The goddamn notorious piebandit stole ALL my pies, so I had to level up my superman suit a little bit, so I can take them back.
Took the opportunity to try a more advance colour technique (I do that sometimes). It really forces you to focus on the colour when you don't have any outlines to go by, I recommend you try it too.
I have been stricken by the feeling of not being able to draw, and it sucks. Hence the lack of updates here. And before you scream at me "YES YOU CAN DRAW"; no. When I feel like I can't, I can't. I draw things and throw them away, time and time again, and it makes me sad.
Anyway, here are a few things I HAVE drawn that looks good enough. The first one is me as a superhero, for Mike's artjam, the second one was supposed to be Douglas from IT-crowd, but it doesn't look like it and I never finished it.
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.
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.
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.
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:
