 600 pixels wide. So for right now I'm going to work on shiny dangerous things I've already designed. Eventually I'll create something for Supernatural or Game of Thrones, shows where weapons like this make more sense, or another for Fringe, which I've been wanting to do since last October. Hopefully, they won't take all my time.
Alternate colors version. I had three others, but this was the best.
Original: May 27, 2013
Original: June 17, 2007
Wow, it's been a really long time since my last weapon. Things just kept getting in the way, like work, movies and blogging about them (Iron Man 3 and Star Trek: Into Darkness last week), and family. Usually I can get one done in a week and a half even with distractions, but this one had all those little lines. They weren't hard. They were just annoying and every time I would choose the distraction instead.
The pattern I originally drew on paper was craggy, but the tool I used in iDraw (pencil, I think it was) automatically smoothed the lines even on the lowest setting of 0, which I assumed meant no smoothing but doesn't. So, I started the pattern from scratch two more times to find the right look. Turns out I had to do it the hard way, by creating each turn manually as a new point with the bezier tool then later choosing which ones I wanted to smooth. I also then had to connect some lines and separate others in order to color them correctly. This might be the most complicated simple weapon I've done. And, if you look close enough, you can see I ended up going with different styles for the handle and blade. The handle looks somewhat veiny, while the blade looks more like crackling.
This was almost called Raptor, which is now the name of a different weapon that actually has a bird on it. Funny thing is Raptor was originaly named Talon. They were just a bit mixed up. Then @kevinphiggins said that this one looked like a talon, so I had to use it.
Original: April 21, 2006
