World of Warcraft’s in-game calendar was added in patch 3.0.2 on October 14th, 2008. In the nearly 10 years it’s been in-game not many changes have been made to update its features or functionality. I’m going to take a quick look at its current features and then discuss changes I’d make to improve this useful planning feature.
World of Warcraft’s in-game calendar and events.
For the longest time, I’ve kept a folder called something like References when I’m working on bigger illustration projects. As you can imagine this folder is full of images of inspiration, reference, poses, etc and taking up an unimaginable amount of space on my computer. This was until I learned I could use Pinterest in the same way. I’m going to show you an easy way to set-up a reference board on Pinterest to help you plan your Illustrations a bit better.
I’m going to assume you already have an account set-up – if not,
Night Elf Guardian Druid
I finished a new illustration this week. It’s an updated version of an older picture of my Night Elf Druid from World of Warcraft. The original picture was for the Illustration Friday theme of Disguise. For me, the word fits druids very well, as they shift from one form to another. I decided to redraw it because I wanted to update my avatar on my guilds discord.
As a guild leader, and occasionally unguilded alt, I’ve had my share of frustration with World of Warcraft’s in-game Guild Finder tool. Added all the way back in patch 4.1 (4.26.2011) during Cataclysm, the Guild Finder hasn’t been updated or changed in almost 7 years. I was excited when they announced new social features during this years BlizzCon.
While the few images they showed made it look like a Discord clone, I’m hoping that’s not the case. I took some time to make a mock-up of changes I hope they add, but first I want to look at the Guild Finder as it is and what its current shortcomings are.
The current guild finder is accessible to guild leaders and members of a set rank. It consists of two panels, the recruitment panel, and the requests panel, both being tabs in the Guild Info panel.
The recruitment panel consists of a few check-boxes and a small text box. Officers are able to check boxes for:
They are then able to add a small amount of text about their guild, limited to around a paragraph. Below is a sample of the recruitment panel.
Just a quick video share of a timelapse painting of Pinkie Pie.
The last of the line work videos. A quick bonus on how to add a thick line around your finished line work.
A follow up to last weeks video. Refining your linework and adding details.
I made a little tutorial video showing how I do line work in Illustrator. It won’t teach you how to use the pen tool, but might give you a few new techniques to try.
I wanted to talk a little bit about failure and why it is an important part of the learning process for an artist. Quite often my students worry about not always being able to try a new technique and get it right the first time. While I understand where they are coming from, it’s more true that we learn a lot more from our failures than our success. If you get it right the first time, you really haven’t learned much. I loved this quote from the end of “Meet the Robinsons”
Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths – Walt Disney.
It’s really a true statement. And the movie itself reinforces the notion that failure is ok. I know I haven’t talked about working on my masters much, but there were a lot of projects that I didn’t quite get and I ended up really frustrated. This was especially true anytime we had to work on an editorial illustration. My super cutesy style doesn’t lend itself well to magazine illustration, but I tried my hardest to make it work.
During my final semester, we were assigned a three part editorial illustration with a full-page, half-page and spot illustration for an article about corporate greed. I had a serious mind blank about what to do and my thumbnails showed that. My first set were terrible.
Kal
