So I did a concept sketch for my detective character here. I liked the sketch but I also needed visuals for my demonstration speech in my communications class. So I made a video of me working on this since this was a ready to finish sketch.
Wednesday Saturn is my detective character for my story idea called "Jazz on a Wednesday." It's like a film noir kind of story where Wednesday solves crimes in the illustrious but shady city of Safe Haven Metropolis. She partners up with Jazi Quartet an ex criminal hacker who faked her death and changed her identity to Jazi Quartet after a late famous singer of the same name.
So it's like one of those dark gritty dark deco style stories with mafia's and such. I have a very unique world planned up but I want to keep it a secret. Don't want anyone taking my ideas now.
Yeah this was done fairly quickly and it's not the best work I've done mainly because I was really running short on time and had to get it done for my presentation so I pretty much took a weeks worth of work and done it in one day. So excuse the sloppiness.
Yeah my attention kind of changed from my comic and animation project to doing the over haul of Lanavi in the piece "Musical Vibes." It has been awhile since I actually worked on some stand alone imagery so I guess it's fine.
I don't normally like revising already finished art work mainly because at the end of the day it's not a new piece of art. I like to give viewers something new and surprising to experience so this is why I don't refer to this current art project as a simply revision but rather an over haul.
So what have I done to the piece so far. well for one I deleted all the color layers and background layers. I fixed her face and changed where she was looking. Along side fixing where she is looking I also did some polish on her eyes in general. I'm still thinking if I should keep her expression or tweak it but yeah. I'm thinking of adding more lines in her hair to indicate hair strands. Her face is is pretty fine so all I need to do was trim things and such but her body I ended up scrapping it altogether and re drew it.
I'm also working on a character for the animation project I really want to do. So yeah.
Camera's don't do justice for this. Anyways I decided to do a background painting to, well, practice drawing of course. This is an acrylic on Bristol painting. I basically used 7 colors for this which were red, yellow, orange, green, blue, black, and white. Green was mixed with orange to make the browns. I used a pointillist style of painting basically it's optical blending via painting with tiny dots rather than brush strokes. It helps give off that leaf texture as well as blend all the warm color together to make a nice autumn like feel.
Pointillist style makes it really easy to paint natural backgrounds with acrylic. Normally doing these kind of paintings with acrylic is really hard because acrylic doesn't blend so well together as opposed to oils. I'm pretty happy with this especially since I'm very new at doing backgrounds all together.
I was feeling like drawing autumn even though it's Spring. I'd love to walk through a forest in autumn and have all these colors around me.
As far as painting go I love not being restricted like trying to paint within the lines sort of thing. So this one was especially fun to do because I didn't need to be so careful.
Late heads up post, but ugh too tired to do drawings. I haven't been sleeping well this whole week and as a result it has been really hard to work on anything really. I've tried to work on Paige Italic's character sheet but I just can't seem to get her the way I want her to look. I guess I have a bit of a art block due to being so tired which sucks because I really want to get the comic started.
Hopefully I can get a good nights sleep this weekend.
I also really need start working on that color contest for Sword Girls.
In other news SkullGirls came out on both PSN and Xbox Live. The game is one amazing fighting game that feels so good. Parasoul is my favorite and I love her walk animation which may sound super odd.
I've also yet again have had this thought about my style. I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing because I just feel that it is, but yeah I think I want to try drawing everyday, doing quick 30 minute sketches daily as well as do some traditional pieces and actually use my Prisma colored pencils.
To tired to think of other things to talk about sorry for now I'm just going to relax, think about the story for Newbie Bounty Hunter and watch some youtube shows.
Oh man this weekend was probably the best birthday weekend I have had in a long time. So yeah I'm older now not much to say about that but let's go over my birthday celebration.
First off I don't throw parties and haven't since Sophomore in high school. Now a days I just go out with the family to eat out. This outing was special though because we went to Yoshi's in Oakland California which is Japanese restaurant, bar and Jazz club. So I had a nice dinner and got to sample high class sake (I'm of age to drink but I'm not a fan of it but I will at least spend some years drinking a little bit for occasion but that's it. Sake or rice wine is my kind of drink though) and had an alright pork chop. I don't really eat sea food so yeah I really can't judge sushi even if I did order some. It was good none the less.
So the big part of this dinner was that we had reservations for the Jazz concert that would be playing after our meal. My favorite genre of music is Jazz so this was super thrilling. It's neat because this night (we did this yesterday because school is tomorrow and such) a combination of my favorite things Japan and Jazz. The band playing was fronted by a Japanese Pianist too. Hiromi Trio Project was playing that night it boy was the performance full of energy and passion. Hiromi Uehara is now one of my favorite pianist and she had one bomb of a trio to perform with her.
I was super thrilled to experience that I ended up buying her album. Best birthday celebration ever.
I also got a gift and in my opinion a very awesome one at that.
Yup "The Art of Miyazaki's Spirited Away." Spirited Away is practically the reason why I'm here studying animation. It's the first Miyazaki movie I saw all the way through and it blew my mind. It stands as being tied as my favorite movie of all time with Summer Wars. This book has 240 pages of concept art, cells, and information on what Miyazaki thought's during the development of the movie as well as the complete script. I'm going to definitely going to sit down and read this book over and over again and take as much from it as I can. I have a lot of art books and this one has to be the most helpful. I should really do a section where I tour my art book collection.
Yeah anyways I love my family they made my day incredible. I'm happy to have the family I have. Now back to making them proud by producing incredible art.
It also neat that every once in awhile my B-day falls on top of Easter. Which is a pretty important day for Catholics. I'm Catholic but not so religious but I still attend church and such maybe that fact added to how incredible my celebration was.
So the web comic I'm currently working on isn't the first the I dabbled into comic making. There was a web comic before but it didn't last long for two reasons. I was looking though my old files and actually found the old pages to this web comic which was called "A Glass of Water." So here they are.
Click for better view.
Man this was way before I took life drawing class the proportions are so wacky.
Anyways why did this comic fail? The first major reason was the computer I was using back when I started this comic died and so I was with out my major art tool for several months. The second reason was when I eventually got my new laptop I really didn't know where the story was going and every direction I tried to bring it wasn't working in my head.
So A Glass of Water is on a long hiatus. Yeah I don't want to give up on the characters of this story. The character Laa (the character with the "!" sign hoodie) is actually a female version of me or at least how a female version of me would be back in that time. The other character appearing in the third page is Chesna. It's basically a slice of life story about my life interpreted in a female version of me in a fictional world. I wanted to add a unique twist of which I've been thinking up from time to time. I have an idea but don't know how to approach it just yet and right now Noobie Bounty Hunter is the story I'm working on.
So yeah I just thought I would share my first attempt at a comic. I have Manga Studio so I have a better tool to make comics and a much improved art style. So yeah.
One thing I learned from trying to start this comic was that people were genuinely interested in how the story would pan out. Sorry to those eager for more but maybe they will stumble across Noobie Bounty Hunter when I bring it into the web comic community. Yeah I posted this AGoW on a web comic community and got 4 subscribers. That's not a whole lot but it told me that anyone can be interested in a comic it don't matter the quality. I'll tell you here and now the quality of this comic is bad, but that is the magic of comic making the art is relevant and important but the story factor, and how you tell it is just as important or even more important.
Let me apologize for making such lengthy blog post I just get carried away sometimes. I hope these aren't wasting your time and if it is bothersome then just shout out and I'll try to shorten it. I can't help it >_< when my mind rolls it rolls.
Click for better view. (I don't know why a black lot of something appears on her left hand with out her weapon when you full view it but ignore that, that's not apart of the design.)
Anyways yeah character sheet done for now! I will finish it up in the future like clean up the lines and add color but since I want to start working on other characters and get this comic rolling, I'm happy with just sketches and such. Colored cleaner versions will be done when the comic is actually getting pages posted on the web comic page under the characters or casts section.
So yeah here is KI-WI the heroine of the story. The super fighting robot created by Paige Italics. So I will be explaining what is written here mainly because my hand writing is terrible. So KI-WI is to be 5'4" around a little bit shorter than me (yeah I'm a short guy.) The thing on her head, the egg shaped thing is where you could access her brain via plugging in a wire so it opens as seen there. The thing on her left hand is the Solar Lens, her weapon. It absorbs light and stores it as energy of which she can use as a laser to cause harm. It is attached via a rectangular socket just below her wrist joint(edit: no I'd rather it be on the back of her hand much like in her body suit sketch over to the very right.) and can be adjusted back and forth so that her left hand is more flexible. Lastly under her clothing is her body suit. Even though she's a robot and has now explicit parts what so ever, Paige felt she needed a body suit just to have some modesty. She has feet under those boots I just didn't feel like drawing them.
So things to know about KI-WI. She's short but taller than Paige, Paige is super short. Her clothing serves no practical function what so ever, it's all aesthetic (more on that when the comic starts rolling). She's left handed (again more on this when the comic starts rolling). Lastly she was seen with short sleeves in previous sketches I decided to give her, her longer sleeves like in her 2010 design because I love drawing those sleeves and she looks right with 'em.
Next up I want to design Paige Italics. So yeah now for a little break and then back to work!
I guess here is a little screen shot showing how I generally make my guidelines for the body. Oh and this is the second time I did KI-WI's character sheet. The first round was not so good in my opinion and her body just looked off. This one is much better and more true to her previous character illustration here.
First order of business is to finish KI-WI's character as seen above for the comic, and work on the rest of the frequent cast. I think after I get KI-WI done I can start thinking about laying out the first page and getting the story all ironed out. I already have a good idea as to how I want the story to roll I just need more characters to fit the roles in certain plot lines but yeah.
I hope to get the prologue chapter all done by the end of this month and when I'm half way or so done with the prologue I will make a web comic site and start posting pages, but first things first I need character references mainly because it's a very good way to keep your artwork consistent especially in comic making since it is typically important that the characters look relatively the same from panel to panel.
Next thing I should consider working on is a personal art piece that has been worked on since June of last year. The issue with this art piece is that I keep learning new techniques and such and I end up editing this piece with all the new stuff I learned. I mainly want to make a top quality illustration out of this piece as to avoid disappointing myself. With that said I feel like I need to re work the background after doing a bit of background study. I need to better refine the line work and stuff.
Oh almost forgot to mention. Sword Girls is holding a coloring contest. I actually want to consider doing it maybe I can get some colorist experience under my belt. I don't plan on being a colorist but it would help to have that skill. Colorist are basically professional artist who color other artist's line work. Usually you see these guys work in comics and stuff.
So in a nut shell, work on and finish KI-WI's reference sheet, start the other Noobie Bounty Hunter character's reference sheet, and work on my personal art piece which I will call "Walking."
