Attack of the Dailies XXII

"You shouldn't be in a position to design clothing" -- My wife

Finished the line art (sans background, anyway). The remainder took an hour and 18 minutes. I know this because I started Haywire when I picked up the sketchbook, and Gina Carano was kicking ass for 78 minutes when I put it down.

As suspected yesterday, attempting to line it all up sucked. Even with the registration marks, there was a tiny bit of rotation preventing the composite from being perfect, so there was much tilting and sliding and fictional PG swearing*.

And then I fixed it in Photoshop, too.

^{*”Narwhalbutt”}

Attack of the Dailies XXI

The armourers from my village are significantly less nude.

A little more on the armor girl. Now with a rough background and embarrassingly small amounts of armor! I’m sticking with the idea of roughing stuff in and cleaning up the perspective afterward, hence the messiness. It seems to work.

Now for the usual self-critique/flogging:

There will be more separation between the shapes in the cleanup; I wasn’t terribly concerned about line quality or contrast in this pass. I probably should have been. It will probably haunt me during cleanup.

Looking at it now, I think the reflections off the breast plates could be a little rounder — this doesn’t really give as good a sense of curvature as I wanted.

I regret not just finishing the pencil drawing first. In addition to being a faster way to get things done, it has the added bonus of making things look cohesive when the drawing is complete. Now I’ll either have to resume the pencils and attempt to line them up the new scan for a composite, or somehow make the digital line art match the existing stuff. I think the former is probably my best bet, and it still sounds awful.

I should mention that throwing in some figure and color work is really just for morale boosting after struggling with the perspective stuff for the last week. I do intend to return to spaceships and corridors; I need the practice. I think I will continue to add figurative work into the new background attempts, though. It alleviates the frustration a bit, and keeps me drawing longer.

Attack of the Dailies XX

Ooh. Only have a limited amount of drawing time. Better start with the boobs.

This picture pretty much says all the horrible things about me in one shot. This is also the most useless armor I have drawn in a veritable pantheon of useless armors attributed me, and for that I apologize.

In another universe (possibly tomorrow’s), there is a thing in the picture responsible for her face and neck being in shadow, and her armor is colored in. No promises she gets finished hips. I’m not a miracle worker.

An aside: drawing on paper is SO EASY compared to drawing with the Wacom. Line control is a snap. I actually forgot this, it’s been so long since I picked up an actual sketchpad.

If I have any complaint it’s that this particular paper has too much tooth, so the pencil marks are a little grainier than I’d like.

Attack of the Dailies XIX

Choo-choo! Wait. That's not right.

After fixing the most egregious perspective errors, I realized my first sketch was only really off for the conning tower thingy. I mean, it was WAY off, but I’m still pleased my eyeballs are good enough to have hit the lower section without too much incident.

Now I gotta work on adding interesting details. This is really flat. I also thought the last version had a lot more charm before I hit it with the ruler, so finding that balance is something I need to learn too. Probably just need more hand-drawn lines.

Attack of the Dailies XVIII

My spaceship design philosophy is "like a naval ship, but upside down" apparently.

So I know I mentioned the story about how I got zero education in perspective from the Academy, but something I may have glossed over is that the guy who taught the class for the first four weeks was amazing. He was a former toy designer for Mattel and highly sought-after for his ability to knock out concepts quickly. He demonstrated this in class to great effect several times (before the Academy stopped paying him and he left us out to dry, that is), and the thing he emphasized most was getting a sketch down first and dealing with the perspective accuracy later. He was not an advocate of busting out the ruler in the first five minutes.

I am probably never going to be as efficient at this as my instructor-for-4-weeks, but I think it’s a good idea, so I’m trying it. Tonight’s sketch: no rulers. Wonky? Yes! But I’m going to fix that tomorrow (or attempt to). I’ve already experienced one big advantage to working this way, which is having actual reference points to work from when you DO pull the ruler out. Diving in with nothing but some vanishing points is daunting and clearly not conducive to great creativity. Or at least not for me. I bow before those who can work that way.

Aside: the long-suffering reader of 8bitartist.com may notice that this is another attempt at the ship I sketched when I was sick on my birthday. I feel this is at least a small improvement over the last design, wonkiness and all.