A very quickly done and cartoony self-portrait.
Foolin’ around with Photoshop some more. Trying to work looser and faster, without worrying about perfection. I really need to work on more interesting and dynamic poses though.
Oh, and Happy New Year!
I did a very quick digital drawing of Creature today.
I’m not sure if I ever really explained who Creature is on this journal… so let me do that really quick.
Creature is a weird canine-ish animal thing that I drew a lot when I was a kid, mostly in highschool. Actually, he first started out as more of a demon-ish thing, as is evident in the first few pictures I drew of him. I hadn’t ever really had anything that I drew more than once, not even a character, but for some reason he stuck in my mind, and I ended up drawing him all the time.
I still don’t know what he is, really. I’m terrified people think of him as one of those many numerous canine-ish “fursonas” out there, or even worse, a sparkle dog. But he’s not me, nor is he an extension of who I am; he’s separate, and I just like drawing him. He doesn’t have a set personality, or any kind of a story or background. He’s just there.
Anyway, I hadn’t drawn him for ages, so I sat down tonight, opened up Photoshop, and sketched him out and coloured him in about an hour and a half. I’m trying to get used to doing these quick Photoshop drawings, and I really do think I’m getting better. I just have to work on my shading and colouring, and definitely my backgrounds as well…
Right, enough rambling. Hope you like the picture. =)
EDIT: Here’s another animated .gif layer run through. I let it linger a little on the sketch layer, since I find that the most interesting part. =) Click on the picture below to see it animate for you.
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!
Well, it’s been nearly a month since my last post, I should have something to show you. Let’s see what I can find…
Agh, sorry it’s been a bit of a while since my last post. I suppose school/work has taken up more time than I thought it would!
I’ve been doing a few fun things here and there throughout the last couple of weeks. Been doing school stuff, which is fun, been doing some silly web-building/designing projects at home wherin I make a complete fool of myself and multiple others for the glory of another (you’ll hear about that shortly!), been helping a friend move, and watching numerous silly Disney shorts (mostly Donald Duck because he’s mah faaavee) on Youtube around also trying to keep up with my blogroll on Google Reader and devART to boot.
But really, it’s mostly school and working on the weekends that’s been taking up all of my time. I get, if I’m lucky, one day a week to myself that doesn’t involve either of the two, and usually I try to spend it socializing, which leaves little room for anything else!
But, I have been getting a couple little art-y things done, so I thought I’d share them. First, the ones that are a part of that website project I was hinting at…
So I was chatting a couple weeks ago with Losmios, aka. Mia and one silly comment lead to another until I was in the midst of coding up an ultra silly fan page for her (Beware!! That link is poison for the eyes!). I ended up working on it for about three or four days straight over my weekend until I was literally being kept awake at night due to crazy coding dreams. I decided to take a bit of a break from it, which I am still in just because I haven’t found the chance to get back to it. I hope everyone that wanted to contribute hasn’t grown bored of it too in my absence…
Anyway, other than doing the website and all the coding and everything I also wanted to contribute some Mia fan art, so I sketched up a couple of things. Here’s the first:
This intellectual piece of work was sketched directly in Photoshop CS and coloured in about an hour and a half. Because I’m all slow and out of practice with Photoshop stuff, hehe! Also, I was having issues with the pressure sensitivity on my tablet, which I still have to go and fix…
Anyway, yes, that was one of my oh-so awesome tributes to Mia. Here’s the second, which is in decidedly worse taste:
Oh joy. The quality is overwhelming me.
This one was done with markers and watercolour. Yes. and I deliberately tried to make it look bad, though I’m sure I could have done a worse job if I tried. I did too good a job of staying in the lines. It’s a hard habit to break!!
Yes. So those were done last week. Since then I haven’t done much by way of drawing, usually just the odd scribble here and there that I don’t like and don’t really want to share. =) But today the awe-inspiring Michael Sporn uploaded some original Bambi storyboards and model sheets and I just about died from happiness. I have previously attempted to draw Bambi on a few occasions in the past, but never have I had such beautiful references. So tonight I sat down and tried my hand at drawing baby Bambi.
These sketches are a mixture of direct reference to get the form figured out, and attempting my own poses. I’m sure you can tell which are which. 
I could use more practice, and even now I’m feeling an urge to get back to it. I just wish I had more creativity in terms of poses to draw from! I’m seeing even now that the urge to make his legs shorter/more proportional in real world terms is great, I really have to fight that and stick to the proportions on the model sheet. Also, I tend to make him too stiff; I need to loosen up, though that’s been the trend in my artwork for a while. Always too stiff! Hehe!
Sketching Bambi is a delight, though. Not only is he outrageously cute, but he also has those beautiful, long, thin legs that I absolutely adore. The rhythm, angles and negative spaces made by thin and spindly legs has always been like crack to me, which I love to explore. Hmm, maybe I should get back to sketching. One page is hardly enough!
They were drawn with blue pencil, by the way, but I tinted them in Photoshop in order to make them more visible. I’ll have to experiment with drawing him in other media. Maybe a darker, softer lead might be fun to try… or even brush pen when I get a little more confidant!
Anyway, go explore Michael Sporn’s splog; he has tags for his stuff, here’s the one for his model sheets. They make me squee with joy! Oh, if only I could draw like the Disney animators of old…
Right, I’m off to sketch. =) Turrah!
