I Hope You Weren't Planning On Doing Something Today...

Another drawing of my "bad side" character. Her design is pretty much finalised now (although I might need to make a few tweaks here and there to make her easier to animate), but I'm still a bit iffy about her colour scheme, so that will possibly change at some point.

Come To The Dark Side

Been a while yet again since my last update! Still, I'm back at uni now, so my posts will most likely get more frequent as I get further into my course.

The biggest change that's occured since my last update is the fact that I am now in possession of a tablet, which has made digital art much easier to do - shading and whatnot used to be a very awkward process (especially when I had to shade large areas) since I had to use my laptop's trackpad to do it all. It's also nice to be able to just draw straight into the computer without having to faff about with scanning and adjusting levels in Photoshop and erasing lines that didn't quite get rubbed out properly while I was sketching and all that.

Anyway, part of our course this year will involve an animation featuring ourselves (placed in an environment via a greenscreen) interacting with our "good" and "bad" sides, which can be based on a number of things, such as our traits, what we wish we were like, what our opposite would be etc.

Here are a few concept sketches I did while coming up with my "bad side" character.



I actually find sloths a little bit creepy for some reason, but I wanted one as a character anyway. This one represents my laziness.



This one… I’m not actually sure where I was going with this one, to be honest. I wanted a character based on my horrible procrastination problem, and so decided to have one that is the cause of said procrastination. Tempting people with TV/video games/internet etc. etc. etc. when they’re trying to work and all that.

The snake thing was far too elaborate though, so I started to go for a slightly simpler and more humanoid shape, as shown on the right.



By this point I already had the basic idea of what I wanted to do for my animation: I’m trying to do my work, and my “bad side” is trying to distract me from said work, telling me I can “always do it later” or something. I had this mental image of the character’s arms stretching offscreen and pulling back a laptop or something out of hammerspace and found that pretty amusing, which is why I gave this design long arms (which get a bit more elaborate in later drawings).



Quick (inconsistent) turnaround of my sloth character, and then a little doodle of her and my other robot character.



More of my robot character, who I still need to name. Here you can see her arms are quite a bit longer, but I’ll most likely make them retractable so she’s not dragging them around with her all the time.



My robot character at work - preventing other people from doing work. :P



She'd been grinning creepily in nearly every drawing so far, so I decided to see what she’d look like when things aren’t going her way.



And last but not least, a bit of foreshortening practice and silly expressions.

Burn Baby Burn

While browsing the audio section of Newgrounds one night, I came across this little piece. While listening to it I got mental images of Heatman from the Megaman series looking all cute and innocence while surrounded by all this destruction he's caused, so I decided to draw it. I'm not entirely sure why I got those mental images, and there is a reason it was Heatman of all things, but I won't go into that right now.

This was my first attempt at shading an image with the light source coming from behind. My first try was as follows:



I hadn't quite completed the shading at the time, but I decided to show it to a few friends of mine anyway and they gave me a few pointers about where the lighting should and shouldn't be. One of them suggested making the front more interesting by adding highlights from the glowing gem, which I liked the idea of since I've always wanted to try using green highlights. This was how it looked after I'd tweaked the shading:



I'm glad I decided to get an opinion on it before finishing it off, because I think the second try is vastly better than the first.

Another Updated Appearance

Changes in appearances seems to be a recurring thing with me, although most of the time it's unintentional on my part and often happens gradually. Here however, I decided it was finally time to make my character, Wassat, look less like some sort of reject Megaman boss and more like... something that isn't a reject Megaman boss. I'm not quite sure if I managed to pull it off and I'm still most likely going to be tweaking his design in the future, but for now I'm pleased with his new appearance.

In other news, my new sketchbook doesn't seem to scan very well.

KangaRuse

So my character, Ruse, has been... some strange indeterminate species for some time now, so I figured it was about time I fixed that. The animal he seemed to resemble the most (and that was most frequently suggested to me) was a kangaroo, so I modified his tail a little and found that I actually liked how that looked. So now, he is a kangaroo.

...I find it amusing that I keep drawing him not acting like how he's actually supposed to act. He's kind of meant to be a bit of a psychopath. :P

Anyone Want A Hug?

I was having one of those days where nothing I drew was turning out right, so I did what I often do in that sort of situation - make something up as I went along, not really caring if it looks right or not.

This time however, it turned out a little creepier than initially intended. :P

Bird Brain

It was my brother's 17th birthday a few days ago, so I drew him a picture of one of his characters, named Rhys, as a present. It's been a while since I inked and coloured something traditionally, and honestly, I think it shows. I've just gotten used to digitally colouring sketches. He's supposed to be more of a grey-ish colour, but the reference picture I had when I was drawing this was fairly old, so he ended up much more blue than he's meant to be.

But anyway, the reason he looks so sour is because he can't fly. And also because he was initially supposed to be a magpie but ended up looking very little like one, which has resulted in an inside joke between my brother and I in which other characters are constantly getting his species wrong, calling him things like "the pigeon" or "the parrot" or "the wagtail".