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.]

Sketchbook Pages Fresh Off The Press

Well, not off the presses. More like fresh off the Cintiq. Recent series of digital sketches below, like literally from the past few days. Plenty of storybook vignettes and random character pieces.
(*Note 08 / '23: Redid some of these pieces back around 2022. So instead of the original dirty underwear that was here, you get slightly laundered boxers a few years later.)

(*Okay, now back to the proper timeline for my drawings.)

...And here's a redux of an older piece from... 2018 I think? 8-bit characters hanging out at the old Chinese takeout place we'd hit after class at the local JC:

I guess at the time I thought the shapes were pushed enough on the first version (small inset picture on the left). But in all likelyhood I just wanted to get the color and lighting done, and didn't take enough steps back to see if I actually liked the overall feel of the poses or the drawing itself. And as usually the case from back then, I didn't really push the concept or character interactions either, so... here you have it. More characters, a little more activity, including burping. Hopefully some color soon.

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.]

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. 

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.

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!

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.

Memory Lane, plus random viking sketch

Some older commission design pages from around '08. The concept was supposed to center around a gift certificate or gift-card service with the idea of "Thank you" built into it. I'm not even sure if it's the correct kanji or Japanese term, but that's what I was given. I also think coffee was supposed to be part of the marketing factor, as in "Redeem at Starbucks" or whatever. These are some of the more interesting pages from the bunch.

Once past the initial stages of coming up with ad scenarios, I wanted to hone in on having a flagship character or set of characters that interacted with customers. In this case, a post-WWII delivery man and his pet shiba in tow. This was before I'd heard of Hachiko.

As always, once older material's dug up, the temptation's to correct now-obvious mistakes with the new drawing toys. Ended up redrawing ~40% of each page on the Cintiq. Which when considering the over/under for how crappy some older material can be, isn't all that bad. Mostly retooling of the faces - only took several years to unlearn self-taught bad habits - and some anatomy/shape refining.

Don't remember if this was earlier or later than the above two. In any case, the request was to go beyond the simple boy-and-dog duo. I think I was aiming more for a 50's flagship character that also served as a logo.

And, a random rough page from a recent series of Hellas-meets-Viking vignettes.