Last of 2013

Almost 2014. Did one last drawing for the year. I didn't hold up to one post a day, but I did well for the beginning of the month. :D

Happy new year!

Tramapoline

WIP for the day. I've been using a super quick sketch and flat layer masks to quickly build up and section off drawings lately. It's a fairly straight-forward process to recreate. I'm getting quicker with it, but it is still slower than just painting on a single layer.

I recently got a new webcam, and the first thing I did with it was record and then playback on high speed how I look using the computer. I never realized, but I have a lot of weird postures and gestures. This pose with the hand crossed over, holding onto one shoulder is how I frequently sit. I don't cross my legs however, but I figured it looks more appropriate considering the angle. This is still a WIP and needs to be cleaned up and colored some more.

Candies and Sodas for All

I'm not sure I posted this on here before, but this was a piece back in October.

The last piece is one of the other versions I worked on from my previous project. Red seemed to fit well with the green eyes. 

Pack my little suitcase

Since the other day's drawing was cartoony, I figured I'd go for a more painterly painting today.

Horse Drawn Mower WIP

This was a family related project I was asked to do about a whole year ago now. A family member asked if I could paint an old film still of their uncle mowing. I got the rough design put together, but I seriously got stuck on this project. I ended up dropping it because the beginning of this year was extremely busy for me. A year out now, I want to get this thing finished, because I don't like having unfinished requested projects hanging, especially not for a whole year. :|

Here's the WIP I started back up.

Pirate Lady and the Upside Down Parrot

I didn't like where I left the last piece, so I worked with it some more. I guess I'll just added every benchmark of this drawing to this one post.

The final idea after trying multiple backgrounds. The character started looking like a pirate lady, so I went with that idea. I was starting to get annoyed by the befuddled crossed-eye look the character had, and actually adding a pirate eye patch seemed like a good solution to change the primary focus. Adding the parrot just made the pose and facial expression more appropriate. After getting everything drawn in, I went through a ton of different editing and blending options to get the picture to fit more together.

Decided that just a character was boring and started playing around with the composition of the character versus the background.

This was the original end goal, but I decided I just didn't like it, for one, partly because of the wonky anatomy.

Wasn't sure what I was working on yet and I was just drawing a super curvy character with crazy fluffy hair. The document I was working on was just a large canvas that I had other sketches on. Here I was trying to come up with an idea for the theme and background, beyond just the character.

This is what I started with. The middle flats gave me the idea to go forward with this drawing, otherwise, I would have just left it was the sketch.

The next day.

Still working on pretty much the same image, but the whole concept changed a lot. When I realize I can take a drawing in many different directions, I end up flipping between those options, which in turn drags projects out for a very long time. I just don't settle on one idea. Well working on this drawing went from just silly to being fun. I learned some shortcut methods with this as well.

I missed a few days.

..I missed one day posting here, then another, and then another.. Blargh.. well I'll post something again. It's Happy Paddy day! So, today, I to somewhat of a degree finished that last drawing I started. It's silly, nothing serious, pretty exaggerated and cartoony. :D

This style is rather slow because you need build flats, which I rarely do. They're useful though for keeping edges cleaned up. I went through many different quick hair styles that's why I'm posting two versions. With most of my cartoon drawings, I start with way too large of hair and then I eventually shave it off until it's closer to the character's skull. The first hair style made the character look like she was from the 80's. 

..not bad, just drawn that way.

I was in the mood to draw something really cartoony. I had the idea of something Jessica Rabbit-ish. It's pretty silly. Here are the initial stages. The shadows part is still pretty rough. She's drawn with absurd proportions just for that exaggeration. However, the arms I figured I'd fix towards the end, at least to make them a little bit longer.

It's a Monday.. Isn't it?

I might be doing something more with this. It was a quick sketch for a possible project.

Driving Along a road

Just got back from a decently long road trip.. and going to post some simple sketches. I'll see if I remember what these are even suppose to be in a few days. :P

Morning of Yore

I wanted to get this out of the way for today, so I did a 5-minute sketch! Here it is. I chose a really simple side profile because those seem like the quickest to do.

Water is a craft

Today, I almost forgot my personal commitment to post here each day. I didn't do much of any drawing today, but I did work a little bit on some weird watercraft idea. I'm not entirely sure myself the point of this. The idea was the craft had a clear view through the front shield, into the water below the craft, despite the craft resting generally on top of the water.

Banner continued

To follow up last nights post, I'm more-or-less finishing the Banner Saga fan art piece I started in Feb. and restarted last night. I decided to keep it rather fast, loose, and smudgy. I don't really enjoy reworking old stuff, because they usually need to be completely reworked from scratch instead of patched. Reworking old projects also warps me back in time mentally, where I get stuck following old bad habits. Well here it is, patched. :D

When I started tonight, I had to do a quick sketch of how they were standing and sized. The original was more cramped. I'm still not entirely happy with the positioning and composition.

Since this is Banner Saga fan art related post, I'll also re-upload my other Banner Saga fan art piece. Stormy Seas. It's not entirely clear, but that little guy is protecting the "world" servers, which I now realize should be next to (the super tiny) Yggdrasill, world tree. It was a fun idea. 

Edit: Ha. I found the original-original. Here it is. (each character shared some feature of one of the main three Stoic Studio devs). 

Banner

Since I'm holding myself to posting something each day here, today I sort of ran into a bit of mud. I was up all night last night, and so today I've really been out of it. I haven't gotten much down this evening. When I sat down at my computer it was already 10 pm, and I was mindlessly sleepy. So to reach my pseudo-quota I looked back for something I could/wanted-to rework. I chose this fanart I started back in February for the game the Banner Saga: Factions. The devs are really cool and nice people. I originally drew this with the plan to somehow incorporate some features of each of the three devs into the characters, be it giant side burns, goatee + glasses as armor, and a beard. It was silly, but the characters were very flat, boring, and incomplete. So I have the perfect reason to rework this. I haven't played and Factions in a very long time, so this project idea has probably been largely warped. This is still a WIP.

Fornesby

Haha! I haven't gone to sleep yet, but it's tomorrow so this still counts! ... I drank way too much coffee today. However, when my brain is sleepy-numb, I tend to be more willing to work longer on projects. This was a strange escher-girl drawing I just kept on adding to. Simple single tone shading on flat colors can be very handy and is a quick way to do lighting. The lighting in this isn't top-notch, but I feel, for now at least, it's passable. The extreme escher-girl shape is still in the drawing, just masked by the clothes. See it? Haha. Yeah.. After a few minutes, I just couldn't handle that distorted of a drawing.  Some days it's fun to draw with that extreme, but tonight I wasn't feeling it. I'll wake up tomorrow morning and see the other giant distortions I left in, but for now it's fine. I'll throw up the flats minus the sloppy shading. None of it is highly refined, but flat color and basic lines can look nice and clean. ...Okay. Off to bed I go!!

Towards something

A consecutive day post? Perhaps I can string these along through the entire month. That would itself be an accomplishment for me. :D Going to throw down another little sketch-scribble. I've been sketching a lot today, but mostly just making notes. I was getting sleepy tonight and scribbled this little character. I haven't been feeling too adventurous lately to work on larger projects.  

Haywood

Woohoo, a new month! It's kind of nice to restart with each new month, giving yourself new goals and deadlines. It's refreshing. I was watching my friend stream Hearthstone last night, and since the majority of my screen was taken up by the stream, I couldn't really draw anything on the computer. I decided to pull out a dusty sketch book and throw down some pencil sketches. I seem to go back and forth frequently, learning and forgetting. The key I've found to drawing with pencil is working with a soft touch. A single pencil can simulate a varying number of values and marks.

It's a nice change. When I work softly, I noticed that I hold the pencil roughly 2 to 3 inches above the lead. However, when I draw digitally, I usually hold the stylus about half an inch for the point. This shorter grasp greatly constricts the variance of my strokes and shapes. It also cramps my hand more easily.

I've additionally had the bad habit of heavily using one digital brush in only one manner, making my work bland and lacking nuance. For whatever reason, I get a brain-lock and make the thought of changing brushes very difficult, despite my vast assortment for selection.

Some days, I just don't like using low opacity on a blank space. I feel like the lines need to be solid, so I opt to use dark black lines when I really need to be using soft, varying lines. This can make my drawings very rigid.

Here's a little digital sketch I did right before bed. I took what I was relearning from the paper sketching and applying it to the digital space. It's a quick few minute sketch. It might be hard to understand, but there are a lot of minute visual notes in the sketch for me, because I will probably use this to make a finished piece.

Stuffed

I haven't added stuff to this for a bit.. so here is some! Nothing fancy, just two parts to two separate wholes.. which happen to still be WIPs.

Bucket Head

A few/several weeks ago I saw Anthony Jones (correction: oops, it was Anthony Jones, not Andrew) post symmetrical robot head figures built up from simple scribble silhouettes (sorry I can't remember the link at the moment, I'll add it later if I can find it). I thought it'd be fun to draw like that and so I tried my own robot head thing. It's really just practice with value and planes. I'd probably like to polish this up some more, it's a fairly fun project.

Robit heads!

I accidentally inversed the image when I was saving it, and I thought the inverse looked pretty cool, somewhat x-ray.

Blaaargh

My brain has been mush lately. Even when I sit down to work on something I haven't been able to mentally articulate what I was trying to do. So far, November has been a lazy, off-task month for me.

Here's a 10 min sketch of something with pink hair.

Halloween stuff

Well, after that last post I figured I should actually try something Halloween themed. She's a witch I guess! The octopus on a stick I'm fairly sure is an item from WoW, but I don't entirely remember. It's simply what scribbles became. The octopus was meant to be enjoying a sucker while trying to mimic her hat. It wasn't impaled.. it's just sitting up there. The leg pose is odd, but it's what I stuck with. :P (added quick knee edit).

The next image was just a quick lighting test. I don't have time tonight to finish this, but I oddly had fun with this and will likely finish it.

Not Halloween related -- or is it?

Some simple, silly drawings. I'm not necessarily going to finish them, but I wanted to post something. I guess these can count as Halloween-ish.

Gasp - Artificial Neck

Here's a quick lunch drawing. I got the idea from the Mordesh race in WildStar where parts of their body are separated by ~glass containers (and I pretty much stole the glass container part). After studying the trachea a bit from the other day, I realized that it look just like a fighter pilots mask and thought it would be interesting to try to draw a character without a full neck in a non-gruesome manner. Of course, she couldn't rotate her head without neck muscles, but meh! The character kind of ended up looking like a Lara Croft... it's not meant to be, just a random character. :P

Rocken Rolls

Haven't drawn much today. Worked on a simple animation test and some bland sketches. I decided I just needed to draw something other than scribbles. So I sat down, put "I Love Rock N' Roll" by Joan Jett on repeat, and ended up with this, so far. However, I need to hit the hay now. The animation look was heavily inspired by Balak01 from DeviantArt and from looking through Glen Keane pieces today. I'd really like to be able to draw with more of an animation feel. It's still a little contorted.

A little distracted

I was working on a new project this evening and started working away form the original idea. So I'm just adding the WIPs and the quick diversion (which is up top -- Esper hurling cats). :P It gives me a reason to take a break. The WIP at the bottom was mostly just getting the body poses so I could later draw armor on top. It's the female Exile trio -- a Granok, a Mordesh, and an Orange. Their classes are ~"Medic", Spellslinger, and Esper respectively. 

Mechari Warriors

I decided that I should just work out some proper, albeit sketchy, lines for this drawing. I wasn't able to get any sort of detail with flat painting and jagged brush I was using before. So here's the lines for the Mechari pair. Wait.. I just noticed that Mechari rearranges into: "I am Cher." !! (edit: swapped out for the slightly cleaner lines)

Adding edits and decided to clean up the lines some, as well as add a heavier line.