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.]

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.

Random Character Design Sketch Page

 

Not much to say here, just a random sketchpage I did a few months back while listening to comic book industry talk on Youtube. It's probably what got me to drawing the characters doing typical super hero crap in the background. I know it's what definitely got me to add the Google Streetview images: The person talking mentioned his old comic book hunting grounds as a kid, in... I think it was somewhere in Ohio, some little town. I like the storm cloud atmosphere in the pics near whatever freeway, so I thought: Why not have some superhero / UFO shenanigans going on there?

 

I have no idea what I was thinking with the Bond / Get Carter-style character with the gun arm though. The foreshortening is probably correct, but it doesn't totally "feel" correct. Meaning that it isn't jammed in your face Terry-Gilliam-style enough.

Sketches before the year ends

...Because tumblr's flipping out for some reason over showing images proper. From the past few months going back to Halloween:

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 Sketches, continued

Remember doing these either at the old office space, or at a sketch session with the coworkers at Starbucks, back around October of 2012. Above is 2nd pass, below is the 1st; Colerase on paper.

Ended up redoing the faces (and a couple of the graphic logos in the margins) on the Cintiq this past week, plus the additional character study on the bottom right. What a (hopeful) difference a few years makes in learning correct understructure. It's funny, what at one time you think "Yes, that is the sh*t" only to see it a few years later and realize "Yes, this is sh*t.

To quote Max von Sydow's portrayal of Dr. Kynes - and in the same resigned voice, "The process of removal continues"...

Older Sketches

(Started Oct/Nov. 2011; finished Oct 2014. Efficiency par excellence.)

I've mentioned before about sitting on a sketch or illustration for a few weeks or months to spot all the mistakes. So how about a few years. Which seems to be what it takes for me to gauge not only any potential progress, but to correct whatever bad drawing habits, shape choices, facial geometry issues I tend to fall into. It's one of the reasons why I'm grateful I've kept most of my mistakes from, shall we say, being immortalized.

(Another from the same batch, roughly same time period.)

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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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.

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:

CDA Workshop: Manu Arenas, notes on comic book illustration

One day workshop featuring Manu Arenas (or Man Arenas, as he's known on the front cover of the first book of the Yaxin series, The Faun Gabriel). Hosted by Concept Design Academy.

(Though Sir Manu would probably prefer spotless whites for the negative space around the characters, I left it fairly dirty since this came out of a physical sketchbook. Besides the drawing of other folks that were in the room, the characters in image are copyright Manu Arenas.)

He had some of his comic images up on the projector while he spoke, which were (loosely on my part) sketched the meanwhile in between taking notes. Condensed the two pages into one, ditched my chicken scratch writing, and typed out whatever notes I thought were relevant. Some PS for color; otherwise (if  Mr. Arenas happens upon this) the linework is Colerase on paper. It physically exists somewhere sir, I can assure you.

Notes here are by no means exhaustive, since this was a 5 hour+ lecture. He covered some art history the first quarter, citing Bruegel and Bosch as influences growing up.

Great artist, good class.

Space Girl, plus some story detritus

Some stuff from about a sketchbook ago. Which is to say, several months to almost a year past. Feels like a bit of a cheat, posting one-off sketches and the like rather than anything story related:

Had someone ask me about a month ago how the comics were coming along. I forgot what I said, something like "Ah, work you know, paycheck, etc." But the reality is that most anything from the sketchbooks this past year just haven't been worth posting, much less the (several) abortive starts at comic work. Several things go into it, mostly just general technical drawing issues - consistency from one page to the next being a concern. But ultimately the big bugbear is, well, story. Not interested in wasting folks' time with a supposedly polished story on my part if it's going to be the narrative equivalent of a demo reel. That's fine for portfolio purposes - not for something published. Or more importantly, something that should aspire to be memorable, to the point that it can potentially define a certain place and time for the reader. Milestone - not a millstone - for both the reader and artist; take note...

 (A couple of characters - and a key moment - from Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. )

That being said, I should start posting some of those aborted attempts at comic pages. There are several floating around the sketchbooks, fairly complete in terms of characters. Almost an entire moment even, with a beginning, middle, and end. Taking the trouble to scan them in may be the thing I need to take another look at the drawings and correct them, in effect doing another pass and pushing the shapes or poses as needed. If anything, it'll be cathartic to get the dirty laundry out of the washer after several months and into the dryer. Just like real life.

(If I remember correctly, had previously illustrated several pages of a retelling of the Nihongi - the Japanese Genesis, so to speak. Seems the main character here is retelling the part about the wild man, Susano-no-wo, near the end of the page. Pretty lady seems content with just enjoying her breakfast.)

~ The Kaiju Connection... ~

Quick series of sketches from awhile ago. Had the thought of a back-alley setting, something like The Karate Kid - in fact, it is that back alley, complete with the trashed Hutch in the background. Add to that a weird Guyver-type main character that's apparently run into a bunch of drunk Japanese kids, not quite bosozoku but probably a step up from the hardcore punk kids circa 1990's.

(Once again, I based several of the characters on folks from one of the links above.)

The other thought, besides the fact that I had no idea where this was going, was to have a kaiju that can transform in and out of the shadows, from several story tall monster into a smaller human form - probably without being able to control it, oddly enough. Which in this case, the human form would be Gene Hackman. Or more accurately, Popeye Doyle from The French Connection... which coincidentally is yet another film that has nothing to do with CG or television animation.

(Doyle laughs at everything, from film genres to masked characters that have tendrils for an arm. Ignore the drop in quality on the margins of the page, or the attempt at writing in the middle of the pic.)

Didn't really like this last one, partly because it doesn't resemble Doyle all that much. But I liked the lighting and the pose. And the Hutch he's leaning on.

...Speaking of which, I thought I'd share a bit of the music that helped inspire these. A long out-of-print 3 song mini-disc from a Japanese band called Scarecrow Carried Brain. Their only release so far as I can tell. I even think my Guyver character above is on the mic for the entire album:

 (Click here. Is a safe download from Dropbox I can assure you; ripped straight from the original CD.)

Stuff's amazing, insofar as it confused the hell out of me the first time I heard it. Opening track had me thinking, "Huh, they're playing next to a RxR crossing" before realizing that the drummer is effectively playing a constant drumroll off both the snare and ride as the main beat. Second song has King Ghidorah sound effects coming out of the guitar, while the third song's what I call Spaghetti Westerncore.

Yosh.

Sketches

...on post-it notes. Which gives me a legitimate reason for the scans turning out yellow this time around.

...Have Photoshop back on my computer again, so I might get around to doing a clean-up and color pass on a sketch or two here. Once the ambient temperature outside drops below, say, 100 degrees.