Kniggit

I was going to post a sketch of Moof -- I mean, Link -- from Wind Waker, but I'm having a hard time cleaning him up and making him presentable. I'll have to maybe trace him on the light box and ink him before I loose him on the world.

In the meantime, here's a Kniggit:


While I drew him, I wondered about what sort of tabards people would wear in modern times, and very quickly realized that we call them "t-shirts". This is why his tabard says "Porn Star".

Digital Painting

I'm trying to get more time in practising my digital painting -- specifically, using photos as reference. This is only my second try, and I've put up the rough version. Most of the colours I eyeballed but I am not very good at it yet so I confess that I have cheated a bit with the eyedropper tool.

Here's the rough pansy:


And here's the reference photo:


You can see that there's a few problems with my version, mostly in regards to shape. Mine is wider (Neil says: "fat 'n' sassy!") but it's still recognizeably a red pansy, so it's not too bad.

Today's Special

Troll shammy:




Plus a confused bedroom monster:

Later...

Okay, here's the Drood, looking more leer-y than ever. I love this guy:


You know what else I love? Rammstein. Rammstein is terrific music to do art to, AND it's just about the only music that we can listen to on a car trip, since you can actually hear it over the whooshing of the wind going past our tiny car. I've been alternating listening to Rammstein and O-Zone's Dragostea Din Tei all week now, and I feel so happy and angry at the same time! Yay!

Stabby Goodness

A sketch of my gnome rogue. Trying to do a nice, semi-dynamic body composition. Probably another sketch that will look fantastic in colour.

Night Elves

A sketch from a photo reference (nothing special):


And what I've done so far on my would-be-playa druid:



Hmm. I guess I need a bit more skin-tone contrast. Some shadows would probably help, too.

Daily Artwork

So here's a preview of what I've been working on for Neil's birthday. I took a sketch like this:


and toiled away on vector art in Illustrator for a week or so until it now looks like this:



That's an almost-fully-rendered set of Felheart there, being modelled by Neil's tiny warlock. My only qualm is that I used a wall from the inn in Tanaris for reference, and even with colour adjustment it doesn't provide quite enough contrast with the Felheart armour to really pop. I should have used one of the night elf inns. I may have to remedy that this weekend.

In any case, I used our photo printer to put the image onto a 5.5" x 8.5" card, and I also made a sig he can use on the guild forums and will probably make a wallpaper version too. I'd also like to submit it to the Blizzard fanart repository, but I'll ask Neil first, since it's half-his.

Phew. Now I'm working on colouring a dumb little comic from my sketchbook, starring my small night elf army:



In case it's hard to read, that's my Level 12 Druid going on about his "epic staff". I'm sure it's been done before. I'm just experimenting with a more stylized drawing style.

Today's Sketchbook

A demonstration of my retarded inking skills through random photo reference. The first face is just me trying to draw the actual individual features in the photo without any sort of attempt to put them together in a holistic sense.
The second face is using the features in the first drawing to make an actual character.

Supervillain

Here's a little guy that's headed nowhere good:


It's a rework of a sketch I did in a meeting earlier this year, with cleaner inking and the kid reworked to look a little more unique. The inking is clean enough that I'll probably colour him.

I guess this sort of work brings me to one of the major woes in my life, and that is the fact that my inking sucks. I am a TERRIBLE inker. I've recently been able to get some decent results with a nib pen while doing my comics, a few less-than terrible results with a brush and some mediocre-but-clean results with vector graphics. Every other attempt? Sucks. It may be that I am used to working on too small a scale, because I can certainly get my colouring to look decent in Photoshop. Maybe it's time to clear off the ol' drawing table and invest in some larger paper.

Actually, thinking about larger paper makes me miss that one studio course I took at the U. I'm checking out more sketchblogs lately and I keep thinking that I would still like to go to Illustration school. The key to good art is practice. The key to practice (at least for me) is to have a professional poker (as in, "You! Artist! Get going! [poke poke]) and there's nothing quite as sharp and pokey as a deadline. I am not a self-motivated person. Sigh.

Dessins du Jour

Some more experiments in realism/not-so-realism. Pose from a photo and the subsequent messing around.


A closer look at the more cartoony version:



A girl from a photo on someone's blog:



And because I can't stop reading Go Fug Yourself (even though I'm philosophically opposed to fashion commentary... But then the authors go and post another picture of Bai Ling and I think "OMG Bai Ling, I have no clue as to who you are but if I just keep watching you I will have awful drawing material for decades.") I pushed the poor girl into GFY mode:

Cartooning

Here's a sketch I did last week of some random guy on Flickr. The photo was taken in full sunlight and the shadows were nice and crisp. I went with the stark, easy-to-ink look rather than halftones.


And then I tried to do a more simple, cartoony version -- not a direct conversion, but pushing the features and body in one direction:



An altogether beefier kind of guy, the sort of guy you imagine as a security guard or policeman of some sort. I cut the legs out of the picture because I screwed up the angle on them.

Still Sketching

This is Miss Cy, my night elf warrior and potion dispenser. She majors in big-ass axes but I'd have to draw her in a completely different pose for that.



I didn't finish the blurry tree background, but I figured I'd better scan this in before the pencil crayons rubbed off too much.

I'm still working on adding a few drawings to the sketchbook every day, but the scanning is going a bit more slowly.

Keepin' it Original

Ladies and gentlemen, the first gangsta gnome:



A little rounder and cuter than the Gimp version.