Pencil Lines

Ugh. This is one of those drawings that looked so much better before I went in to do the detail work. How on earth did it lose the energy the original sketch had?

I probably shouldn’t upload bad drawings like this, but I figure that I’ve drawn so little over the past couple of months that I should really show anything, no matter how terrible.

This was supposed to be an update of this drawing on DeviantART: Multiple Joys. I still like those ink sketches, and wanted to see if I could do anything more with the character. Eh, maybe I’ll have more luck if I try again.

I’m really enjoying my anthropology class. We were watching this video: The Nuer, and I couldn’t get over how beautiful the people were. I wish I had better references for their scarification patterns, then I might have given this lady some.

I was too frustrated after redrawing her left leg about a dozen times, so I just left it as is. Please try to ignore it? One of these days I’ll have the time to actually sit down with an anatomy book and figure out how to draw these things.

A sketch done tonight when I should have been doing homework. Man, I have so much I need to do it’s not even funny. That should explain some of the lack of art that’s been happening the past month or so, I apologize.

Yesterday Dennis came over again, and once more told me that I should go ahead and do another quick photoshop sketch, kind of like the one I did of the monk boy in my last post. He said I should draw my character concept for an upcoming game of Diaspora that we’ll be playing soon, so I did!

Polly comes from a system named Andy’s Left Foot, a very boring system with one homeworld where they are one of the technological centres of the cluster. The upper class rules with an iron fist, but the planet is overrun with people and pollution, so the upper class likes to get away as often as possible. As such, they are known as the cluster’s Tourists. Anyone who can afford it, mostly the cream of the upper class crop, can make clones of themselves to take care of their business while they’re on vacation, sometimes for years at a time. Sometimes the rich make clones of themselves just to do the work they don’t want to do, but which would be too improper to hire someone else do for them. When the Primes come back from vacation, or the clones wear out, they are recycled back into the system.

Anyway, Polly was one of these clones. Her Prime (the person she was cloned from) was a high-level politician of some kind, and as such Polly was taught all the things her prime knew during Escalated Development. However, she managed to slip through the cracks during the behavioural conditioning and cybernetic imprinting process, and found herself with her own free will and ambition, something that was supposed to be suppressed and stamped out. Being probably the fiftieth clone of this important person, she wasn’t really watched much, nor was she important, making it possible for her to coast through her duties until she was able to engineer a plan to escape.

So, she escapes, and spends her life on the run, jumping from ship to ship, system to system. Her lack of hair makes it difficult, since that’s a sure sign you’re a clone, so she wears a lot of bright make-up and ghastly wigs to try and disguise that fact. Thankfully, fashion in the cluster is such that this makes her blend in rather than stand out.

Here she’s in her room, alone, crying over a love she lost tragically just a little earlier. Clones have no hope of developing any kind of relationships with people, let alone falling in love, so the experience really affected her a lot. All she wants is to live her own life, though a rogue clone is one of the most dangerous things to the people of Andy’s Left Foot due to the knowledge they would hold of the important individuals and their doings. The are hunted down like plague dogs.

Polly isn’t her real name. Indeed, as a clone she wouldn’t have a name, probably an identification number of some sort. I figured Polly was fitting, though, since it is a popular name for parrots, something that copies/mimics others. Since that’s a clone’s entire purpose, I thought she’d be the kind of person who would allude to that fact when choosing a name for herself.

Right… so, yeah, sketched up in Photoshop and inked and coloured there. Again on my laptop. I made another animated .gif to show the different layers of sketch, ink, colour, etc.:

Again you’ll see a blank box; click on it to see the animation. =)

It’s been a long time since I cel-shaded anything, so please forgive any sloppiness or blazing errors you might find. It just takes practice, and I am rather happy with what I came up with in this picture, especially on her face. =) Though I probably should have chosen different colours… the colour scheme is exactly the same as that Monk Boy picture; orange, red, and purple. Oi vey. Ah well! It still looks neat.

I have to head to class now. Enjoy!

Right. So I’m drawing this picture, and I’m having trouble coming up with an aspect of it. Want to help me out?

So, it’s this naked chick with a mohawk. She’s carrying a pole. There is something (or “things”) hanging from it. What are they?

When I originally started sketching her I had this vague idea of an angel with some kind of weapon, like a pike or a halberd or something. But as she progressed she changed into something much more neutral. Now she’s this lady with a mohawk, which I really like the idea of. Mohawks are usually associated with very strong stereotypes of alternative, or punk rocker types, which have their own sets of personalities and behaviours and characteristics attached to them. But here, you can’t see her studded leather wrist bands, her crazy ripped denim and fishnet arm socks. I like the idea of going to the basics, behind the stereotype, to show you that it means nothing. Just because she cut her hair a certain way, she is inundated with these stereotypes, and I wanted to convey the idea that she can, and is, anything. I really liked the calm, neutral overtones from her pose, like she really is an angelic being, but defying her own labels.

Maybe I’m thinking way too much about it, haha. But anyway, I need the pole to be something other than just a pole. Not a weapon, though. I came up with a couple ideas; one, a lantern of some sort, but I’m not sure if that conveys enough meaning. The other was maybe having some sort of semi-precious stones hanging from the ends of the poles; stones too are given arbitrary meanings and characteristics, but they too are very neutral and can be meaningful or meaningless, depending on how you use them. But now I can’t decide on the stones I want to use, so I’m all conflicted there…

Any other ideas out there? Anything would be helpful, even if it’s silly. =) I would like to work on this more, but right now I’m stumped!

I have a couple random sketches for you.

I was playing around with shapes and trying to make some interesting stereotypical characters from them. They were very small; these guys are only a couple inches high. I really have to do more fooling around with shape and style. I love the results. =)

A nice looking character I sketched one day, then inked. She has the tentative name of “Candice”. I really like this style, putting the emphasis on the nose and the large eyes. I used it once before on a quick character I named “Donny”. The only problem is that I’m not exactly sure how it would work in other views; so far the profile view is the only one I’ve got to work. I did a few sketches in different orientations, but they didn’t work out so well.

I did a quick sketch of the Candice character in a full-body shot, to play around with clothes. Instead, it turned into playing around with body proportions and blue and purple pencil. I also drew another profile shot of a generic head in that same big-nose style to use as a template and just to cement it in my head a little more. I need to draw more cartoony stuff, it’s a lot of fun. =) You can also see in the bottom right-hand corner a picture of a flan, from one of those Final Fantasy games, as the dessert it’s named from.

And last but not least:

A lady I spotted from the window of a bus the other day. I’d like to sketch her again and do her better justice, she had such a wonderful smile. I was planning on working on this sketch a little more than inking it experimentally to see how it turns out. Maybe I’ll still do that!

That’s it for now… just a bunch of sketches from the past couple of months.

In non-art news, I was accepted to college for this Summer, so I’m hoping that hanging around on campus and doing a lot of random sketching like I used to will mean I’ll have more to submit and on a more regular basis. Let’s hope so anyway! I’m so darn excited about it. =)