Epee Attacked by Wedge

From an artistic point of view, Wing Commander II is probably my favourite out of the whole series of games. The saturated colours makes everything so bright and lively and the colour schemes make it easy to distinguish between friend and foe.

This is an Epee light fighter, often derided by players for having thinner-than-toilet-paper armour, at rest on the flight deck of the TCS Concordia. Compared with my previous drawings, I worked out how to filter scanned sketches so that the resulting black-and-white starting point is much cleaner. Consequently, the colour palette used makes the final image look rather cartoony, but then, the original game had a cartoon feel about it anyway. My colouring technique is rather basic, admittedly, but after doing some research, I realise this is probably the best I can manage without spending money on a tablet (which would be a rather extravagant waste of money given that I don't draw very much).

Materials: Paper, mechanical pencil, fine-tip black ink pen.
Software: GIMP 2.6.
Time: About one and a half hours sketching plus two and a half hours colouring.

Kotaku Bets on Wing Commander

E3 2010 kicks off tonight, and the staff at Kotaku have put in their predictions for the week ahead. Two of the seven editors suggested a Wing Commander announcement, although both with rather long odds. All of their predictions can be found here.

Prediction (Odds)

* Wing Commander reboot announced - for consoles (500:1)
* EA unveils Privateer: Steltek's Lament, an all-new adventure in the Wing Commander universe 30,000:1)
* Sony unveils a new PSP this one with two thumbsticks. (1000:1)
* We finally hear something official about a new Syndicate. (50:1)
* Steel Battalion is revealed as Capcom's core Natal game (16:1)
* Hulu comes to Xbox Live (1:1)
* Microsoft acts as if the Zune doesn't exist (2:1)