Finally poked around Sketchbook Pro long enough to figure out how to use the paint tools more effectively. Well slightly more effectively anyway. Figured I needed to sort out something to draw/paint as a result. The lack of tiny screaming people was due to scale. I tried drawing a few tiny Lego men, but due to the scale they would have to have been tiny specs almost. Then when I changed the image to have the building be smashed I reasoned to myself the area would have been evacuated.
Should I change my mind on this one and look for a way to rework the buildings and add some color I'll add some sort of tiny military defense force on the ground too. Nothing too detailed if at all, the scale of the drawing itself is just too small overall to do much and I've have to scale it way up, do tons of work cleaning up the edges, and then scale it back down again.
This one comes in two flavors because I can't decide which one I prefer.
With lines on top.
Straight up painting.
And, yea, the perspective on the buildings is totally weird, but it's an improvement for the year so I just need to take mental notes on that one as usual.
Update: Touched up the lizard-beast, not the buildings though
A few weeks ago I got it in my head to do some sort of rock creature. Sourced by a photo of a gorila I found on Google image search. Just tinkered with it a bit more and decided it was best to move on.
Not claiming victory or defeat on this one, just posting it.
My history with art and doodling sources back to elementary school when I'd get bored and want to draw little characters over any exposed paper and later on on notes in jr. high and high school. Nothing fancy, but the point is I've never done much work on backgrounds, and that fact shows up to this day and irks me to the point that (finally) this year I've actively been trying to focus on expanding my abilities there.
A month or two back I started trying to create a tiny universe to write short stories in, maybe as that web comic I've been telling myself to do for a decade. The way this ties in is that my concept art went from character sketches to, you guessed it, environments... from there I ended up going back to revisiting the basics of perspective and greyscale painting environments that can be colored later on.
This one started out as a simple 1-point perspective line drawing that I colored right off without any underpainting. It didn't work out and my colorblindness handicap had me selecting some colors that I was told were a little too odd. So I duplicated the layer, converted it to grey (or saturation to 0 if you prefer), and used that as a baseline for bringing up the light values accordingly, eventually adding more details with great ease comparably.
These colors are mostly the originals. Not totally sure what the actual color names even are because I can tell from the red hints that I'm just unable to see some of it how most people do. But the important part is that it looks many, many times better than it originally did and was easier too. I still prefer someone else to help me with colors though, for the sake of humanity.
I had the urge to do more backgrounds after that one, but some other ideas I fiddled with didn't pan out. Can't say why, but as I was skimming animation background archives on Google and Reddit's r/animation I was reminded that reality itself need not apply to the composition so I should go dick around. Somehow from there I wound up looking up backgrounds for Ralph Bakshi's "Cool World". Probably wanted to do a nighttime downtown scene and have blocked the rest of the movie from memory.
I had originally considered adding street lights. But instead of going back and repainting a fairly large amount of it, I just made two quick layers and doodled a few lamps and light cones to see if I'd even like the look. Here's that one for posterity.
First of all: one had multiple hours doodling, correcting, adjusting, redrawing. The second one only just got past the initial stage for adjusting/correction.
Okay, now I can safely babble away merrily.
As of late I've only done line drawing, hatching, and non-shaded illustrations. It's what I'm most interested in, but I'm inconsistent at it. Getting better, I swear. Anyway, last week I dusted off my memories of how to paint (what I did the most of in college oddly) and have returned to trying out grayscale digital painting. Still prefer achromatic and monochromatic painting to full color, and have since before I learned just how colorblind I really was (standard male, not one of the other two rare variants).
So I've been messing around lately with 1940s themed concept art for a personal project and line-only drawings weren't working out so well on their own for me to practice the style. This was the impetus to make me go back to rendered digital paintings instead of just a bunch of loose doodles for my planning. Oh, and I always liked lowrider magazine camera angles and wanted to goof around with that.
This was actually drawn on my Android tablet and scaled down on my computer. The Galaxy Note 10.1 only has resolution of 1280x800 pixels, so the art always looks less refined on a PC and really needs to be scaled down after. It's got a few goofy spots I can't stop staring at, but it still turned out better than I expected for my first real attempt at sitting down and painting a car in years... or possibly ever. Not sure I ever seriously gave it a shot before.
This was done on my Wacom and 1/4 or less time has been spent shaping it up, fixing angles and trying to figure out what needs to be erased/redone. I'm posting it not as a comparison but because I'm unsure I want to keep working on it. Neither drawing is 1:1 to the source photo so I've had to do a lot of guessing of where parts are I honestly guessed wrong more than I'm gonna admit, even moreso on this one to the point that I think I'd rather start all over instead block in half of the car all over to figure out where I went wrong.
Was watching Game of Thrones S3 and feeling fidgety. Ended up trying an attempt at exactly what it sounds like.
1) Add a bunch of black hoses.
2) Put some humanoid thing in a chair
3) For the love all that is sacred to you, put a respirator on it. RIGHT NOW.
4) Goof off, act like you thought of it first.
I was messing around (read: lazy) and didn't look for any pose sources images, and mostly spent my time re-familiarizing myself with greyscale digital painting anyway. Wound up getting bored with the pose as a direct result and messing around elsewhere, which was non-boring.
Cintiq's are apparently famous for having bad default colors, and the LCD TV I use for my main screen definitely has contrast issues. I've got no idea how this will look for other people more than usual.
Digital doodle dragged between various programs and tinkered with for personal experiments.
I'm still not the most confident with coloring, though I did, whilst under duress from a friend, adjust some arm lengths and a few other things today after leaving it alone for a week or so. Oh digital editing :swoon:
Just some random doodles from recently. Not all ideas pan out and others are just quick works for skill building.
Sci-fi mining operation I couldn't color in any way I liked. Also I couldn't think up a fitting foreground element. Might try something later tonight on it, might not.
Buncha quick heads from r/redditgetsdrawn I did to practice female jawlines mostly--and two instances of boobs, though they were secondary this exercise.
Early doodle on my Android tablet.
Possibly an even earlier doodle on the portable tablet...
Played with some sketching tools and wanted to do something with a silhouette and an oddly shaped head. Then I added a cape when the shoulder scribbles turned into one whilst I was debating where to put the clavicles.
Recently got an Android tablet for drawing on when I'm at my usual cafe spot or elsewhere when I have a few minutes to scribble something out. This is one of the first larger ideas I completed mostly on that device--no need to stick to the mobile option when I'm in my own room, but the composition and the majority of the linework was done on it.
Not the fanciest of work, but I don't 3D model all that much at the moment. Also I need to move away from this one and start a new project in hopes I figure out that fancy facial geometry flow that all the high-end tutorials say is the way to go. It somehow makes one giant loop around the face, the concentric circles/loops within for each eye and one containing the nose and mouth.
The wire frame is as far as I went the manual way, then I sub-divided once and tried the sculpting tool for the other two images. Somewhere between hit and miss, I'm still happy to have tried as an amateur.
This is the fourth of fifth time I've tried to model individual fingers, but I'm not very familiar with Blender's rigging/bones system so I stopped short of finishing it. Not sure I want to keep tinkering with this one or not since I sort of want to start anything else and goof off with a more cartoony theme. But I am curious if it has any flow to it for animating.
Anyway, backburnering this for the immediate moment, and may just treat it as a stepping stone to the next idea. I also need to sort out a few simple models and rig them for animation purposes since that's what I really enjoy out of this and what I end up doing the least since all the creative steps before animating are where I have the most problems and lose my way. Simpler = I finish all of those quicker.
Based on an old guy that comes in on Mondays for chess club meets at the cafe I haunt multiple days a week. Due to slight movements and drawing it over the course of a week (drew until he left one Monday, repeat the next Monday) I ended up leaving his mouth and eyes closed. It was more the angle he was sitting in.
Darks touched up during scanning, drawn in 2B and 4B pencil. The sketchbook isn't so hot at letting graphite get any darker than what I had.
I learned that day that trying to listen to a lecture while taking notes and drawing something with text involved meant I didn't question that voice in the back of my head saying I miss-spelled something.
This character from Doublefine's Psychonauts was the semester project of someone in class. Doodle based on something the guy explained or showed during class. It was almost three months ago, I forgot at this point.
Long story short: I just wanted a simple character to model and didn't want to get caught up being me and re-designing the idea 10 times over. The project folder is even named "Pikachu_v1" because I knew I'd run into some problems that might by too far back to fix. In this case I created a few small lumpy spots on accident that I didn't notice in time, and some parts just feel weird to me personally. Also the UV map is a cringe-inducing mess. Not my strong point, but it serves here unless you can see the chinks in the armor.
Things to do:
--Figure out how to do fur so it's not all facing one direction, though this will probably be patches of non-rendering NURBS with hair dynamics sprouting from them. So far all experiments have been flops though, and I'll probably save that for another project.
--Fight the rig a little more, see if I can it at least to function a little. Okay, my ideas are rather limited to animating and modeling. When it comes to UV mapping, texturing, and rigging, I don't get far without copying wholesale from tutorials each and every time.
--Transition to Blender? Maybe it'll be more stable and less likely to crash when sneezed at by am amateur. Also no educational license 8)
If I can get the rig working enough, mirror it and not cringe in disgust, I'll spend a little time messing around with this little bugger. The other goal of this project was to create something short and pudgy to see how many vertices I needed per joint to get it to bend in a way I liked.
Being long-term unemployed is a drain on a lot of things and a lot of video games played if your discipline is as suspect as mine can be. This semester at my local community college I took an intro course into motion graphics, which was mostly Adobe After Effects with a smidgen of Maya dynamics/particles and Photoshop, and re-took the second level 3D modeling and animation course. It seemed to work to keep me productive and learning.
Okay, deleted a stack of excuses and drivel twice now. Let's try this again.
The MoGfx (ugly abbreviation, but you get it) class went decent enough for the first half of the semester with vector animations, Photoshop integration and puppet pins. The latter was compositing video with sfx rendered in Maya... and was not my strong point and was very much a painful learning experience in the opposite. So we shall never speak of that again.
My time management on this (The 3D modeling/animation class!) project was better than usual, but it drove home my weakness with painting weights and texturing. I also don't like straight FK (forward kinetics) rigs (rig = skeletal structure and the joints) since they work exactly like claymation and pure IK (inverse kinetics) often have crazy issues with joints over-extending--this all makes no sense to most people, I know. Somewhere in the middle of all of this is a rig I can work well with... I'll find it in a few years of practice.
My goal this time was experimentation within a moderate zone so I didn't break too much stuff. Crashing and burning is easy for me in Maya. The goal was to model something that reminded me of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman from Casablanca. I got sort of close with him and only finished maybe half of her model for this low-mid poly range.
Issues:
-Need to burn down my Frankenstein rig and start anew
-His face is too flat
-His lower teeth had a control to animate it. It broke at the 11th hour.
-That texture. Inspired by Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers
-Jittery hands. FK rig problem. His drug wavering from his core (waist/lower back) made this arms wobble like that. Was too hard to full de-animate it.
-The blendshapes for the facial animations needed more work
-Spent at least an entire night learning how to make an eye-rig. He drunkenly stares forward the entire time. Goddamnit!
Fun:
-Glass materials
-Lighting
-Decent camera jitter for once
To-do:
-New rig from scratch
-Practice low-poly modeling more
-Water dynamics
-Smoke/fluid dynamics for cigarettes and fire
I still draw, I swear! I do amateur (aka: learning the ropes still) 3D modeling too. I just don't find most of my work worthy of posting is all. A few things to my Instagram profile now and then even!--though their resizing algorithm is rather garbage for pencil drawings...
So as of late my usual wish-I-was-a-comic-book-artist styled work has been total fucking ass. Something has caused my brain and hand to be at civil war and refuse converse with the enemy and it's been both a creative dump and a frustrating mess with only one crumpled sheet of paper over a lost temper thankfully. The rest is just leered at and imagined on fire as I laugh maniacally. Somehow during a frustrating night I tried this rendering method and the warring factions of my brain and hand signed a cease-fire agreement for now.
Anyway, for the past two weeks I've only been able to render doodles like this for some reason. Which is weird specifically because this exact style is the one I have NOT been able to do properly (okay, with a few decent exceptions numbering under 10, and I'm not kidding) with pencil since I started carrying a sketchbook with me 95% of the time 14 years ago. Charcoal is easier to do this with since it's more controllable in its innate messiness and smoothness, but specifically my pencil shading and rendering skills have always been runner-up at best. It's a brave new frustrating world on normal sketchbook paper (60# probably) and 2B/4B graphite with a kneaded gum eraser to dab away highlights.
The black outline was added because it looked too plain and trying to shade all that area in pencil would have been a giant smudgy mess the instant I closed the sketchpad. Slightly tweaked the contrast as scanning, and adjusted a tiny spot on his right-lats from a spec of something on the scanner glass.
Cafe drawings of people's heads while trying to be sly. The sly factor messes up the perspective a lot while pretending to not be totally staring at someone's head while one hand vigorously sketches.
Done on a leftover bit of bristol board a friend gave me.
I realized I draw too many people and went to Google to find images of animals to draw from. Only found photos for two of those on my phone tonight, though I'll do more later since they're surprisingly good exercises.
Related ideas, though the panel set (drawn by campfire on New Year's Eve with a beer in one hand) gets read two ways: A slipper devil or... someone grabbing a specific element of nature.
Was reading the Lucipher comics and it featured a weird floaty demon-baby creature as a background plot device. I drew this instead while thinking about how I liked my version better--because I drew it and added a cow.
