Character Designs

Over the summer I designed the whole cast of characters for a story idea I have been working on.  After I took character design class, I really wanted to make a full sizing chart for the whole cast of characters, so that's what I did.  Why am I posting them now; because I was not able to color the full body pictures until now.

 The first thing I drew (an colored) where just the head shots of all of the characters that I plan to have in the story.  This was to see if each character looked different from the others in design, construction, and silhouette.  These were the first designs I had (some were more solidified than others, as you will see in the charts below.  The eight characters on the top are my heroes, the six on the bottom are my villains.  My inspiration for their color palettes and rough designs is a different species of squirrel (only exception are the twins who are of course the same species).

 So here is the heroes chart.

In order they are (and squirrel species): 

Arland (Western Gray Squirrel)
Fionn (Albino Squirrel)
Arthura (Eurasian Red Squirrel)
Emrys (Prevost's Squirrel)
Taliba (Northern Striped Palm Squirrel)
Brava (American Red Squirrel)
Jayanti (Finlayson's Squirrel)
Manon (Antelope Ground Squirrel)

The villains chart:

In order they are (and species):

Cathal (Abert's Squirrel)
Laura (Giant Indian Pale Squirrel)
Dracul (Eastern Fox Squirrel)
Gwandoya (African Bush Squirrel)
Rayu (Long-Clawed Ground Squirrel)
Ranya (Long-Clawed Ground Squirrel)

All-in-all I'm relatively happy.  There's still a few tweaks I'm probably going to make (like make Emrys look more like a child).  I also plan to maybe work some more on a few designs.  It was neat to draw them all out and to see them all together.

If you have any suggestions or tips or anything, feel free to let them be heard.  Just remember I purposely did not variate line weight, nor did I add shadows and highlights.  This was just to strictly see the designs themselves and how they looked to each other.

So happy I got them done before the start of the new year.  Now to go celebrate.  Everyone have a good New Year's Eve and I'll see you all next year.

My work over the quarter

I'm finally done with finals, so now I can update here.  I've included a few pieces that I've done over the course of this past quarter.  It's been a tough and eventful quarter, but I got all of my work done, and the end result was worth all of the hard work, lack of sleep, and getting sick.

This is one of the first projects I did at the beginning of the quarter.  It is a pin-up of Akira and Devilman from Devilman by Go Nagai.  I will say that once I figured out Devilman's design, he was very fun to draw.  In this project I could only use pitt pens and show light and shadow through line weights.

This is one of the last projects for my Advanced Inking class.  We all had to draw Jeremy Irons in brush, and do all rendering in Brush.  This was quite hard for me, and I spent two days dreading putting ink on his face, and practice different techniques until it was perfect and I felt confident enough to ink this.  I am really happy with the result of this work, and am planning to try to do some more dry brush pictures over my break.  I'd like to try to work on and refine this technique as I love the results I got from this.

These four pages are the pencils for my inking class final project.  This story was a lot of fun, and in a way a new challenge for me.  I tend to write fantasy stories with anthro characters, so my teacher suggested that I should try to do a story a bit out of my comfort zone, so no fantasy, and no anthros, and all new undeveloped characters.  So I kept a medieval base as that is my favorite story time period, but decided to go with 100% human bards.  These two characters were new to me, I had rough ideas for them, just their names and an idea of what I wanted them to look like, but they actually changed a lot from my original ideas, but I'm happy with the result.  A friend of mine suggested that I have the audience throw tomatoes at Quartz, I then built off of that for Quartz to throw a tomato at Dia's face, as he deserves.

Here's the final product.  I'm thinking about coloring these for fun sometime. I really think that they would read well in color, especially since I envisioned them in color since I imagined their color schemes to work with the stone/mineral that they are named after.

These are the pencils for the other studio class I took this quarter, Visual Storytelling I.  My first fight seen in comic format.  I definitely learned a lot from doing this, and see that I have a lot more work learning about fight scene pacing.  This was originally a back story for these two characters, though changed a bit, but it's okay since now it reads better for class purposes.  I also learned a lot about cobras from my research on them so that I could depict the snake as properly as possible, adding in my tiny changes where it made sense.

Here's the final colored version.  After I printed them out for class, I realized that I went a bit too dark-primarily on the environments.  So now I know to watch out for that more.  I really feel that Arthura's inner dialogue through the whole story is just calling Brava an idiot.  He just looks so irritated and mad the whole time.  He's so great.  Brava is great too, he's always so fun to write and draw for.

So that's a summary of the work I did this quarter.  It was tough, but well worth it :).  I feel like I learned a lot, and improved.  Now I'm enjoying my break and looking forward to the next quarter and what it has to hold.

First Blog, First Post

So as the title says, this is my first post in my brand new, shiny blog which I am highly excited for.  And in perfect time since I finished the generate 24 hour comic challenge this pass Friday/Saturday with all 24 pages done!

It was very fun to do, and I'm quite proud of myself.  To by-pass my perfection ism ways in this, I chose a simplistic way that I occasionally/rarely draw in, and a very goofy idea for a story and just ran with that, coming up with everything as I went along.  Not at all a way I normally work, but for this I feel it worked.

So, without further ado, my 24 page comic: