2013.12 Dots

Ciel

Riven

Turns out dots work just fine.

Lineart has been an on-and-off style for me.  I still have a ways to go for control and weight, but I'm warming up to doing more.

2013/11 Dots Dashes and Slashes

I did these two illustrations over the last two weeks, figuring out digital black line-art and brush painting.  I'm also have trouble formatting my dates.  (2013.11.01 or 2013-11-01 or 2013/11/01) @__@

More Mariya

I really like this cleaned comic look! Less so the messy lines below.

2nd time in Chicago

Week of 2013-09-08 and 15

An Attempt to Caricature Ahri

I started this over a weekend two weekends ago, and finished it that Tuesday, if I remember correctly.  It's not visually striking at all, and I struggled a lot on the rotation of the head and her facial features.  I got lost during the process from sketch to paint.  Overall, considered a failed piece.

Week of 2013/9/1

I felt a lot more comfortable painting these.  There's a couple of different techniques here which varied from drawing to drawing, but it's the first time I've been comfortable with linework.  I think it's due to the fact that the lines are fixed-width, which allowed me to worry about one less thing.

The painting of Ciel above has the thick black lines, which I'm sure work well to contrast saturated colours.  I'm still not sure how Mariya (the one carrying the box) should be coloured in.  Miku had some of her lines painted out, allowing for the pastel glow and rim lighting.

More Mariya

Getting back into Drawr

I will be doing daily sketches on drawr.net.  It's a very limited tool, (few undo's, 13 starting colors, two brushes, and two levels of opacity) but restrictions drive improvement!  

Redrawing characters will be my initial theme. Mariya will be the first character to be treated. :)

Friday Night Coffee

"Let's go for a walk and a nice, hot coffee"

I drew the sketch for this painting earlier this week as a quick doodle on paper.  I still feel like I have a lot more control with a pencil than in Photoshop, so these digital drawings are still largely experimental. 

My painting process is still largely single-layer-ish, in that I create a new layer everytime I take a break from painting, and I always paint on the front-most layer.  Mistakes and changes are whited out and then painted over.  

This is a 'free-form', unguided approach to painting, which lets me think decide on things as I get to them.  Essentially, chaos brought into order.

I think I could have made changes to the character's legs a lot earlier, if I spent time in the "roughing" phase.  Whenever I start a new painting, it's easy to get very excited about laying down colours and paint, and just overlook basic balance issues.  You can see in the last version below, the angle of her hips and the shape of her top changes.  These are adjustments that should be addressed earlier to avoid paint-overs.  Her hands should have been more defined from the start.

I am still wary of doing any sort of line-work in photoshop.  The initial lines were pretty rough and I ended up painting over most of it.  I added a rim light around the top half of the character, basically painting out the outline with white.

From here I want to try painting some extreme close-ups.  What does an eyebrow look like?  What about a lock of hair?  How do I think skin can be painted?  These are questions that I don't run into when painting a character at this distance.  

2013.07.21 day sketch "unnamed"

Drew this today, though it took two sittings.  He's unnamed (I didn't want to give him the biblical John), so I'm open to suggestions!

Introducing Blanchette

I Watched Evangelion 3.33

...and thought I'd do the obligatory Rei/Asuka fanart.  I had fun drawing this.  For brush I switched back to using a circle brush; the last couple months I'd defaulted onto a more rectangular, vertical brush, which worked well for weighted cartoony lines but not much else.

This painting wouldn't be complete without an Asuka + Wille, but I want to do a landscape action painting next (potentially Attack on Titan), so red-hair is going to have to wait. >,<

I thought the third Evangelion film sped by really quickly.  A number of new characters showed up, but don't get developed...  It's forgivable in part that civilization has become more ruined since 2.0, but in 3.0 its just about Shinji and Kaworu, and even then they learn to love each other so abstractly.  I think Studio Khara was successful in making me feel like I have no clue about what is going on, right from the start of the film.  The musical metaphor was nice but I did not expect it to be extended into 4.0.  The final Evangelion film will have the sheet music end bars in its title.  (シン・エヴァンゲリオン劇場版:|| ) Regardless, Evangelion just feels so good, and I can't wait to see and hear the familiar characters in the final act.

Below is the process from sketch to final.

Paint Tool SAI - Flexible Brush settings

Line-art has been a difficult area for me.  I've been stubborn about painting/drawing with single size media, and while it works very comfortable when I'm drawing traditionally with a ballpoint pen (I just found a pair of Zebra's at Staples, one of my favourite barrels), the results on non-cintiq tablets are disappointing.

I'm going to try and break down my findings from Paint Tool SAI.

Animation practice!

I was hanging out in the Animation cubicles and decided to play with a bit of traditional animation.  These were the original five pages that I drew and watched back on an old Lunchbox downshooter, which would take photographs of the frames and play them back on an old TV.

I animated it with out using a light-table, and my character's head shrunk as the pages went on...

I reworked the animation and cleaned up and colored it in Photoshop.

Digital Figure Drawing

Quite a different experince!  I brought my laptop and tablet to the drawing session today!  I started out in Alchemy and then switched over to Photoshop.  (images posted in reverse)