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
I was supposed to finish and upload Talon, but I just had to get this one done. It's inspired by a new show, Human (now Almost Human) that's currently filming or recently finished filming its pilot; not sure which since there's been little information for weeks. Why would I bother? Because Joel Wyman, executive producer of Fringe is running the show. For more about the knife, please read Blurring the Lines.
Original: March 25, 2013
Original: October 25, 2007
For no other reason than that I heard the Gladiator theme last night, and I was looking around the living room today for inspiration and immediately came upon the latest issue of Maximum PC, I named this knife Maximus. Quick and easy. And that lasted all of 20 minutes. I decided it didn't fit at all. It's not a large blade and it's not my best, so a name meaning "greatest" doesn't really work. I then thought about Imagine Dragons, my newest favorite group, of which there have been more than expected lately. I've been listening to "Bleeding Out" and "Radioactive" multiple times a day in the car. It felt right to take the name from the lyrics in one of those songs. (With the) Darkness Fed would have sounded odd and Darkness was almost right. So with a slight change, Feeding Darkness seemed like a good one.
Original: November 15, 2008
I finished Szerszeń today...again. Happy birthday to me!
This curved staff never had a name. Many of my weapons don't. It was inspired by nothing, commemorated no events. I already had The Nameless One, which I then entered into a contest and renamed Ruber Mors, so I couldn't use that. It went for five years without a name, but I thought of a yellow jacket as soon as it was complete, though there are no stripes and it doesn't remotely resemble the insect. It must have been the black and orange (close enough to yellow) combined with the "stingers" in the rear and the aggressive look.
But there was no way it was going to be called "Yellow Jacket." That's not a name. That's not interesting. I thought a simple translation might do, except I'd like not to translate literally to outerwear. So, I decided to go with a translation of "wasp," but nothing sounded right. Then I tried "hornet" in German. (I just needed a yellow and black insect. Any would do.) I liked "hornisse," but didn't love it. Spanish, French, Italian, Latin, Greek - none of them worked. Russian seemed to fit with "shershen'," but I wanted to see it in every language Google Translate has. I came across the Polish "szerszeń," which sounds almost exactly like the Russian word, and I knew that had to be it. My father's side of the family is Polish and Irish, so it works. And it doesn't hurt that I imagine it to make a similar sound when swept through the air. ;)
As for the design, some kind of grip or wrap was planned for the handle, but I like the pattern too much to cover it. Since it's not real yet, it doesn't matter. So, I was done. I was about to send it to Dropbox and Photobucket. But suddenly a copy appeared. I thought I accidentally made a copy, which I've done a couple times before. Stupidly (because I know computers and software screw up all the time) I deleted what I thought was the copy before I saved it anywhere else. Then I went on a grand adventure trying to recover it. What happened was it was some kind of ghost and I deleted the original. I couldn't open the ghost. I exited and reloaded and they were both gone. For an hour I tried to find recovery software for just the one file, but the only one that may have worked wouldn't work with the newest iTunes.
I didn't realize I could back up my iPad to iTunes, because I hardly use iTunes. I never even synced after I upgraded my computer last summer. iTunes wanted to erase everything because the iPad was tied to the old library, so I haven't really played with it since. And I completely forgot that I set up iCloud to back up over Wi-fi when I charged it, so there was a save file from that morning. I then backed up everything to iTunes in case iCloud didn't work, saved the Art Studio files so I wouldn't lose the background, foreground, pattern, and the copy I had of the weapon almost completed (just not in a scalable vector file that's editable in iDraw), and then erased all settings and documents. That's the only way to get to the set up screen where it asks you if you want to recover from iCloud or iTunes. Why go through all this since, if I had to, I could finish it in Art Studio or start over in iDraw? I'd rather not have to, because it wouldn't be exactly the same and I spent too much time on it for that to happen.
Later that night... Well, even though the backup was supposedly from before the file was erased, the restore was definitely from a point after. I know this because I made a new file in iDraw with what I scavenged from Art Studio and that's the one that was restored. Yet the version of the background I had worked on a few hours earlier was not restored. Odd. No matter. I found out that iCloud was a good idea to set up. Though I didn't get back the one file I needed in this case, I learned that it does work, and not all is lost. I will now be saving revisions to my Dropbox or email. Nothing had ever happened with this app before and I got lazy. Never again.
Original: September 6, 2007
Anyway, it's been five years since I first drew this trident. In all that time I didn't have a handle for it. To be fair to myself, though, after I finished it I hardly gave it another thought. I had too many others on my mind. Well, weeks ago I was "ready" to post Defiance and then realized a handle was probably necessary. How else would you wield it? It's not exactly shuriken-sized.
Original: September 13, 2007
You may notice that I flipped the design at the top and changed the one at the bottom. I think that was the right decision.
Original: January 2, 2008
I finished Lyssa days ago, but I've been too wrapped up in editing a post about Fringe that I've been working on for the last year. I have to take some time for this, though, because the other won't be done until at least the 18th, the last day of Fringe's finale. And I promised it months ago. I just completely forgot. So, here is Lyssa. This weapon was originally one of the quickest to come together, and it was also the easiest to draw in iDraw. Didn't take long at all. Simple, I guess, but I like it.
Why Lyssa? I've named a couple after women so far - Kerrigan and Miranda - and I felt like keeping it up. I also immediately thought of The Widow of the Web from Krull. No, it's not a great movie. Still, I love it. You might think it was because of one of my first crushes, Liam Neeson. I had no idea he was in it until I saw it a number of times. My favorite part of it was Ergo (David Battley), who I always remembered as the teacher that delivered the best line from Willy Wonka.
"I've just decided to switch our Friday schedule to Monday, which means that the test we take each Friday on what we learned during the week will now take place on Monday before we've learned it. But since today is Tuesday, it doesn't matter in the slightest."
~Mr. Turkentine, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
