So, I just recently uploaded a picture to deviantART. A picture I’ve been working on for three years, and was never fully satisfied with. I don’t think I can fully articulate how much it means to me to finally have it out of my hair and out in public where I don’t have to worry about it anymore!

It started as I said, three years ago, when I was going through a rough time and needed some extra cash. I decided to put out a plea for commissions, just quick $10 sketches and small digital drawings and the like. I don’t think I got any bites, except for one; Mia, aka. Losmios, told me she wanted a commission. But not a piddly little sketch, oh no. She wanted a fully painted digital picture she could make fancy prints of. I didn’t know whether or not I had the time or the energy to pull it off, but I accepted it anyway. How could I refuse?

Anyway, it did turn out to be a little more than I could handle. I was rather intimidated and vowed to do the best work I could do. I had an image in my head of how I wanted it to look, but it just wouldn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. As such, it sat on my hard drive for all this time, during which I would randomly open it up again every few months, put a couple more hours into it, then close it up again. It wasn’t until I started art school and wanted to start fresh that I decided to bite the bit and just set it free.

So I have. But it seems so anti-climactic after so much work that went into it. So I’m going to post a series of WIP images to show you just how many iterations it went through before I finally came up with what I’ve uploaded today.

So yes, Mia gave me a commission to draw a picture of her pegasus persona. I opened up Photoshop and freehand painted, without references, a couple different equine poses, but I settled on the one you see below.

This really shows how sketchy the first pass on the pose was. I used one of Photoshop CS’s default brushes and just went to town. For the wings I used a photo I took of some seagulls as a reference. There’s no way in hell I could do that freehand!

So, after I settled on the pose I switched to the regular hard-edged round brush and started airbrushing, smoothing it out, adding shading, and a few more details. The entire pegasus was painted on one layer, something I had never done before. I had a lot of fun with it. Oh, right, and I decided to do it all in greyscale first, thinking later I could use one of Mia’s own techniques and colourize it. This eventually caused a lot of problems. But anyway, onwards!

Right! Here I added the mane and tail. I did those by painting in a semi-opaque, flat coloured mane shape. I used the smudge tool a bit to tease out some finer strands. After that, I just went in and traced out a bunch of locks from the main shape, adding light and shadow. It was almost like sculpting. At the very end I went in with a small round brush and added a bunch of small, straggly white hairs just to make it seem a little less plastic. You can see some of those in the detail picture I uploaded to DA.

This was my first pass at a background. I envisioned a bunch of mountains poking through a veil-like misty cloud layer, which the sun was just sitting on top of. In my mind it was very pretty and dramatic, but it’s the background I ended up struggling with for three years. Urgh.

I tried many times to paint the clouds in, but I could never get them looking anywhere near to my satisfaction. I went to another friend of mine, Katy Rewston, and she sent me her own little sketchy paint-over to try and show me how I might go about the clouds. I tried her suggestions…

… but yeah, they didn’t really turn out how I liked. (I also added some shading to the pegasus here, trying to make the lighting a smidgen more believable.)

Either way, the picture stayed like this for months. I just couldn’t get the clouds right. On top of that, I knew the mountains were terribly painted. I knew they were simply placeholders just to figure out the look of the background, but I didn’t realize how much of a pain they’d actually be when I tried to paint them properly. Anyway, I took a stab at repainting the mountains.

Well! They certainly looked like the best mountains I had ever painted. But right, they were in the wrong positions. So what do I do? I cut them up and try to fit them in the same places the old mountains were:

Okay, getting closer… but there’s still something off about it. I also added a bit more detail to the mountain in the foreground there.

So I was left with this. And there was something wrong about it. I didn’t have the same dramatic presence to it as the one with the crappy mountains did. I was so frustrated, I went to a digital painting forum for some constructive criticism.

And oh man, did they oblige. They certainly reamed me out for the background, and everything else too, but I learned a lot. They told me about a grid method often used to help with composition, so I stuck that on and went about reordering. After applying their feedback (and making another half-hearted attempt at clouds) I came up with this:

You can barely see the faint gridmarks in there. Anyway, this was a huge help, and I certainly loved the composition much more. But what about those clouds? And wasn’t I supposed to colour this eventually?

Here I started trying to experiment with the colour. The background simply has an orangy-color layer over top of it; the pegasus I actually went in, following the instructions on Mia’s tutorials, and made my first few attempts at colourizing it. And it really didn’t turn out so well.

No, it doesn’t look terrible, but it certainly wasn’t turning out how I wanted it to. The brown on the knees just looked dirty, and whenever I tried to make the socks white I just lost detail. And don’t even get me started on the spots on the wings; I never saved any pictures of my attempts with that, because holy crap, it just looked so bad.

So… it stagnated. I felt I couldn’t deliver a product if I couldn’t even make the subject look like the character it was supposed to be. And on top of that, I just couldn’t get the damn clouds right. It didn’t stop me from opening it up and trying it again and again though, over successive months.

I even experimented with using my own reference pictures for the clouds. Yeah, it looked super cool… but I’m not that great a photomanipulator. I also couldn’t find the type of clouds I wanted for around the mountains… and all sorts of other problems.

Then, using a simpler technique, I came up with this. And it didn’t look so bad! Basically I took the soft-edged round brush and added a bunch of opacity/size pressure settings and scatter effects, then went to town on the clouds. There are two layers here; a black cloud layer, and a white cloud layer underneath the black. The varying opacity in the black clouds made it look like the white showing through were highlights. I liked the effect a lot, but I sat on it for a hell of a long time.

At some point I opened it up and sketched out those misty clouds around the mountains, exactly what you see in the finished picture at the top of this post, but I can’t remember when. Obviously I didn’t think it looked that great at the time, because I closed it and forgot about it. But when I opened the file back up a couple days ago, I suddenly realized, hey; it doesn’t look that bad. Presentable, in fact.

Then I came up with the crazy idea: could I call this finished?

Well, even if I couldn’t or not I decided to anyway. I finally added a small colour overlay layer to give it some character and uploaded it. Now… it’s free.

Can I go now? Hehe!

Well, that’s it. I hope this was interesting for you! I hope you like the picture; I sure do. Hopefully it’ll stop haunting me now.

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’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.

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!

Here I’ve done some more Donald sketches. I hadn’t seen the references for a while, had just watched a couple Donald Duck shorts, and felt like drawing him. He’s hard. That beak keeps changing, agh! Surely more practice and study is needed.

Next:

I wanted to draw a quick picture of the Last Unicorn of “The Last Unicorn” fame, so I did, sans reference. I keep trying to give her proper anatomy, what’s wrong with me? One of these days, I’ll be able to grasp that grace that I’ve never been able to capture.

The bottom sketch is just a cute one suggested by my sweetie. He suggested “A person building a humanoid robot,” and this is the scene that came to my head. =) I’m trying to think of a way to skew this into a Christmas card…

Here’s a bigger version of those two:

They’re just pencil with micron ink over top, size .05 and .01. =)

Next!

Well I went ahead and coloured that Picard sketch I posted a while ago. I’m still really fond of it, there’s just something so appealing about that man’s face… that, and I’ve been watching a lot of ST:TNG lately. Anyway, I coloured this on my Erlkonig, my laptop, using my poor, ancient and huge Intuos 2 12×12 Wacom tablet. I don’t think I’ve mentioned which tablet I own on here yet, so I thought I would. =)

That’s all for that, really! Next…

This is a picture of a boy monk, also suggested by my sweetie. I was complaining, as I often do, about not doing enough art, so he kicked my ass and told me to draw something in the hour I had before bed. So I opened up photoshop and asked him for a prompt, so he told me “a monk in orange and yellow robes.” I came up with this in just under an hour.

I made a fun little animated .gif to go with it. =)

You might just see a big blank box; if you click on it, it will open the full .gif file and it will animate for you. It basically just cycles through the layers I used to make the picture. Not a real walkthrough, but close enough, since it shows you my initial sketch layers and how I refined them over time. I might have made them cycle a bit fast, though, so you might have to open it up and step through it to see the layers more clearly.

Animated .gifs are fun as hell. I can stare at them for hours.

What else do I have… Ah, right!

Sorry for the horrid scan. I had the urge to draw Ariel the other night for some strange reason. Strange because I really don’t like her very much at all as a character and always found her to be rather bratty, childish, and simply a bad role-model for kids to begin with (I thought so when I was a kid, too, so I haven’t just grown up to be a prude, I promise! I’ve always been one. . So to satisfy my urge and to also placate my gut, I tried to draw her looking all bratty and pouty, using model sheets found at the Disney Animation Archive. Clicking through more model sheets I found the ones for “The Emperor’s New Groove”, one of my favourite Disney movies, so I had a go at quickly sketching Kuzco as well. I figured, he being such a sleaze, he’d totally be one to hit on an overly sexualized 16 year old mermaid-girl (but hell, since I was the antithesis of sexuality when I was 16, perhaps I’m just jealous =P). So I came up with this.

K, enough rambling about that.

Hmm, you know, I think I might have run out of things to show off. No, wait! I have some sketches in a ratty notebook in my schoolbag, but I haven’t scanned those yet. Another entry, then. =)

The final few weeks of school are hell. Thanks for putting up with me! I hope you like what you see.

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!

Took only a few minutes to sketch, to ink, and a few more to colour. I don’t know though, I think he’s cute. =)

Both of the following sketches were drawn with a mechanical pencil filled with F lead. I like F lead better than HB because it doesn’t stain the paper as much, it doesn’t smudge as easily, and it makes it much easier to block things out before going in and refining the lines, making things look much neater. At the same time, it’s not as hard a lead as H lead, which I find isn’t dark enough to produce a strong enough line, and I find it also imprints the paper making it hard to draw again over areas you erase. But Anyway, to the sketches.

Picard has the most wonderful face. I found myself staring at it more than actually watching the episode, so I decided to do something about it and sketch it out of my head. I wanted it to look like a cartoon-ish caricature rather than a portrait, so I tried to exaggerate some things, like his cheekbones, and his strong eyebrows intimidating his rather small eyes.

I do like it a lot. There’s something to be said for cartoony portraits, and I think this is one of my best yet. =) Still need to work on being more abstract and less rigid, but that will come…

Next, the counselor herself!

While watching the episode from season 3 entitled “The Price”, I saw Troi turn towards the screen after Ral first met her in her office and thought she looked absolutely gorgeous with her hair all tousled. So I paused it, saved a screenshot, and sketched it out. Of course, I took artistic license and made her look a little bit prettier (if that’s possible!) and a little bit more in my style, but I still think it looks a lot like her, and it’s not quite as cartoony as my sketch of  Picard. Sometimes drawing beautiful people can be fun, but damn is it hard to get their proportions and everything right when you have such smooth skin and faces like that. Her hair was a tonne of fun to draw.

When I was a little girl I always wished I’d grow up to be like her. I’m certainly not, though if I curled my hair and tousled it up I’m convinced I could get myself to look a little similar…

After sketching it I scanned it and put some colour on it in Photoshop CS:

That was also a tonne of fun. I don’t often colour things, but when I do and I’m able to just relax and finish it however I like I really enjoy myself. I’m especially happy with the way her hair turned out, but as Dennis reminded me, I could have spent a little bit more time on the communicator.

Right, that’s it for me. Any fellow trekkies out there say “Engage!”

I know I said they were just going to be quick sketches, but really, this is what I was hoping for; getting an idea that would inspire me to do something fun. I really enjoyed this.

While talking with Dennis about it, the idea of Wallace playing the part of Cheesus popped into my head. It was perfect! What better person to play the god of cheese than the man that built a spaceship in his basement just so he could go to the moon for an afternoon to sample the local cheese? It was Dennis that came up with the idea of playing on the Sacred Heart imagery; he’s such a genius.

I used these pictures mainly for reference: Wallace and Gromit, the Sacred Heart, and Mary. This is the first time I’ve ever drawn Wallace or Gromit; I wonder why I’ve never done so before? They’re so much fun.

Oh, and those are supposed to be large circular wax-covered bricks of cheese floating behind their heads and serving as halos. I was going to put a Wensleydale label on them, but figured I was already pushing it enough as it is.

Here’s the original sketch:

Sketched it out on paper with pencil before scanning it. As you can see, originally Wallace had a beard/goatee to better match the Sacred Heart reference. In the end, though, I thought it took away from the fact of it being “Wallace” and not just a picture of Jesus in Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit style. Wallace can wear a wig and pretend to have hair for once, and we’ll just forget about the beard for now, hehe…

I worked on the line art in Painter X, which was actually much more frustrating than I thought it would be. I think the problem was that I was working way too large; the original resolution on this is ridiculously huge for something so simple. Also, the simplicity of the picture meant a lot of long, straight, and circular lines that were very tough to draw smoothly in such a high resolution. Just ask Dennis how much I was ranting and grumbling all the way through it! I swear I must have drawn, undo-ed, and redrawn every line in this picture at least a dozen times. Not my best line art ever, but it serves its purpose! I’ve learned my lesson for next time.

I ended up colouring it in Photoshop CS, since Painter X is still kicking my ass in that respect. Used one of Photoshop’s default brushes for the whole thing, which is a brush I really love the texture of. I thought it would be great to give it a painterly texture. I’m really happy with the look of it.

The rays were done using the polygon lasso tool; I just selected a bunch of “ray” shapes, feathered them a bit, and then drew inside the selections with a lighter brush to give it the look I wanted. I also inverted it and used a darker brush “behind” the rays to deepen the contrast. I like the effect it gives, and it’s quick and easy. =)

Anyway… I’m really happy it’s done (now Dennis can stop bugging me about it). This is the first coloured thing I’ve done in a long time, and I’m really happy with it. Yay!

For those who don’t know, Wallace and Gromit are the intellectual property of Nick Park. He’s rad. And for those who don’t know Wallace and Gromit; what’s your problem?! Go watch the shorts now!!

Was sitting around with Dennis, was thinking about some of the things John K. have said in his blog posts, and suddenly got this urge to sketch one of those old-timey, spaghetti-legged characters with the pac-man pupils.

And, I dunno, an anteater seemed like the obvious choice. Isn’t it?

So here are some sketches.

This was the initial character sketch, where I just drew everything down using broad shapes and trying to keep things simple. But I’m sure John K. would say that there isn’t enough construction; he’s just a bunch of lines floating in space, there’s no meat behind him. Ah well, I’m still learnin’ here!

Asking Dennis what I should draw him doing next, Dennis replied an action pose, throwing something. So, next sketch:

I can already tell there’re a lot of things about him I have to work out, but it was fun to try and figure out how his body would work from a different perspective. Maybe I should try a turn-around and see how well I can reproduce him from other angles?

Then I figured, where’s an anteater without their long tongues?

Now this one looks the least like the original character, but I think it has the most construction. Ah well, practice… I should have drawn his tongue straight for the most part and flipping back and forth only at the end; maybe I’ll do that the next time I draw him. =)

Anyway, it was a fun learning experience. I liked him so much I brought him into Painter, inked him up using the scratchboard tool, than dragged him over to Photoshop CS to “colour” him up:

I used only the basic web colours for his shades; only six different shades of grey, including black and white. I figured that would simplify it and give me the best tonal range. Maybe not… I’m not as satisfied with the tones, but I’m not as certain what is wrong with them so I can fix them. Added a couple paper textures from mayang.com to finish the old-timey look.

It was only after I finished this up, saved it, and uploaded it to DeviantART that I realized I forgot his ears. D’oh! Ah well, that’s something to remember for next time.

There’s something I really like about the weight of him; he’s big and bulky, yet he has that adorably droopy nose and long arms that makes it look like he’s almost melting. I love that. I’ll have to try some more oldie cartoon characters, this was a lot of fun to do!

If you were to make an old-timey, 1930’s style cartoon character, what would you do? I’d love to see anything anyone else comes up with. =D