Revised Older Piece - Beta Euthynus Redux

Close up of an older piece (see below for full view). 

From the Instagram post:

Dug through the archives and found an older piece - alot of older pieces actually - and decided to do some revisions. Alot of these were pretty rough around the lines, and I caught myself cleaning some of them up on this one. But then figured, what the hell, at some point at least some aspect of your old work is what it is regardless of whatever fixes you make, or regardless of whoever had a problem with your approach beforehand ("Not clean enough!"). A person can always improve, but parts of how you used to approach art shouldn't be completely erased either. The industry, Instagram, the internet - as lame as it sounds, they can't provide your art with you. 

Which is just another way of saying: Don't let the studios or the Internet Commons erase your thumbprint or signature on your own work, warts and all. Trends have a way of flattening both concepts and art, and eventually the people who come up with them, if they let them. 

(And yeah, all of this grandiose stuff on a post that's basically an upshot on a girl's butt. I get it.)

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.

Space Harrier comic pages and WIP cont'd

And the Space Harrier saga continues.

Some WIP pages and illustrations:

Scum and Villainy

...Rounding out the Boba Fett Youth post from a few weeks ago. Plus, work's been an interest place this past month.

And, a preview for the next set of illustrations:

Beta Euthynus Proto Comic Roughs, cont'd

Some lighting and tone studies for what would either be rough comic panels or extremely clean storyboards. Give it another 5 years and these will be considered 1st pass thumbnails.

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 4

Bit more comic panel approach to sell the idea of passage of time.

Beta Euthynus 2

Second page. Plenty of layers that were toyed with and thrown away in the making of these illustrations.

Beta Euthynus 1

Part of a series of cleaned and toned vignettes during the Halloween season. More to come. (The backlog of illustrations needing color is adding up.)

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.

~ UFOs and Storyboards ~

Full storyboard PFD can be found here. The thumbnailing and tying-down process to how I usually do boards, or flesh out scenes and short sequences. Panels read from left to right, with additional poses plugging inbetween at various points.

An additional page featuring the opening shot; another can be found here. The rest of the boards and story are in the PDF.

There are more development pages than here, but these are the most presentable. Anyone who takes a look at the full version can also see where I added some Photoshop finesse (relatively speaking) in terms of grey tones, additional poses, or camera work.

Probably not the most efficient time-wise to work in traditional means (Colerase and Moleskine), but I like the end result better, in linework, composition, and generally being able to see outside the frame, or further forward or behind several scenes. There's something to be said about being able to compare shot-for-shot at a single glance on an actual physical page sitting in front of you. There's also something to be said about not being rushed with a stylus on a canvas the equivalent of waxed ice.

Plenty of Close Encounters, ET, Super 8, and general UFO folklore fueling the above.

~Call me Lazarus... ~

...So seems to be the case as of late. Anyhow, semi-monthly update.

Some explanations for the drawings are in order: The several pages here are a continuation of the Chthulhu tank crew page I posted several months back. The blue pages are the most recent (last night); the others in red were back some months ago - the crimson was pretty much at the same time as the first page posted (somewhere below in another post); the scarlet were a few months after. In fact... quite a few of the things posted here have considerable gaps inbetween, some going back to almost a year ago. Hooray for procrastina... I mean, progress.



If you pieced them together from oldest to newest, they'd be somewhat consistent as far as being sequential. As far as actual story... these are more screw-around pages, to keep my mind fresh with drawing something sequential. I think I spent more time trying to figure on how the steering mechanism operates the tank rather than where I was going with any of this.

Panels below are separate. Pen and ink somehow found their way onto the pages. Not entirely happy with every panel, but some of the individual character drawings turned out alright. The large panel that takes up half the page (right side) is an artifact of that screwing around I mentioned earlier. Find myself doing more and more of these - what are these called... friezes? - as of late. I blame Klimt.

(There was a second page of ink. Will post another time.)

Some early sketches of these characters. Probably the 3rd pass, right after I did the initial two comic pages. You can see a gradual codification of the faces, esp. in comparison with the first comic page and character sketches (somewhere below in another post).
Some more random sketches from some months ago.

I really like how this last one turned out for some reason. Maybe it's the environment being something more down to earth rather than sci-fi or abstract. Or maybe the shapes on the nurse. Definitely not the Grim Reaper lurking in the bg; no...

...........................

And as an aside, wanted to try to repost some of the color pieces I threw up (quite literally) back around November. Adjusted the saturation levels between the Cintiq and the monitor to compensate for how pastel the tones were looking on my computer back home. (These were done on another work station). Not sure how these'll fare out on most other monitors though:

I'm growing to hate the process of translating color to digital, since it seems like no matter how much color correction you hope to achieve on any one monitor, you still have to troubleshoot how the color is going to turn out between several other monitors before you can settle on a palette that you not only feel comfortable with, but that will translate well once it goes to print. Have had enough bad experiences with locking in to one work station (monitor, tablet, Cintiq, etc.) while painting or color correcting a scan, only to find that it looks like f**k all once you see it elsewhere on another format.

Anyhow, some additional panels:


Think the key is to punch the core tones and shadows to a nice level of vibrant, while wrangling in the light source tones (both primary and secondary) to a point where they remain both bright and vibrant - at the same time not being washed out, etc. Which is tough; you want those secondary light sources (or shaded areas) to not draw the eye away by being too saturated.


In either case, I'm sure someone will comment on these being too dark. Which is probably correct, given that Wacom and Kinko's seem to have as a mission statement that no matter what I do, I have to constantly guess what the actual color I'm painting in looks like. To quote Robin Williams; "It's like hunting with Ray Charles."

~ Surprisingly not dead... ~

...but getting there soon enough. Some vignettes, with color, despite the Cintiq and the 2nd monitor getting all womanish on me and deceiving me eyes with the tones.








First two were from months ago, around the same time I did the daytime vignette studies (below a few posts); spent the past hour doing cleanup on the lines. Yes, they are cleaned up. Still working on how this will end

Next 3 were from this past month. The entire sequence of 20-something panels is actually finished, with the panties playing a vital role near the end. But then again, when do they not.

Last 2 are more recent; still working on the sequence, but I have an idea of where it'll go. Although a decided lack of underwear, a jetpack and a Chthulhu will more than make up for it near the conclusion.

~ More Moleskine... ~

Older pieces from the sketchbook, from a few months ago.

~ Cthulhu Tank Crew sketches...~

Done on an 8.5 x 11 Moleskine sketchbook. (Redid some portions of the above pen & ink piece in Cintiq. I really need to keep from uploading before letting these drawings sit for a few days, to catch the mistakes...)
Another page after this, but I just got done finishing my taxes, and I'm tired.

Morituri te salutant. Or rather, 'So long, adieu - Auf Wedersehen, good bye...'