Raygun

The past few weeks have had me working on a character model in Maya, mostly in vain. It's still not presentable (and I still don't know how to present it) but I've done some character sketches in the meantime to get a better feel for the character. She's sort of a June Cleaver meets Flash Gordon character.

 Prints of the following piece are available here: [x]

Do you recognize her at all? I've used her for a few other pieces: [X] and [X].

Awol

I'm sorry I haven't posted in awhile and I swear I will soon but my plate has been so full lately that I'm kinda going crazy. I set up the gallery in Vermont a week from today if that clarifies things.

In the interest of posting something, I did this sketch last week playing with some potential character designs. They're far from being finished designs, really just something to get a feel for their shapes, but this is all for now.

blush

As a pick-me-up from the Darfur project, I've been jotting down ideas for my Character Design final due next Wednesday.

This sort of came from how silly my boyfriend thought it was that the big giant of a mechanic blushed so much in the storyboard. I gotta agree but that's why I did it X3. Okay, now back to real work.

Burnt Sienna

I'm pretty sure all my dreams will be in Burnt Sienna ink for the next few weeks. As I said, I can't post the comic that I'm working on but I can post my homework for this week.

I also did a background but I didn't want to bother/don't have time to scan it. This has the same character from an older post (although she's a bit stubbier in this version) and some new ones in the same universe. I'm starting to like working in this style. Comic to follow?

Steampunk Versus

For my latest assignment, I had to take a character and draw a cartoon version and a live action version.

 

I think I preferred the Live Action version more before I colored it but it'd be worth trying out this style again. I also LOVED making the comic version and i might so something more with this character. She's certainly practical enough to draw frequently (by design). Comic is ink lineart with a brush and Live Action is ink by nib, colored pencil and blender pen. (the green is so her leg can be replaced with a CGI steampunk leg)

bikini

So Character Design at RISD just started last week and today we had a model come in. I've been in a rut for awhile but I was really on my game tonight. I really missed working with colored pencils, especially in this style.

In other news, page views for this month surpassed last month's total the other day. Also, I've finally imported all my blogger posts to my tumblr. Tumblr is clearly better for sharing work but I still love blogger for formatting. I also got a smart phone :D Just sayin'.

Kicking my own butt

Instead of coloring the character sheets I did last year, I just started over completely and redid the design for Kara from Alex Boyle's "Lurid".

I kept the old version up but I'm so much happier with how this one came out. I'm going to create the rest of the characters in this style so I have a solid series.

Hunt character

I swear I've been working on stuff, I just don't have a lot to show for it yet. I lost a lot of my progress on my "Hunt" animation but when I redid it, I was able to streamline it a bit and add more to it.

So after trying to piece together characters using textures I made, I felt like the feel of the art was way off from what I pictured it being. Instead, I'm putting together an animatic using my storyboard then dropping handpainted elements in the animatic placeholders. Did that make sense? ^.^;; Anyway, I'm hoping it'll like I visualized once it's done.

Character sheets WIP

 Last summer I started a project with a friend of mine. He was writing a post-apocalyptic story and will eventually need artwork for it. I started by doing character sheets for two of the characters.

 

I started by sketching the designs on tracing paper then taping the paper to the back of bristol board to transfer it through. This was before I had my epic light box so I had to hold the paper up to a glass door with a lamp behind it (>.< good times). These pics are just what I got from the scan-n-stitch. I'm going to bring it into Photoshop and clean it up, color it a bit, and add some texture to the background.  

Good News, Everyone! (did you hear that in Professor Farnsworth's voice?) My goal for this month was to get more pageviews this month than last month and as of last night and some blog trading on Etsy, I finally reached my goal with calendar days to spare!

second page

Yesterday, I had the privilege of meeting Jason Lutes. He's the amazing graphic novelist responsible for Jar of Fools and Berlin: City of Stones (my favorite novel in my current Graphic Novels course). "Berlin" is the first in a series of three books that takes the "clear line" technique you may recognize from the "Tin Tin" series and shows the points of view of Germans from various social classes during the Weimar republic, the time period between the World Wars. If you would like to know more about him or creating comics in general, he is currently a faculty member at The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT.

In other news, here's the second page of the Little Mermaid adaptation. Not too much to say about it, technically, that I didn't say in the previous post. Here's the first we see of the protagonist with her grandmother and sisters. They were a lot of fun to design and individualize. Originally, I had a page for each of the sisters depicting their journeys to the surface but I had to cut them to make the story more concise. Would anyone like to see a tutorial on making a watercolor block on here? I know there are plenty out there but I need to make another block soon and I thought the viewers at home might be interested. Please let me know! ^.^

Edit: New layout! While I should have been napping to make up for lost sleep last night, I felt playing around with the blog layout was more worthwhile XD While the other one was cute, it was pretty loud and I wanted something softer that I made myself.

Hey now

So the class I taught today went well. All 4 students seemed very interested ^.^

In other news, I actually got some new artwork done! I'm glad Kelly (the awesome chika I'm writing "Stoneholders" with. Keep an eye out for our animated series in 5 years or so ^.^;; ) and I decided to change Izzy's haircolor but I'm not so sure about Ajax being orange. Maybe grey would be better :P