Happy birthday, Oz! Woot!! ^_^ Good thing you posted in your journal I was planning on releasing this tomorrow and forgot you're a half-day ahead of me. :)

So Oz is out at the beach and is challenged by a pufferfish to see who can inflate the most. Well, clearly Oz won but it appears that puffer is a sore loser and plans on using his natural defenses to great effect... o.o;

This is my first inflation pic ever, hope I did it right! ^_^ Also this is my first full 3D shaded image since a month ago. Geeze, I was rusty already... -_-;

I also tried a new technique suggested by  Nian where instead of using antialiased lines and coloring everything tediously by hand I instead inked with plain-old jaggy pencil lines so the coloring could be done with flood fill. That really sped up the coloring but fixing the holes was still slow. -_- Also I think if I do this in the future I'll have to scale up the actual image size to 4x instead of 2x and maybe switch to a 2-pixel wide pencil since the lines still seem a bit jaggy. (Also the final images came out a bit smaller than I wanted. <.< )

Although I have to say I'm at the point where maybe I'll simply write a painting utility that does nothing but flood fills properly for antialiased lines and ignores small holes.... >.>

Drawn with Paint.net, Photoshop, and UT2004 for the background from one of my own maps. ^_^