Warm Ups

Printmaking drawing/sketches

Quick Paint

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

Past and Present

Every now and then there are fun little memes that crop up on other sites I frequent that get my mind and my hand going. This is one of them. Started by Thundercake at Deviantart this one asks you to show your past and future self, to show how you've changed. I had fun with it.

Existence

Would you look at that? I exist again. I really need to get myself on a schedule with this bugger. Here's to trying that this summer.

Otherwise, I feel like I owe an update. I've finished my 4th year of the Design and Illustration program - give me one more year and I should get my soul back from them! What a glorious day that will be. In the meantime, I am working quite happily at my internship at the video game company here in town, where shoes aren't required, the nerf gun darts fly daily, and I am quite at home.

So until I get some actual art worked up, I have a giant image made of sketches that I've thrown together.

(Warning: The file is rather large and will likely take a bit to load.)

Don't Sneeze Too Hard

Over my Christmas break, I got together with a friend and we spent the evening seeing if we could make a full comic each in that amount of time. I decided to do something small and silly - I didn't even really plan this out out very much (In fact, I got done with page three and went "Shoot...I don't know what to do next")

So, here we are. My 4 page, quickly done, mini-comic.

Not too bad...

...for not having digitally painted in a while.

Just a quick (1 hour) digital painting to keep myself from getting too rusty.

The Faces Watching Me

Haven't had much time lately to draw for myself - or to sleep for that matter - but have some more faces I did using myself as reference.

'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.

The Original Invisibility Cloak?

The train derailed again, and this is me trying to get it back up. Part three of the blog design stuff will come soon. But for now, have this. It's a motif-thing to go with the story/Fairytale The Twelve Dancing Princesses. Displayed are the branches with the silver, gold, and diamond leaves, as well as the goblet from the dance.

Yay for quick photoshop jobs! There should be more to come on this, possibly with an explaination.

(Read the story here)

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.