Trying backgrounds again

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.

Messing around with digital painting some more

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.

Generic Sci-Fi Guy

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.

Vanilla

 Texture layer on divide

 Texture layer on multiply

Ants? Don't worry, I got this.

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:

Few more randoms

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...

So I added a cape

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.

Sharkarex? Tyranark?

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.

Sports?

Naked Guy

First time trying to make a project in Blender.

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.

Old Chess Player

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.