You can have it if you want

Random things today.

No, I'm not really serious

I wanted to depart from my usual way of drawing characters a bit (i.e. bodies that try to follow the proper anatomy of humans, but in a stylized fashion), and do something more Stephen Silver-ish. Granted, he draws beautiful proper anatomy too, but his usual style is very much characterized of bodies built up using simple shapes, and tangents to its advantage (at least, that's the conclusion I've drawn...). To say the least, it's very animation-y (which shouldn't come as a surprise...).

So I started drawing a little bit, and ended up with this team:

You may know that character design is one of my true loves. I love coming up with characters, and drawing them. I think a good character can easily carry a story far. When I draw, I usually tend to just draw something random, and see what happens, but this time I thought about the stories behind the characters, and how they could be interesting in their fiction.

Richard "Dick" Rigid is obviously the main badass of this team. He's also madly in love with Bill, the lieutenant. He walks around topless in the office solely to get Bills attention. Clara Page is a reporter and journalist, and is also in love with Bill. She mostly wants to steal him away from Dick though. Rooster is a homophobe, and doesn't know his partner is gay. Dick's afraid of conflicts (emotional ones - not, like, fist fights and shit), and hasn't had the heart to tell Rooster that. And Bill Pendulum, yeah, why does everyone love him? Honestly, I have no idea.

And that's what went through my head when I drew this. Now, I'm looking for someone that wants to buy the rights to make a show out of this, and give me one million dollar for it. We can call it "Hard time" and make it an half-an-hour show.

The kids are gonna love it.

Är jag en astronaut?

Drew Piebandit, the notorious villian who's complety unrelated to that other piebandit. Or is she? Maybe, maybe not.

Progress: (Cause people seemed to enjoy the progress of random scribbles and shit that turns into drawings)

Original design by Mike Perry.

Mafia 2

The Mafia 2 demo was released short time ago on Steam. I LOVED the first game, but wasn't overly excited about the sequel (uhm, not to say I wasn't... unexcited), but once I downloaded it and played thorugh... well...

...DAMN, I can WAIT until it's released now. Haven't had this much fun with a game in quite some time now.

The random playboy magazines that you could pick up was a bit surprising though, but it's a strangely effective way to get you to care about the collectibles.

Yes, I like it so much I made a comic. When I like things, I make comics.

Identifying your shapes

Something that's very common to read in any sort of book about drawing (at least books about drawing comics/cartoons), is about the importance of identifying your shapes, i.e. breaking everything down to simple spheres, cubes, cylinders and cones. When I was younger, I used to disregard that. I mean, it sounds so boring, doesn't it? Who wants to draw shapes; I wanna draw characters and COOL stuff. Not geometrical shapes.

However, the more I've practiced to draw, the more I've realized what a huge favor you do yourself by breaking down everything into shapes. I now feel that identifying your shapes is one of the most important things you do while drawing, so I'm gonna go over and show how I do it.

1. I start as usual with a circle for the head, so I can measure up the head to body ratio. As I've said before, I usually do a 1/5 ratio, which in real life is the aspect ratio of a child, more or less. I like too keep the head big though, even for adult characters. Anyway, I then do a simple stick figure to get all the parts out quick.

2. I then flesh out all the lines and work on the silhouette. It doesn't take more than a few minutes to get this far, and approaching the drawing this way, makes the silhouette very defined (or, at least easy TO define), and it gives you a very good base for the finished drawing. You can basically see if anything is out of proportion all ready and fix it, so you don't have to deal with it later.

3. This is where the shape identification begins, and thanks to the well defined silhouette, this is also the FUN part! I basically just go over it and get all the lines out, joints makes for circles, legs and arms becomes cylinders (or just lines connecting the joints). Be careful not to ruin the silhouette or create tangents. When doing things like the legs, I find it easier to do the joints first, and then connect them by drawing in the legs.

4. And that's basically it. I filled in the lines one more time, cause I like to have a well defined sketch to go by when inking, but I guess there wasn't to much reason too. Though, I had to add clothes and a face to the sketch before inking it too, obviously. So, a few details later:

Think this is some kinda motherflippin' joke?

Spent some day in the photo studio at school with Jacob yesterday, taking pictures while wearing our newly printed tshirts.

We printed six ones, "^_^", ">_<", "._.", "o_O", "T_T" and "e_e", via spreadshirt.

Jacob obviously took most of those, but here are some I took with a really old camera:

I like them.

The creative process

Here's Mike Krahulik:

But enough about that.

This month's art jam is about drawing Felix the Cat, and I thought I'd show you all how I tackled that task, and ended up with the final drawing.

My initial approach was to do what I usually do, draw the character, but in my own style. I.e. approach it like it was my own character. In the first sketches (in the top left corner), I tried to get a feel for how what basic shapes Felix is made of. He's a very simple character, but still kinda hard to "get right". Though, I think most classical cartoon characters are like that.

Anyway, I wasn't sure if my style fitted or not, but I moved on to try and draw him in different poses and in different angles, and nothing seem to look that great. Plus, I couldn't come up with a good pose, or how I wanted him to look (evil? heroic? just plain?).

I decided to try mimic his style instead of impose my own on him, but I also knew it'd be a bit boring if it was just him, in his style. I mean, that's how every other image of him is, so what's the point? So I did the only sane thing I could think of.

And dressed him up like Super Mario.

In the name of progression

Back in the dark September of 2005, I was introduced to comics of the web, more specifically a little webcomic called Ctrl+Alt+Del. I still remember exactly what strip I was greeted by the first time I visited the site.

The 16 year old me was amazed.

“FREE comics, on MY internet?” I thought. “I NEVER!”

But it was true.

This was back in the days when we still had a dial-up modem, and every time of the day when cranked up the Internet for some surfing, I'd click through the archives of said comic.

Here was a comic about video games and things that I cared about, it wasn't like a typical print comic; of course I loved it. But what amazed me the most about it, was the ability to, with one click, see and appreciate the difference in artwork, and how far the artist had gotten since he started out. I loved seeing progression back then, and I still do.

Today I'm aware of a lot of the amazing webcomics out there, and also about the fact of how hated Ctrl+Alt+Del is by other artists (granted, most of those complaints may be legit). I barely read it anymore, but I still find myself in the habit of defending it whenever someone critics it.

Anyway! (tl;dr: my life story)

In 2006 I decided to create my OWN comic in the vein of CAD, i.e. about games. With print screen-backgrounds.

It looked like this (BLEARGH):



Sorry about that. (Yes, this was back in the day when writing “teh” was still cool)

I've been wanting to remake this one for like a year now at least, and I finally got around to do that. So, this is progression:



(Click for fullview)

Obviously I had to rewrite it a bit too, cause... well I HOPE my writing has gotten a bit better since 2006.

(Btw. Alyx actually does have pink/purple underwear, I didn't make that up. That shit is canon.)