First up, welcome Portal fans! When we decided to do a few pieces of Portal fan art in the lead up to the release of Portal 2, we had no idea we'd get the attention that's come out way. Thanks to everybody for their kind words and support.
Although there are still a few bits yet to come, I thought I'd do a bit of a rundown on what we've been up to, and what's in store.
Mim has done a bunch of little Chell drawings in Inkscape. They've turned out great, and I'm once again stunned by her skills. Mim has sketches of a couple more that are unfinished, and a collaborative work in progress that I'm going to 'ink', so look forward to those as well! Also in the mix is the manic Chell Beans, (mim speculates that Chell may be driven by the desire for beans rather than cake).
I've done a Portal poster in the style of the early iPod ads. There's a second one coming within the next few days, and a third that I've been toying with in the back of my mind. I was about to say that I don't know why Valve didn't include that sort of thing in their Steam for Mac campaign, but I just discovered that there was one of a TF2 Heavy eating a sandvich, so instead I'll say that I think Portal is a better match.
Whilst killing time with mim by doodling turrets, I started to wonder what a Companion Cube and Sentry Turret might look like if they swapped shapes, but not styles. When we got home, I dove into Blender, and 8 or 9 on-and-off hours later I had a complete scene. I've wanted to do 3D stuff for twolofbees.com for a long time. I'd always envisaged it would be a grand Lof People scene rather than some fan art, but I'm more or less happy with what's come out, and I'm excited to be working in Blender again (it's been five or six years since my last forey into the world of three dimensions).
The first of these images should be up tomorrow :)
Just over a month ago, mim and I decided we wanted to do something in the lead up to Portal 2. Some late night brainstorming brought up the idea of doing a Portal version of The 12 Days Of Christmas, and it was well into the next morning when we realised we'd gotten carried away. Over the next couple of weeks, I put together artwork for the comic whilst we back and forthed on whether or not doing a video was too much work. Some early sound tests revealed that mim does a pretty good GLaDOS voice (with proper processing), and, as you can see, we decided to go get it out there.
All 12 "days" of the comic are up, but it's going to continue for a little while. There's a downloadable version of the song on its way as well as a few extra pages with closeups of the artwork (because those tiny, tiny Portal Devices are actually pretty sweet).
Mim and I are both massive Portal fans, and Portal 2 has very, very big mark on our calendar. It's been heaps of fun to do some fan art, and we're thinking it's something we might do from time to time (though we'll still keep the cute stuff coming!), especially with the Jurassic Park game looming on the near horizon.
You can see all of our (good) Portal fan art by checking out the Portal tag (not including the 12 Days Of Portal comic by default, though).
We ended up doing a lot more fan art than we expected. Check out the second blog post.