Submission to Apr. 2002 MVGC

My sixth submission to the now-defunct Monthly Video Game Character competition.  The owner, Ben Krefta, still has the website up and you can peruse other submisisons by going to http://www.organicmetal.co.uk/MVGC/MVGCindex.htm

This was the comment I had included with my submission:
RUDY ROUGHKNIGHT: Trash Intro Omake
"Last month was the the perils of procrastinating, this month was the beauty of working early (sort of).  If it wasn't for John the 3rd (who had submitted an entry as well), I'd still be procrastinating this submission - I'm glad he kicked my lazy ass.

Shooting my big mouth off, I promised BOMU that I'd make a Japanese style four panel comic strip.  At the start I had only two gags - both were pretty lame.  The first gag's sequence was:  (1) Top down shot of Rudi reaching up saying "Just a little more...";  (2) Close shot of Cecilia's face as she tells Jack not to peek up her skirt;  (3) Close shot of Jack looking down and denying the accusation;  (4) A semi-SD long shot of the three forming a human ladder with Jack on all fours acting as base, Cecila standing on his back and Rudi standing on her shoulders - Rudi's outstretched arm is ablur as he tries to get his first grip on the cliff wall and is saying "C'mon guys, I've almost reached it!", Cecilia replies "Hurry up, you're heavy!", and Jack retorts "Oh yeah! What about me?!".  The second gag is the one you see here.

Since the submission is a comic strip, it wasn't subject to my cheesy-anime-title rule.  I used the word "Trash" since I notice that a lot of Japanese artists (and some games) use it to refer to unused or unfinished artwork.

Because I started work a week before the deadline, I decided to try out a visual style that I had stumbled upon while working on the Ulala submission - which in the end nearly prevented me from submitting this.  You have to admit, it does look purty.

Still no change in what I use to make the image (HB pencil, any ol' drawing paper, .5 tech pen).  Drawing and inking the four panels took around a day, cleaning it up after scanning took another day (a tedious, mind-lobotomizing process... unfortunately it's the only method I know that makes my work look really nice), block coloring also consumed a day (since I'm trying out a new style), and color shading was almost 2 days of carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing mouse work.  Between block coloring and color shading I took a day off, especially when my fingers started to cramp from constantly gripping a mouse."

Just like the ULALA piece, the PSD of this piece was also lost when the harddisk crashed.  As luck would have it, I had made a JPG image of the full sized work (the one I submitted was smaller due to file size constraints) to be used as a sample work for a tutorial I was giving to a bunch of friends.  I then re-sized it so that it could fit in the DeviantArt webpage.