character sheet

Here's a loose character sheet I made for a comic idea I had that takes place in an ice cream parlor.

Horny Holidays!

Don't click unless you've been naughty this year! I have. A lot.



Trying to arrive at an efficient method for drawing digital cartoon smut. Leaves less paper trail, and may prove handy for an upcoming 08 project.

alien picnic -- color 2

My much more color-savvy wife Wendy helped me pick a less garish scheme to proceed with. Going to try to make the end result stick to this warmer palette, with some subtler stuff going on. For instance, her uniform, jetpack, luchpails etc. now need more definition, not to mention that little cyclops-squirrel.

+++edit+++

Overwrote this with some minor finishing touches. I think I'll leave this here, or risk over-rendering.

alien picnic -- color 1

Blat! Main selections mapped in. This one may not actually call for an overly laborious color treatment, but we'll see what the next few days bring.

alien picnic -- pencils 2

Made one more costume design modification. Now I can begin coloring the piece with confidence! Holiday break is coming soon, so that's when I'll tackle that.

alien picnic -- pencils

After doing another print/trace, the drawing was losing too much energy, so I redrew it from scratch, trying to preserve the elements I liked while axing the stuff I didn't. Unfortunately I chose to black in areas of the gloves and boots (really badly I might add -- where's the volume?), drawing emphasis away from the important stuff. Hopefully I'll be able to knock this back in the colored version. Not really happy with the way that shoulder emblem and headpiece came out either, so I'll most likely be tweaking these areas heavily. *sigh* Concept art is sooooo much easier than illustration, even cartoon illustration. If anything, cartoon illustration is harder because it demands selective simplification for maximum impact/readability. Only when I'm more confident with compositions like this can I ever undertake something as big as a comic. Gah...so daunting.

alien picnic -- mid-res alterations

I pulled a Bret Blevins and turned her into a skin-tight suited space girl w/ rocket pack, making some modifications to the alien. Going for "CutesySexySciFi." This is the drawing I'll tighten up and color.

alien picnic -- mid-res

The thumbnail was enlarged, printed, drawn over, then scanned back in and cleaned up slightly for the next round. The scene doesn't really say "sci fi" to me yet, so I'm going to mess around with the tree, alien and girl costume in Photoshop. Stay tuned...

alien picnic -- thumbs

Yesterday's musings on giving spacegirl a sandwhich gave me an idea for a little scene : picnic-ing spacegirl is getting her thermos drained by a long-tounged alien whatzit. Here's me thumbs!



I plan to do the one to the right of the star, most likely going with a different costume.

Spacegirl RMX

...this time based off a drawing by sketch-cohort Brett Bean.

~~~afterthoughts~~~

-I forgot to give her hips even a sutble tip/swivel, making her look a bit ED-209ish. Her posture is unfemininely rigid. Where's the distribution of weight?

-The whole piece suffers from "concept art syndrome" where lack of plausible motion, background elements and dynamic perspective result in something not quite worthy of the term "illustration." What are her hands doing? What's her story? Should've given her a weapon, or a PDA, or a sandwich...anything to lend last-ditch purpose to the pose.
-The boots are the only part I'm remotely pleased with, which is strange considering I normally gimp out on the lower legs/feet. Random blob-tech ftw!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Could spend lots of time correcting the little things, but I'd do better to start over and get the *big things* right -- i.e. motivation/gesture/silhouette/weight/composition. Funny how something as simple as a fantasy pin-up girl can be such a struggle.

peachy

Wauuugh, painting is hard. Think I got a little closer to eyeballing the colors on this random web photo, but as you can see, when it comes to quickly getting everything into a picture, I choke big style. Well...that's why I'm keeping this blog. We'll see what happens in a year's time.

Eyeballin' color # 1

'Kay, so previous painting exercises were done using the color picker to get palette. But now the training wheels are off! My first "just eyeball it" attempt is waaay washed out, as you can see (haw!), but I'm still totally infatuated with this picture.