Between Classes

Random bit of character and color work I did back in September, as well as some character design sketches. Nothing too crazy.

Pretty sure I did the color with a back painting of just a random pastel palette, then worked up the core colors, highlights and shadows from there. Not the best placement of the backpack, but oh well. I had to thin out the one strap to try to keep it from being confused as the outer line for the one leg. Even looking at it now I can see other ways I could have gone about his pose to make it cleaner or more "correct," but again oh well. Character and atmosphere first, I keep telling myself. [Edit: Went back and moved the backpack out of the way of the leg's silhouette. That only took several days for me to scratch that itch. Hopefully it reads a little better now.]

Cosmonaut Sketches 02

As promised some months ago, here are the rest of the sketches for the cosmonaut girls in combat, and a somewhat finished version or two below. 

Exploratory sketches:

I don't exactly remember which order I did these in. I'm pretty sure the latter two below were later, though all of this was months ago so who knows. 

The 2nd pic above has the most recent revisions with the black lined character in the foreground (3rd or 4th pass each). Not exactly proud of that, but it's better to be honest about methods rather than saying "I can hit everything perfectly 1st pass in 20 minutes!"  Yeah, maybe a small subset of things I obsess over, but definitely not everything. I still have to put the legwork in just like everybody else.

 All of the above I of course did in my basackwards way, after the first or initial version which is below.

Added some Gaussian blur for a little depth. Even this wasn't the original version; I did some slight revisions even after I'd posted it over on Instagram. In fact the first version of this got the Learnuary treatment by me (or the "How NOT To Draw Like Me" lesson plan):

 At the least and as I always say, my mistakes are to your benefit my tens of viewers.

Space Harrier Girls - Revisions

[Full image and sketches below.]

Time flies when you're thinking about having fun. It's been a few years already since I did this piece. Seeing it recently made me want to do some revisions on the girls' faces and some minor tweaks with some of the shapes, as well as refining the color to look a little more painterly. 

[Simplified cartoon cel shading. Basically just dropped the layer that had all the smoothed out color overlay.] 

Looking at the older version (which you'll have to find yourself, old underwear rule and all), there's probably not much difference between the two to warrant a repost, but... whatever. I can see the differences and know where my old drawing habits were at the time, and how I need to improve.

Sketch part of the image. Usually when I draw digitally, I start at 3000 x 3000 pixels for the canvas size, and then double the image size the more I want to draw to either the left or right. (As you can see, the color from the first image above bleeds over a little on the right.) The sketch part of the file is just me messing around, proportion studies or turnarounds, screen caps of things I find interesting, or things I want to drawover on to see where I can improve on design choices, or just thumbnails for later composition ideas. Usually a mixture of all of the above.

Samus Aran, Once Again

A more finished Metroid piece from this past week. Full image and sketches below.

[I ended up doing all of these after the finished piece above. I guess that's the part of my brain telling me I didn't push the pose or shapes far enough the first time. I'll probably do another version based on these sketches later on, something more cartoony and less contained. But we'll see.]

[Closer to the original. I think these were the first sketches before I started messing around with simplifying the design.]

[Quick preview of another piece coming soon.]

Metroid Illustrations and Sketches

My versions of Samus Aran. Full image below.

 And a few older sketches and illustrations I did of Samus, based on a friend who asked for an original. Goes without saying that she likes her her video games, so I played around with making her the star of the show. The first set were work up sketches for the pen & ink version, the latter were for prints for a charity show we were both a part of. So in effect she's famous now, at least for the half dozen homes where this art is framed on the wall (hopefully).

 

Blue Collar Acanthostegids

 

Some random character design and digital painting pages. (Yup, plural.) Not much to say other than I really need to figure out why I keep adding tetrapods in average everyday settings in my drawings. 

70s and 80s Shopping Mall Americana

Random character designs I did awhile ago. Some of these ended up used for a larger piece (below).

Pulled as many memories as I could from high school movies (sorry folks, too young for this time period) and my older siblings' yearbooks, as well as a documentary on Youtube I ran across about the Oak Park Mall (Kansas) during the early 80's. Tons of feathered hair and thermal jackets:

Character Design Sketch Pages

Roughly 3 sketch pages, formatted together vertical-wise, moreso for Pinterest than anything else. Good luck ever seeing it there though. As always, some of these can be found on the Instagram account.

Am sure my tens of viewers could care less about whatever progress I may or may not make on this front, but I need to be able to gauge for myself where I'm at in terms of simplifying shape choices, or just having a better shape and line rhythm that isn't sacrificed for the sake of belting out story ideas, and vice versa. Is a fine line between actual productivity and spinning one's wheels in order to feel productive. If the animation industry's taught me anything...  Well, there's a whole tier of management dedicated to extracting the latter. Which I think explains more than a few end results, in things far beyond our own profession.

And then we see it in the wheels,
the wheels!
Which never like to rest,
the wheels! . . .
How heavy are the stones themselves,
the millstones!
They dance in merry ranks . . .
The millstones!

Beta Euthynus sketches illustrations and WIPs

Because Mr. Chris Palmer has really appealing shorthands for character faces.

Character Designs and Sketch Pages

Not even halfway through the season yet. Anyhow, making the effort every day to step away from storyboarding and doing some kind of illustration, design, or color work. Even if it sits in a folder for the better part of a year.

Kaiju Redux

Goes without saying, another retake on an older piece from... I don't even remember anymore. Originally did these as an ode to Mr. Tom Perkins' art book. (Scroll down to about the 9th selection.)

(One of several digital drawovers on the original Colerase sketches.)

Beta Euthynus 5, plus sketches

Tone studies are killing me. Should have probably picked an easier environment to render other than the bridge of a spaceship. Part of the reason I'm doing these is to get the mind geared towards thinking about the lighting and environment when coming up with a composition; that and to try to vary from shot to shot the amount of space and distance being used. In short, to get away from close- and medium- and to feel comfortable with long-angle shots to convey the mood and acting. The challenge of having a somewhat detailed environment (which includes lighting) is to not shortchange it and to see it through to the end. Tends to make the work bottom heavy, since rendering the background's probably the last thing I get to before the tone work.

...Some sketches of our character during Happy Hour:

Beta Euthynus 3, plus sketches

Next installment. This suffered a few retakes, namely the girl's face and the gorgonopsid's general line of action in the chair. Redid the latter as a reverse S shape, which made it a little more pleasing to... well, my eye.

Some sketch pages from several months ago:

Literally the last page in the sketchbook.

Older sketch, revision

(Just to benchmark my own progress; newer illustration based on the older sketches below. Characters in background seem to be running circular laps around the main character. Maybe she's just caught one of them to ask what in the hell they're doing.)

She's supposed to be in the middle of swinging the character from left to right. Her lower torso, hips and legs should probably be positioned a bit more mid-stride as opposed to a cold-start pose, in order to give the whole thing more energy. As is, the hair, tail and the character being thrown seem to be carrying most of the intended weight of the pic, the main character's pose being a bit too static for what I was going for. Goes to show that marriage to an exploratory sketch or sketches can hinder later possibilities.