Kathy Murdoch

Amelia, the Goddess of Air & Wind

Amelia, a hybrid human and flying fox, was created when a crashed biplane burst into flames and accidentally recreated the summoning ritual conditions for creating a deity. Without the intention of the spell, however, she roamed in a misty void for years before finally becoming corporeal. She loves every part of the world and wants to see it all.

#ElementalDeities #mastoArt #krita #Illustration

I've made a zine!

The Elemental Deities are four goddesses summoned at various times in history, each representing one of the classical elements (fire, earth, wind, and water) and each a hybrid between human and an animal. Each of them has her own mission, and must work with (or against) the others to achieve it.

I've made a five-page comic, and some mock-up fashion magazine covers for all of them, and I'll be posting those here over the next few days!

#mastoArt #zine #ElementalDeities #kapellostore

Custodia, the Goddess of Water

Custodia is the last of the old gods, a hybrid of human and yellow-lipped sea krait. Her eternal mission is to protect the last artefact of her creators' civilisation, and she takes her duties seriously; nobody shall get past her poison-laced trident, least of all Swarm, who lusts after the treasure.

#ElementalDeities #mastoArt #krita

Swarm, the Goddess of Fire

Swarm was created as the hybrid of a fire ant and the medieval mages who summoned her. They wanted her to eliminate the ancient heathen gods. She's hell-bent on getting hold of the artefact she knows Custodia guards, yet she only has an inkling of what its true power is.

#ElementalDeities #mastoArt #krita

Of course if I design four characters and start writing lore for them, I'm going to end up making a comic about them!

Welcome to the Patheon of the Elemental Deities.

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#ElementalDeities #comic #comics #kapellostore #mastoArt #krita

Currently playing the "how many times will I spot a minor error, re-export everything, and then spot something else" game

I spent too long in focus on art today and ho boy am I spaced out righ tnow

#LifeDrawing log: rough one this week. I'd already spent a lot of time drawing and problem solving during the day, so I didn't have much left in the tank by the evening. My 20 min drawings were the worst ones I've done for quite a while, and I wasn't taking in much info either.

Chef's special was drawing using C curves, S curves, and straight lines (the CSI exercise). I didn't do it; instead I was trying to experiment with straight lines vs curved lines, and general shape design. I think this was the wrong week to try it, but one shapey 5-minute pose came out pretty decently.

Earlier this year I pitched the wonderful Jack Lyttle a short story for his twitch stream's Story Time segment since he's in-between reading two classics at the moment.

It's a sort of steampunk sci-fi found-correspondence thing, and Jack ended up turning it into a bit of a radio play performance!

The VOD has just gone up on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZTNRvJcKt0

Find Jack on twitch: https://twitch.tv/jacklyttle

#Pathogen #Scifi #writing #Twitch

Nice, my programmable keypad works with #Krita on Android. I guess there was no reason it shouldn't, but that'll be useful for travel.

(Just have to "export scheme" instead of "export shortcuts", the latter of which is weirdly incomplete.)

(And yes I'm still using custom keybindings even with a programmable keyboard. I've created a Ctrl, Alt, and Shift key so that basically triples the number of keys (okay, we could get fancy with combos to increase that further))

My printed copies of the compilation of all six current issues of Brace for Impact arrived today!

I'm super proud of these, I've been going through them all by hand over the last month or so to prep them for print and add additional behind the scenes material between chapters. I'm so happy with how they've come out.

(More details on how to get hold of one coming soon.)

#BraceForImpactComic #BraceForImpact

Hoping to be well enough to get back to art soon but I did have a moment of delight in last Friday's #twitch stream which reminded me why I do this

https://www.twitch.tv/kapellosaur/clip/MildStormyGrousePicoMause-WnG_eG6GsyjabZ5J

I really need to get better at thinking about my light sources at the composition stage, gah

#LifeDrawing log: despite napping throughout the day to try to be awake enough for life drawing, and still feeling like I wasn't, I did turn up and surprisingly I had a good art day. We had a model that was very good at holding poses, which helped. My friend brought another friend this week, so I got to see two other sets of drawings. Everyone at that class is so talented, dang!

Chef's special was breaking down the pose into just straight lines. I've struggled with this in the past but I think my judgement of angles and lengths (oh no, they're all mathematical vectors) has improved lately. There was an extra twist this time: a single pose broken down into a 3 min, then a 1½ min, then 45 seconds, then 20... 10.... down to 1 for the final. I saw where the instructor was going with this because he's done it before with similar exercises, but I enjoyed the reaction of the other two I was sitting with! (My best of the lot was the 1½ minute.)

I could stand to listen to the #PlanetOfLana soundtrack all day. Everything about it is beautiful.

I very much appreciate artists who put their product prices so visibly and big enough on their tables that you can see what they're charging from random tagged photos on social media. Makes working out my own pricing a lot easier 😊

I'm always entertained watching my own timelapses because I can really clearly see when I came back to the canvas after a break and was like "welp, that wasn't working", go off and do some studies, and then come back and have another go at it.

Has anyone played #TheLastGuardian on PS4? It has the same composer as Planet of Lana and the score is almost as beautiful. If it were available for PC or Switch I'd have grabbed it immediately, but I don't have any playstation

#LifeDrawing log: I felt like I had a tough evening but looking back at my sketchbook, it wasn't so bad. My second twenty didn't hit, and I messed up one of the fives, but the ten-minute one was a real success, which is very satisfying.

Chef's special was to draw the torso first, then the supporting leg, then the other leg and finally the arms. I generally draw the torso first when I'm sketching anyway (in fact getting the ribcage and pelvis sizes correctly proportioned without needing digital resizing is something I'm trying to work on) so these were mostly just normal drawings for me.

Oops forgot last week's life drawing log again

#LifeDrawing log: pigeon attack! We had the windows open behind the drawn blinds and somehow one managed to get past that black-out barricade and into the studio. The instructor spent most of the session in one of the back rooms trying to catch it 😂

Chef's special was the springs exercise again (draw each body part as a coiled spring) which I decided not to participate in because I had a new brown Kraft paper sketchbook and I wanted to use the time to experiment with how best to render on it! I settled on the white ink pen I bought a while back (though the white pencils were pretty good too, just a little less intense) and, for the moment, the light purple brush pen for shading, though I think a slightly darker shade would work better. Plus black pen for the inking as usual.

#LifeDrawing log: a new model this session, and I felt like I had a pretty good art night too. I abandoned my white gelpen for the one-minutes since it just isn't reliable enough at putting down ink on the kraft paper, and switched back to pencils. The model gave us some very tricky poses with tough perspective and lots of overlap, so it was quite a workout!

Chef's special was to draw a containing triangle for the pose before filling in the detail. The other two people I was there with also struggled with this, so it's nice to know I'm not alone in struggling with the "draw the containing space first" style of challenges.