Cosmonaut Sketches 01

 

 

Couple of pages of work up sketches for a larger piece of cosmonauts battling it out on a lonely planet with the natives, which I'll post later.

Not especially happy with the latter one, but when you showcase your underwear drawer, you show all of it, worn out bands and all. The latter sketches I'll post ended up better than these.

WEEEEEE...

Already posted the color version over at the Tumblr. But not the follow-up comic panels (below), reserved for you faithful tens of Bloggers.

Some alternate positions for arms & hands and whatnot, though they could be holographic extensions if she turns out to be an android or alien. And yes, that's Pen Ward and Colin Fleming in the war-driving van, beckoning our heroes to make a quick getaway. Feels like some shape refining and simplification in the foreground characters are needed.

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.

Dream Interpretation

(Bath robe not included. Don't remember if there was any cape or cowl sported.)

Had this dream several weeks ago. Was in a courtyard of some sort, a campus I'm guessing. A girl - who I didn't see at the time but knew she was there - was apparently about to draw a massive mural on the ground, so she was busy sweeping up the dust from what looked a cobblestone courtyard (the actual stone in the paving was crazy small). The wind started kicking up and kept making a mess of the ground she'd just cleaned, blowing the dirt back onto it and whatever. So with one hand I was apparently able to make the wind speed up, concentrating it into a sort of dust devil, compacted it further, and as I brought my right hand down into my left, completely obliterated it. And whoosh, all of the dirt from the ground was cleared away.

~ Image Removed Until Further Notice ~

(Since I don't have a Facebook or Instagram page, this is the only venue I have for public narcissism. No greytone pass on any of these before adding color; just straight fiddling around with base tones and later cell shading. Which probably shows, for better or worse.)

I don't remember if it was me thinking this in the dream, or if it was someone else talking, but the basic upshot was that although you think you've done well in getting rid of the wind kicking up - as well as all of the dirt - the act of cleaning the ground before painting/drawing anything was part of her ritual; a sort of prep-mandala that served as much meditative purpose as the drawing itself.

Later on in the dream, was in some sort of work studio that resembled the art dept. at an old community college I went to years ago (the Animation Hellhole for you one or two old timers reading this). I was explaining - either to the girl or someone else - that the right hand represented either element or vitality, while the left represented nirvana; bringing the right down into the left thus ceased whatever element one was controlling at the time. I think there might have been ideograms, shapes or schematics in the dream that represented each concept that I had in both hands, but I don't remember.

And I've been reading Isocrates, for f*ck sakes. Don't know where any of this Korra or Kundun action came into play.

Ladies

These were somewhat throw-away tertiary characters for a set of one-off production illustrations. I like how both turned out, and since they'll probably only show in this mini series of vignettes I went ahead and threw together a montage of the more finished pieces featuring these two. My only regret is that the cigarette holder got cut off in most of the cropped frames.

(Untoned versions, still in the works.)

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Friday Sketch Dump, plus Alien Abduction roughs

Series of exploratory roughs. Alternating between the literal and more simplified/pushed versions. Am enjoying the pushed versions more.

And here are some of the alternate versions/compositions of the Alien Abduction pieces from a few weeks ago:

(Cape should be indicating flow of action in the first pic. Perhaps this the very beginning of the burst from the gun and he hasn't had time to settle into the action yet.)

(One thing I ought to be doing at the very beginning, before even drawing the characters or anatomy, is just laying down a series of lines and possible shapes to figure on how the lines of action will compliment one another. As is, feels like the negative space wasn't utilized as much as it could have, as well as the background not really doing much other than reenforcing the upshot in the second piece and indicating "Here is hole in wall" and "Here is where character is in relation to other character" for both. Backgrounds are just as much a character in relation to the others.)

Just variations on a theme

...Several takes on an illustration from this past week. Redrew the character a few times, then remembering the ever-dreaded and unforgiving axiom, "Your first pass is never your last", ended up redoing the whole thing from scratch. Will post both versions next time. In the meantime, figured on cobbling a color preview from said-abortive attempt. Enjoy, comrades.

Alien Abduction take II

...The cardinal rule of drawing: Your 1st pass is almost always never your last.

(Our chimera supermodel looks a bit more worried here, which is good I guess, since more emotion in an illustration is theoretically a plus, both from a design and a story angle. Our resident proletarian android also has a bit more bounce or action to his pose, if not less rendering. Again, which of the two is more important at this stage of drawing?... Exactly.)

The mysterious Erlenmeyer Flask continues to change hands. Stay tuned.

Alien Abduction

...in reverse, as our favorite chimera lady's apparently stealing the infamous Erlenmeyer Flask from a genetics compound.

(...So food and beer with the coworkers, and now an illustration. Well... no, I've been tooling with it for the past few days. But as far as you know, I whipped this drawing out in 20 minutes after a pint. Have been hitting paintings with this greytone approach more often, since it pretty reliably establishes the values before doing a color pass. Saves alot of time.)

In any case, an ode to The X Files.

Color Storyboards/Vignettes

Some color vignettes that never saw the light of day; originally just plain boards.

 (I like how some of these quick characters turned out, esp. the design for the girl dancing on the far right.)

Fraulein sketches, once again

Listening to some ridiculous Viking black metal while drawing these.

(Cropped the original, since I reworked the girl on the left. See post further up.)

Not having a strong underdrawing for the faces really killed me on this one, especially for the foreground character (NB: Has since been deleted). Took more time than was needed. So as punishment, I redrew her from scratch a few times to remind myself that Photoshop has layers and opacity settings for a reason. These are all purely digital on Cintiq, by the way:

 (You can spy the undersketch if you look closely enough. Having this solid first really pays; though I find myself drawing as much on this layer as I do just trying to lay down perspective and anatomy guidelines. This works, but it's partly what killed me on the first pass of the drawing, getting too caught up in details when I should've been more concerned with overall proportions and proper facial geometry.)

Don't be surprised if part of this post suddenly disappears at some point.

Comic Panel rough passes II

This panel, and the scanned image below, would have been just previous to the two-panel color image I uploaded last time - both in terms of narrative and when I actually drew them. The above is purely digital on Cintiq, while the one below is Colerase on a Post-it note, with a little bit of PS work on the highlights. I kind of like how it turned out, and it was minimal effort in comparison with the other digital pieces this post. I may take this route more often in the future:

Some other work from this week. Both purely digital, both being reduxes on previous comics or illustrations from a few years ago. Besides benchmarking where I'm at in terms of overall progress in drawing (composition, faces, whatever), is also a good way for me to feel out how I want to work on larger projects, be it one-off illos or illustrated stories:

~ Two Occasions for the Price of One... ~

Complete with supermodel.

More random sketches

Dropped the colerase color and punched the levels on the foreground characters to try to make it clearer - the operative word being "try".

-And some further soldier designs, taking several pages out of Star Wars and Half Life. Many more of these in the sketchbooks. Is challenging coming up with side-scroller designs without defaulting to the side view pose first.

Manticorius

 Larger 2nd pass on one of the previous sketches. Manticore in the background's probably taking up too much of the negative space.

~ Mega Dump... ~

..Or post, as is more polite. Some profile pages drawn in Cintiq, sans rambling story text. I like how these turned out.

...........

And some WWII sketches from... eons (months) ago.

[First pic deleted, as per the rule of not posting shyte drawings.]

Colors turned out ok on this one.

This one... I really tried to make the lighting as balanced as possible. Considering the number of light sources, and forcing the balance so that the eye's directed where I wanted it to go... Eh, needs work. Fire's a pain to render in daytime settings.

...........

Some Boyar Bots. Da, Cintiq:
And our favorite heroin having LOTR dreams involving said bots. Must be the drinking milk after midnight.

~ Post Procrastination (Another Sketch)... ~


Earning the paycheck has put a damper on posting. So to make up for it, here's... a post-it note. With a sketch... Two, actually, since post-its are a high quality medium. Inked in the Cintiq.

~ All draw and no play... ~


...makes Khylov a better artist. At least that's the plan. We'll see if that pans out before I become the caretaker.

Me at my work desk. It's actually not as bad as I make it out here, and the folks at the studio are usually the ones to either tell me to take long lunches or to escape at quitting time.

But with deadlines, retakes, responsibility to my employers, etc. Go check out the Snowcat and the radio and you'll see what I mean.

~ Gulag Archipelago book covers... ~

The Gulag Archipelago, volumes 1 and 3. Did these last year after finding a couple of old used paperback versions of the above. Since the covers were coming undone, figured it'd be worthwhile to take a crack at some layout and make my own dust jackets.

Some more dime-store layout:
The Brothers Karamzov. Probably would do the "Dostoyevsky" font differently now. More than halfway through reading at this point.

Used the mysterious Flammarion woodcut and some Photoshop to make the cover of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. The fonts were straight from the book binding. Could've finessed them a bit more.

On the shelf. The Chaos Space Marines tend to hang out next to the books (left and right).