Life After Quake
Resources used: Lost Civilization, Meye.dk, Texture Ninja, BurningWell.org [sky photo by Titus Tscharntke], TextureTown (I keep misremembering it as TextureHouse for some reason), En Campaña, COMTEX, Quake 2 textures from Realm667, Bauhaus, A.L.T.
Wad file: DOWNLOAD
Decided to make a combo out of the palettes from Doom and Quake, and that gave me inspiration to make some art. The palette proved to be quite to my liking; the original Quake 2 palette doesn't mesh well with the lighter tones of Doom graphics. Beyond the color palette, Ayba, Cacodemon187 and Saige also hooked me up with some cool sources for textures and sprites, and that gave me even more inspiration. Eventually made this. The idea of a berserker from Quake 2 settling down was a natural result of all the ideas floating around and the fact that I was using Quake 2 colors and textures.
The berserker here became enraptured by the peacful countryside he found himself in, and chose a more peaceful life. Since the Strogg never gave him a name, he chose the name Valentin Mészáros Velho Mazzaferro.
-8. September 2025.
Quake 2 was a bit of an awkward game for me. When I first played it as a teenager in highschool, there were things that definitely appealed to me, mainly the guns, though the railgun was a bit disappointing to me as it couldn't compare in looks to the Gauss rifle from Fallout 3 and New Vegas, which is similarly functioning weapon. Note however, that while both a railgun and a Gauss rifle use electromagnetic forces to propel projectiles, they're not the same thing; railguns achieve propulsion using a pair of conductive rails connected to the projectile, while Gauss rifles, or coilguns, use an array of coils surrounding the barrel. From this description you can hopefully tell that I really liked the Gauss rifle from Fallout :P
Besides the guns, the rest of Quake 2 always left me wanting, mainly because I was really into its predecessor's weirdness. Quake 2 has since grown on me, and I've come to appreciate it a lot more. As far as this painting is concerned, it's quite nice! I feel like paintings for which I crack open Lost Civilization's vast collection of tree sprites and midtextures are ones which I always enjoy.
Davno Veče
Resources used: Heretic palette and colormap
Wad file: DOWNLOADYesterday I played a Yume Nikki fangame called Quilt and I became delighted by it instantly. So much so that I wanted to make something inspired by its various vistas. This piece is a result of that. Decided to use the Heretic palette this time, and like with my Hexen palette painting I chose to make all the textures by hand. Didn't make sprites, instead I chose to draw in the additional details in Aseprite.
-13. September 2025.
Can't have a painting with the Hexen palette without also making one with the Heretic palette! However, making this proved to be a bit of an eye-straining experience after a while, those blues and oranges sure are something. Was pretty cool drawing in background details, it feels like something that was a big thing in my older work but gradually became less prevalent. Also love those little waves I drew in the lake - w -
Name means "An Evening Long Ago"
Пустош
Resources used: En Campaña by @Rencoret [contains stuff from Hexen, Extremal Doom, Deliverance, and some resources made by Rencoret personally], a custom palette I made by overlaying the Quake palette over the Doom palette in Aseprite
Wad file: DOWNLOAD
I was talking about palettes with Plerb and she got curious what would happen if the Quake palette was overlaid on top of the Doom palette, so I did just that and found the result quite interesting. I forgot which layer setting I used in Aseprite to get this exact effect, I do know I set the Quake palette to 50% opacity or something. First thing I tested the palette on was Rencoret's En Campaña, and I really liked the look.
I wanted to make a painting with it and eventually I gave it a shot. I wasn't really feeling inspired so eventually I gave up on it. Yesterday I remembered it and took a screenshot of what I had made and showed it to my friends, who found it really interesting as is and thus I decided to simply upload it to this thread.
-25. September 2025. (Map made on 16. August)
Title means "Wasteland"
When I first showed it to her, Ayba noted how the barren and sparse look of this shot contrasts with my other paintings, which is certainly an interesting point and I think the main reason I decided to upload this. It was also handy since I hadn't uploaded a painting since the 13th.
I'll take this opportunity to shout out Rencoret's En Campaña - it's one of my favorite maps of his and I highly recommend it, alongside the rest of his wads!
Buggernaut
Resources used: textures from Juggernaut (unofficial expansion pack for Quake 2), sky texture derived from photo by Iván Cisneros, custom palette I made by combining colors from Doom and Quake 2, various tree sprites and a midtexture I drew myself
Wad file: DOWNLOAD
Been a while since I made a Doom painting! Пустош has been sitting on my hard drive for a while so not counting that. Been quite occupied with playing System Shock and Quake 2 stuff :P
I decided to finally sit down and play through Juggernaut, an old addon for Quake 2 made by Canopy games. Main reason I decided to play it is that I used some of its textures for Awaiting Eschaton and during the time I worked on it I formed a particular emotional bond with those textures. So I felt like I owed it to the folks who made the textures to play it. I marathoned about 95% of it yesterday and it definitely felt like a marathon. It definitely has an interesting vibe and it's definitely a charming little thingy. But it also has gameplay that I very much didn't enjoy, and the maps were often really crude. Ah the wonders of shovelware!Despite my grievances with its gameplay, I'm most glad I played it, thought I can't recommend it in good conscience unless you're really into weird and janky stuff from the 90s.
Anyways, been slowly making stuff for this painting since I made Davno veče. First things I made were the tree sprites and midtexture, which I'm really happy with. Quake 2's colors work incredibly well for outdoorsy stuff like trees. Can't say I had a concrete vision for this painting, I just doodled around pretty much. I think once I found Iván Cisneros' photo and edited it into a sky texture my creative juices began flowing. Was thinking of adding more detail or characters to the foreground but I enjoyed the scene on its own quite enough, and didn't see further additions as necessary, though I did feel compelled to add that subtle arrow pattern in the water. Fun fact: the water is actually just the unedited BLOOD flat from Doom. It got turned blue due to the palette I used.
-28. September 2025.
Wasn't a good idea to treat Juggernaut as a chore, it certainly soured my first playthrough, though there was other stuff going on in my life at the time which didn't have me in the best state of mind. In any case, I cannot understate how much Juggernaut's textures mean to me. I've enjoyed them ever since I made Awaiting Eschaton.
An important milestone happened here: I began making my own tree sprites! I've mainly used my own tree sprites since, and I love them all! If you wish to use some for your own projects, I wholeheartedly welcome you! Just mention me in the credits and you're good!
Sumrak
Wad file: DOWNLOAD
Resources used:
Various sprites and textures I made, some being edits of stuff taken from the bellow resources.
NuGraf textures, taken from this archive. I used the statue sprite from the "BOHUS" folder inside the "NuGraf textures" folder within the archive.
Biolage texture pack (I made the streetlight sprite from one of the textures in this pack, as well as the textures named BIOEDTxx).3DS Max textures, also found on the linked archive above. That's where the sky is from.
Marlin Studios textures, from the same archive. MRSTD01 is from the rustic exteriors pack, while MRSTD02 is from the downtown surfaces and signs pack.
Fence texture made by Rencoret. I made an additional variant of it that's yellow.
COMTEX texture pack. Made some edits to a couple of the textures from there: an older texture called CMTXED01 and two textures named COMLITxx (variants of textures included here that were tinted yellow).Juggernaut textures. Made some yellow tint edits.
Quake 2 textures. Tinted one one of the textures yellow.
Description:
Happy to say that I've gotten warmed up for making my paintings again! Had a creative lull during the latter half of September than ended with my previous painting, and now I'm back at full steam! Quake 2 is a gift that keeps on giving - this time around I got inspired by its colored lighting and wanted to pull something like that off in Doom. The way I went about this was making edits of the textures that were close to the streetlights. I simply applied a yellow multiply filter over them, as well as drawing some simple reflections in the windows. I think the effect is wonderful and I certainly want to use it more in the future. I'd say overall my use of lighting had gotten less interesting imo, and I'm really glad I went all in on it here.
Another thing I'm quite happy about is the way I made the scene itself. I got inspired by Ayba's recently released Belot and as a result I played around with more abstract structures and with having a more distant view, rather than having all the stuff happening close to the camera. Other stuff of note includes some tree sprites I made which were sitting around as unused scraps which I got to use here. The red-blue trees were pure red in the Doom palette but my palette was applied on top of it while it was still in the Doom palette and it created the canopy colors you see here. The trunk looked busted but it was fairly simple to just remap the colors to something that looked more natural.
It's funny how I can't get enough of the Quake 2 derived palette I made and of the textures from Juggernaut. There's something about this palette that just draws me to it. It's mostly made out of Quake 2 colors, and Quake 2's colors have become beautiful to me. They appear to be on a very similar wavelength to Doom's colors, but realized in a way I prefer. They feel more grounded, but still vibrant enough to not appear out of place in Doom. The mashup palette I made is also delightful because while it allows me more freedom with certain colors, it's still limited in some aspects, which feels like a creative puzzle in a way. Doom's palette feels familiar to me, but now I have a palette that's it's own thing, and feels like something I'm still exploring.
I think I've become an actual Quake 2 fan. Been playing Zaero, another unofficial expansion and having a real good time with it. Hell I decided to replay Juggernaut again while on a Discord call with some good friends of mine and I genuinely enjoyed that too. I think my first playthrough of Juggy sucked because I was having a bad day while playing it and my expectations for it were too high, which led to disappointment. Now that I know what to expect from it, I can enjoy it more for what it is, and find stuff I genuinely like about it besides just the textures and artstyle. For example, while the levels are very much undercooked, they do have some really pretty places in them regardless. And the way colored lighting is used sometimes is really pretty. Juggernaut overall feels like a more vibrant world than Quake 2, which is I think why I fell in love with its textures during the development of Awaiting Eschaton, and I think it helped me appreciate Quake 2 more as well. I owe it a lot, I really do.
As you've probably noticed already, I reorganized the stuff that's under my paintings. Main reason for this was because I knew I'd need to put the resource list under a spoiler, since I wanted to really go out on the attribution. I always appreciate it when mappers credit the stuff they used in a cohesive way that lets me know where they got each thing from, so I wanted to offer more information on that front. While there's something I love about finding the source of a texture, or at least tracing it as far back as I possibly can, it's quite a time consuming and tricky thing to do, so I obviously can't say that I can offer the original source for every texture I use, but I will try to give the earliest one I can reasonably find. For example, TextureTown hosts free to use textures, but I fairly sure most if not all are 3rd party, royalty free textures from the 90s. However, since TextureTown doesn't say where each is from I can't really trace them back any further.
PS: I'm gonna host my paintings on Doomworld from now on, in light of Imgur getting blocked in the UK and also the fact that I uploaded a bunch of them while not logged in so they might expire. The paintings are quite small: this one is 51.4 kB, so Doomworld's space limit won't be too much of an issue for them. I plan on moving all of my previous paintings to Doomworld as well, though I don't feel like doing that immediately :P
-4. October 2025.
I forgot how long that description is jeez! This definitely feels like one of my most "serious" paintings. No silly guys, no doodling, and lots of thought and time put into all of it. Certainly proud of it, though it doesn't undermine my love for the rest of my art one bit.
I plan on moving all of my previous paintings to Doomworld as well, though I don't feel like doing that immediately :P
Yeah, I sure didn't feel like doing that immediately - I still haven't done it! Forgive me Britain! At least now I got them all on postimages as a result of moving them to this blog, so I'll probably get all of them replaced one of these days.
Title means "Twilight".
Evening Playtime
Wad file: DOWNLOAD
Resources used:
Quake palette, Quaddicted wad collection[jf_obtex - textures by John "Metlslime" Fitzgibbons; qedsamp - not sure where they're from, might be this], COMTEX, Da Werecat's textures, various textures and sprites I made. There's a bunch of old textures I made for the Quake palette quite a while before I made this painting, I decided to include them in the wad file for posterity.
Description:
I tried my hand at making one big collection of textures that I could use to house multiple painting maps but alas it appears my immune system has a tendency to reject any semblance on professionalism :P
I was also rolling with a custom palette that was a mashup of Doom and Quake colors, but after I saw that a Quake palette texture I really like didn't convert to it nicely at all, I scrapped it, and that was also when I got sick of the one wad multiple paintings idea too. Things were just getting too big for my enjoyment, I feel like trying to add so many textures bogged me down. In the end the usual way of doing this is just more fun - I don't end up tied to any one part of the process for too long. And one advantage of this setup is that every wad is fully tied to its one painting - it's fully part of its story. This one for example has a bunch of unused textures that to me feel like imprints of the creative process that led me to the final result.
Anyways, I love this painting! The Quake palette has shown itself to be quite nice to work with and I like the kinds of vibes I can pull off with it. I feel like Quake as a series is predominantly rather gritty and edgy, which is cool but I really like exploring other feelings with its components. The icing on the cake is definitely Loria - the little girl some might recognize from Fun at the Fair. I really like how she turned out!
-14. October 2025.
Words cannot describe how much I love this one! I'm so happy with how I was able to depict Loria, and I'm always proud of how I managed to make the water look translucent with some midtex trickery. I was certainly more able to make use of Quake's palette then I was when I made Shade. I made a bunch of new tree sprites for it, found new and interesting ways of converting textures to it through Aseprite (the circle pattern texture by the pond is from Comtex, and is a Doom palette texture in its original form).
Closing Thoughts
And with this, everything I had on the 97th Century Exhibition topic on Doomworld is now on my blog! I have to admit, one of the reasons for starting this blog was a general bitterness I had towards Doomworld at the time, but that has thankfully mellowed out as I chose forgiveness and healing over holding grudges. Another thing I admit that this certainly felt like a chore at times! Nonetheless, I'm really glad to have done this. It was a wonderful opportunity to reflect on my journey as an artist and person, and to share some details I overlooked at the time or that only revealed themselves in retrospect.
I hope you've enjoyed this retrospective journey with me, and I hope you join me wherever my art might take us next!
Have a great day and God bless!
| (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ |
No comments:
Post a Comment