Above you can see some cutesy little avatar images, enlarged to four times their actual size to spare your eyes. The first four are of course slightly enlarged and colored versions of character sprites from the 8-bit Final Fantasy 3. The profile is a similar hack of Cecil's picture from FF4. The first of the last three was built using parts of the QfG hero and Roger from Space Quest 5, with lots of further editing. The clothing is what I'd be wearing in a fantasy setting. And the yellow thing is my tail! ^_^ The other two are redraws of the first, clothed for a fancy party and... a cosplay.

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Tags, now apparently known as banners, are small pictures used as a sort of personal signature in less mature forums online. Below you can see all tags I have made. Many of my unreal acquaintances also made tags for me, but they take much space and are not really my art so I do not keep them uploaded at the moment. Also, as the custom is, tags are usually based on artwork made by someone who actually can draw. Most tags below are in part composed of ripped graphics, although without fail I have changed things to qualify them as original enough. My apologies to anyone whose art is used without permission here... please take it as a kind of compliment.

	The first tag I made. I glued together bits from two games... Had to do quite a bit of retouching to replace the 16-color dithering with an eye-pleasing scheme. Each individual piece looks pretty great by itself but when it's all together, it seems kind of chaotic to me. El seemed to like it anyway.
	A rather different approach with this one. Instead of many small pieces glued together, I took just one young Spirit of the Spring and focused on that... Also, this time I used PSP filters to do some of the color smoothing, saving me the trouble. Drew the purple bubble all by myself, too, and used a cylinder effect on plain impact lettering for the name to give depth.
	Yes, the adorable Mrrshan kitty from Master of Orion. Isn't she cute? Did plenty of recoloring and redrawing with this pic, for example I made the starry area much bigger and completely redrew the lower part of the feline.
	The star background is from Princess Maker 2, the planet is Caladan from Dune 2, and those things hovering over it are a pretty pair of eyes from a miscellaneous game. I drew the near-invisible eyebrows myself. The stars actually suffered during JPEG compression but otherwise this looks good.
	Natural beauty from HoMM 3! I took a screenshot of an elf rampart and drew in a rainbow, applied some nice filtering on the name and tilted it nicely to run along the rainbow... and here we have one beautiful tag.
	I dug up the griffin from the resource files of Pinball Fantasies, the best pinball game I know, then did lots of editing and recoloring on it. Reused the beautiful star background from PM2, and drew the funky top part myself with a bunch of filtering. Getting better and better, but still a long way to true artistdom.
	Shanra wanted a Sailor Venus tag so... I made her one. Definitely not an "instant tag". Took me a score of hours to do, mainly since I thought she looked sort of flat, and proceeded to bevel her little by little. Where beveling didn't work, I shaded or brightened the area by hand. I combined two real space pictures for the background and added a sunflare. Compared to the original picture of what's her name the difference is huge.
	Nothing spectacular in this one apart from the basic idea. Grabbed a screenshot of the title screen of the legendary Prince of Persia game, applied some effects and did lots of recoloring. About three hours of work.
	This one is a bit too simple, as all I did was to bevel chibi-Usagi and add the name. There was some other work that ended up being scrapped because it looked dull. The background is from The Lion King game.
	This one required plenty of effort. Miaka had a red ribbon over and around her which I removed by hand... then cut her loose from the original picture, and did some minor beveling for the dress. Quality improvements, minor touch-ups on the background... Evidently this tag looks almost impressive to a professional eye.
	I did plenty of work for this tag, most of which was wasted as it did not look kawaii enough. But the end result appeals to me. I forget where the background is from, but the chibi-pegasus is something I found online, and retouched heavily.
	Combined lots of stuff for this. I do not think the real tiger picture fits in with the hand-drawn things. This was based on the credit screen of Quest for Glory 1, with lots of smoothing and recoloring, as you can see.
	A lot of this is drawn by myself! The blue ball is actually the purple bubble from tag #2, just retouched a lot. The pegasi are from HoMM 3 again. Also, notice the depth effect in the shadows over the ball.
	I made a personal record of having used seven separate layers for this! The name uses a gradient Impact with some beveling, the hills come from the intro of Ultima 6 and the sky is from HoMM 3. The eyes are actually drawn by El herself, I just retouched them. Doing the reflections on the water was difficult... but patience pays off, doesn't it?
	I had excess pegasi, so I took one and enhanced the quality to a passable level, then found a very nice dark sky image to serve as the background with some simple yet visually impressive effects... and to top it off used a font called Sidhe.
	My last, and favorite piece! Rather than drawing on top of a Sierra logo, I drew everything from scratch, except for the girl. She is one of the main characters from Final Fantasy 2, whose picture I enlarged to about ten times the original size, then boosted the contrast and applied the blindshading effect by hand, pixel by pixel!

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These are my favorite desktop images! They are mathematically generated (I used QBasic in fact) with a simple X XOR Y statement and a nice palette. The bottom left one is a tribute to good old CGA. If you stare at these for a while, you'll see they are violent for the eyes!

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Stick Girl Insurrection
While working at a clinical pharmaceutical contract research company in 2003-2004, I drew a pile of moderately amusing stick guy / smiley ball sketches on proofreading printouts. Here's one...

This is the cheese
By request, a rendering of Gerard brie.

Story of My Life (condensed into three panels)
Another sketch from my time at the company, though this one drawn with vector characters. Very laconic, I think.

Marketing in a Nutshell
Another sketch from my time at the company. Modern marketing uses a few basic methods to make people want to buy whatever product is being sold. How many methods can you recognize in this advertisement for a fictitious brand of toothpaste?

Ukraina 2004
I was helping out with the university student magazine when an orange revolution temporarily revised the country. Since me and El liked the movie Van Helsing, and noticed there was material for political satire, we put together this comic. I did the graphic editing using screen captures from the movie that Shanra kindly provided us. The comic is amusing if you're familiar with the political situation that surrounded the event. For reference: both presidential candidates were called Viktor but only one's slogan was "Tak!"... and the former head of the state security service really was called Igor. And as for the vampiric president Vlad in the comic... he's obviously wearing a wig!

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