Archiving Clutch: Part 1

As my friends and Skylanders modding community know, a month back, I came into possession of an authentic copy of Clutch, the Skylanders Superchargers developer art book. And ever since then I've been on a bit of a wild goose chase just trying to find an affordable way to scan this thing.

Now let's start back at the first point, me coming into possession of the book. For anyone reading this that doesn't know the significance of Clutch, this book was only ever given out to developers who had worked on the Skylanders games. Which means this book was never available for retail sale anywhere, making this one of the most highly coveted pieces of Skylanders media ever. And as the self-proclaimed #1 Skylanders fan, I found a way.

Some people might already know about the already existing archive but once you look at it, the photos are blurry, incomplete, ordered incorrectly, and some pages are missing as a whole. In total the book has 310 pages while the archive only has 287, which include photos of the special sleeve it's included in.

So my goal over these past two months off and on, has been trying to find a suitable way to get this book scanned, full pages and full color, once and for all so the art can be archived forever, and other fans can finally have a good look at the contents. Sounds easy enough!

It's not. It's really not.

Over the time I have been spending looking into the digitization of this book, I've contacted a few book scanning companies, and each time they either flat-out ignore me (that can't be good for business...) or I end up getting smacked in the face with absurd prices.

All prices shown are in USD

That costs much more than I paid for the book, mind you!

So far I've been Sierra Oscar Lima... (That's pilot speak for shit outta luck.)

In the meanwhile, I can't even truly afford a large-scale digitization project due to the fact that I'm trying to save up for college, and my paycheck doesn't really cover much. So now what? There's a second method I could go for, destructive scanning. It's a lot cheaper and hell, I could even do it at home for free, but I am adamant on not destroying such a rare book at the moment, and I would hate to see the spine ripped out.

I'm intent on releasing everything in this book to the public, but at this rate, it's going to take a while. I've been racking up small amounts of money from art commissions but it's not really enough to cover anything. I flat refuse to pay $650(USD) to scan a book that didn't cost nearly that much, but if push comes to shove and in a few years time I can't find any other solution, I might just have to bite the bullet.

It's a bit rough putting in the effort to preserve this book properly. Right now I'm taking the full cost of the project. The book, the time spent researching these scanning companies, and probably the scanning cost too. I've been wondering time and time again if it's even going to be worth it, I am not receiving anything in return, which I don't care too much about really, but when it comes to the fact that I'm shouldering huge costs and sacrificing time to release a single book, it's a bit disheartening.

Still, at the time of writing this post, I'm sure I won't give up just yet. I've been reaching out to a few more book scanning services, document firms, and the like. Maybe I can get Clutch into the clutches of the Skylanders community, but unfortunately, that won't be anytime soon.

Spitfire

I should really get working on getting my fanart collective page up and running huh?

This is finally a post of another recent piece, except this one isn't even a month old at the time of me writing this! Maybe it'll be a month old by the time I post it... I keep a backlog of posts at the moment, so every week or so, even if I don't feel like writing, I can get something up on the blog.

For this work I mainly experimented with how to draw fire and lighting from multiple sources. I didn't really focus on the rocky texture all that much...

My more primitive method of drawing fire

Some stuff that I haven't posted elsewhere though except to friends, some screenshots of me working on the piece. At first I was actually just going to draw fire the way I usually do, but ended up wanting to improve in that area, so I started to look up guides to drawing realistic fire.

Early stages of drawing fire

I learnt to start with a layer of the darkest parts of the fire, and slowly work up in brightness with more layers in Color Dodge. I don't know what color dodge actually does, but it looks a lot better than what I would have made without it. Another useful tip I picked up, was to make the pointy parts of the flames blurry, it better sells the illusion of movement.

Working out shading

The lineart is still there in the final work by the way, all I did in the end was blend it with the rest of the art. I like having my lineart remain in my works, (since I usually work without color,) since I feel like it really keeps me tethered to having one thing be consistent about my art, when everything else changes all the time.

Almost every part of the fire was drawn separately from each other, the arms and hands were separated groups, the body and wings are separated groups. Though this new method of fire cost me a lot of storage space, with the file easily going over 2GB with 108 layers. The drawing itself was also too big of a file to send on Discord without being compressed...

I'm glad to try improving my art, learning more specifically how to draw more realistic textures at the moment... I'm not sure if I favor this piece or the Jawbreaker piece, I don't feel like either are good enough to be honest.