Been holding out

Have some art! All from my printmaking class. From the top: A Linocut, a Screenprint, a Lithograph, and an Intaglio Etching

Quick Paint

Drawing of a character for an RPG. Yes, his face is supposed to be that long. Colors/shading were slapped on quickly.

Get Something From Almost Nothing

When it comes to characters, a silhouette can be extremely informative, telling everything from their age to their attitude on life. Because it's essentially just a shape, you have to lead the eye to fill in the details and information itself, using what you do have to make the suggestions.


I might not have been thinking quite that far when I created these silhouettes for an assignment two years ago, but I think I understood the gist of attempting conveying a character and personality through a silhouette. Shape, angularity, posture, hair, props, actions and more all went into each of these character prompts. We were given the description and the template for the "album pages" and told to portray the characters. Take Aunt Adelaide the fortune teller and compare her to Aunt Reba the hairpiece saleswoman (below). They both have sharp features and almost angular faces, with overall round forms, however they both feel like very different people. Reba looks very prim and proper, possibly prudish because her posture is perfect, and everything from her clothes to her hair is exactly in it's place and fits perfectly - because of this and the position of her fingers she feels very stiff, and thus stuck up. Yet, Reba also feels like she's trying to hard, possibly because of the fact that she's trying on her own wares. Adelaide, on the other hand feels much more laid back and much less put together. This is conveyed through her slouch, the rumples and folds in the clothes that don't seem to fit quite right, and the hair that seems to be not-so-carefully done - another detail is the string the crystal ball is hanging from, which tells you that she's not too honest in her trade.


So even the slightest differences between the silhouettes of different characters can have a huge difference.

That being said, were I to be given this project now, it would likely be done rather differently just from what I've learned between then and now.

'Eh Goggles?

Because I've been neglectful in the past with updating, and because it felt so good to just draw.

Studies

Just a couple more sketches and studies from the Twelve Dancing Princesses project. This time using marker to help with making the sketches more readable.

Past Due

Remember that children's book illustration for The Giving Tree? Well, I've been saying for a while that I was going to show the character design sketches for that. Now that I've finally dug that sketchbook out of the box it was in (I'm one and a half boxes away from being completely unpacked!) I can share!


So here we have the typical character turn around on the top of the page (And on a few of them, you can see the base shapes and forms I used to make the character), but what made this one interesting is having to design him at different ages. The age difference is so vast, that I was worried about not being able to recognize the character as the same -- So, to prevent this, I made an effort to keep some of his features similar. For example, his head-shape doesn't change through the years, and though his nose gets somewhat bigger, it stays the same basic shape. I also kept his eyes the same.

Oh! And for those wondering, I have found a job! I'll be working at my campus bookstore - yay minimum wage?

Practice, Practice, Practice

Just a relatively quick coloring of a drawing of an old character of mine. Practicing my coloring and trying to find a way that works well for me.

I've discovered I find coloring much easier when I use one of the shadow colors as the flat base color, and then chisel out the lights and highlights from there. For some reason the shape just forms much easier and much quicker that way. (I had previously been using a mid-tone for the flat base and then applying the highlights and the darks - and for some reason this took much longer and didn't look nearly as good. Maybe because of a lack of contrast?)

Comic Character Designs

As I said in that last gigantic post, here are the character design sheets for that comic.



The goal of these was to get a feel for the characters before actually drawing the comic. This way, when I started drawing the panels, the characters would come more easily and naturally, and they wouldn't look stiff because I hadn't thought out how they would look from each angle and how they would move. Expressions are important as well - without them, a scene can seem very flat as all characters need to be able to interact with their surroundings both visually and verbally. The visual is even more important when there are no words in the comic.

It's about time

So, I've been missing for a while, school (or lack of it as was the case during Spring Break) has gotten me off track. Waaay off track.

So, since I've missed so much, I'm posting much more. I won't be explaining much in this post, so feel free to ask if you have questions! (I like answering questions)


Inspiration comes in the strangest places sometimes, and can induce attempts at world-building. Like this, the idea beginning at some clouds I saw outside of the window of a plane I was on.
More sketches for the same world-building attempt
Sketches of some characters of mine. Ignore the bad attempt at a gun. I'm working on that.
Hand done type assignment for my Illustration class. It's an invitation to come see a documentary that's being shown at a film festival in Rwanda.
More fun with those grey markers on brown paper. Also white gel pen this time.
Quick mermaid sketch.
Character design sketch.
Practice at drawing poses, dresses, expressions, and fabric, done from the stock photography of Faestock at DeviantArt
Practice at drawing expressions, done from the stock photography of Faestock at DeviantArt.
First of three illustrations done to Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.
Second Metamorphosis Illustration. Tatting shuttle, a pen, and a needle and thread
Last image of the Metamorphosis illustrations. This is the final version of the one from previous posts.

Another page in the life of...

Hmm...It's been a while, hasn't it? Perhaps I should set a specific day to update on. Maybe that would get me updating more consistently...

Have a page out of my sketchbook. Done with pencil and grey markers (which I've found has a really nice effect on brown paper)

She's a little long (face, legs, torso...everything really), but I really like the effect of the marker. *Ahem* I think the effect of the marker on the brown paper works well.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Well, maybe not completely different, it's still art.

It's been a few posts since I've put something up that wasn't done for class. I've been working on a good amount of sketches and drawings on my own, most character design. One of my friends is working on a story for a creative writing class she's in, and she plans to try to get it published once she finishes it. I've been involved in the making of the story, as she's used me as a sounding board for the initial world and story building (Which was a blast, I must say. World building is a lot of fun.) So, because of this, I've been doing a lot of the characters of that book. Maybe later I'll show the process of trying to get one of the characters looking right, but for now, what I have is a sketched and colored of one of the main/supporting characters of the book.


I was trying something new with the coloring/painting in photoshop on this one (Found in a tutorial made by Etoli on Deviantart). Making use of both the flow and opacity option on the brush tool instead of just one or the other. I find it gives me a much smoother and easier to work with brush. It also made the coloring go much faster for me than previous methods I've used. It was a nice discovery, to say the least. For those that are curious, the settings I had my brush at for most of that painting are between 60-75% opacity and between 5 and 15% flow.

Back from an unofficial break

Tornado's in January, who'da thunk it?

In other news, I've been neglectful, I'm sorry. Hopefully, now that I'm back on routine, since the semester is starting up again, I'll be able to keep myself on track more. And hey, maybe I'll have more for you all to look at than my face in watercolor, 'eh? We'll see how things go with this semester's classes. I may even have a website to go with this blog by the end of it, what with my web design class being this semester!

Here's to a good semester of growth and good work! Have the "finished" version of that digital painting from a couple posts back (as well as an alternate crop...because I was having fun messing around)

Just in time...

I bet you all thought I wasn't going to post this week! More likely my ego is large and none of you even noticed, but for whatever reason, here I am at 1 in the morning posting. Yay!

Unfortunately all you get is kind of a messy work in progress. Ever since classes let up, I've been drawing a good deal, it feels great to say the least. But I've also been working on my digital painting, because if I ever had any skill in it, well, I'm getting rusty. So I'm using what I've learned this semester in classes and applying it to digital painting, which, I must add, is a blast.

So anyway, I've picked up a few sketches and have started coloring on them using different techniques and styles and such. Needless to say, more than one have been abandoned because my attention span for this is remarkably small, but I want to improve, so I keep plugging away. Like this one, for example, which I am currently working on. Please, no critiques, I already know my mistakes.