Nanomango '10: Character Design pt. 2

Not as far along as I'd like, but just like the hurricane season, so starts Nanomango tomorrow. Due to real life events like vacations, deadline crunches for work, and just plain procrastination, I wasn't able to get as much designed for the comic as I would have liked. That means the rough pencils for a lot of the characters are going to be more ambiguous than I'd like. I'll probably do some designs mixed in with actual work on the pencils, and some characters won't need designs for a few more days.

I was able to get designs done for two characters though. I was able to pretty much finalize Maleen's design, first. I continued from the general costume thumbs to hair thumbs. I needed two to three designs, one for the early appearances, another for her escape after seven years and as a servant at the Prince's castle, followed by her hairstyle when disguised as the Bride and her happily ever after. One thing I was glad to turn to was an older hair magazine I'd kept up with, providing me with a lot of bases for hairstyles, and used in the thumbs. After I got her hair figured out, I moved to the structure and features of her face. I split it up so I wouldn't rely on the hair to define her appearance, and could finalize her face and expressions. I wanted an exotic look to Maleen and to break from traditional appearances (aka, my default faces for females), so a long nose that gives her a handsome look. I then combined the parts to create the overall look, and you can see her in her original princess clothing and her later tower clothing.


I also hashed out some designs for the King. The goal was someone who could look imposing and still regal, and make it clear that he is her father. In other words, I kinda kept her nose and eventually managed to incorporate the stripes/slashes on the arm into her father's clothing and crown, a sort of royal symbolism. The pants will probably be tweaked when I get to the actual comics' pencils.

In the near future, will try and hash out the Prince and the Maid, moreso the Maid because she will be part of Maleen's story for about half of the story, if not more. The Bride only needs an ugly face.

Sketch: PT "I'll Cover You"

Just a bit of Princess Tutu fanart I drew last night. As you can guess, it was inspired by the song "I'll Cover You" from RENT. I just love that song, and it's my favorite from the play. I've wanted to draw something to go with it, and something to it with Ahiru and Fakir as well, for a while (or at least do a few LJ icons). For a messy sketch, I think it turned out well. Opinions and advice are welcome. I'm unsure if I'll clean this up and polish it or not.

Nanomango '10: Maleen Character Design pt. 1

It's been slow, but there has been some work towards designing the various elements for my attempt at this summer's Nanomango. At this stage, it's designing everything, which has been rather frustrating to me in the past. I'm terrible at designing characters, at pretty much every aspect of them. But you only get better by working at it, so there's that. And these images with my thumbnails of possible costume ideas.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about character design, and design in general, is how hard it is to get the ideas to flow. These two pages of thumbnails were done sporadically over a handful of days. It doesn't feel like they took much work. One would think ideas would come easily, but they don't, even when you're keeping the details to a minimum so you can come up with more things. Still, there are the beginnings of some good ideas in these, and will use a few of them for some of Maleen's outfits either as is (with detailing, naturally) or with some modifications and mix and match of a few.

In the meantime, moving on to the physical details of her head. Have to come up with a good, expressive design.

T-shirt Design

Here is the final design (except for dummy text for the city's name) for the t-shirt that features the animals in an earlier post I'd drawn. I created the logo in Illustrator and imported it into the PS file that I'd combined the animals into.

Nanomango '10: Story

I'll be taking part in Nanomango, something I've attempted before and have had mixed results. In the past, I've done original stories, usually working on Overhill, but this time I'll be doing a different approach. Taking a clue from the concept art walkthrough book, The Skillful Huntsman, I decided to base it on an existing story, a fairy tale to be exact. I wanted to do a story that isn't that well known and would offer enough story to cover 30 pages. After reading a few fairy tales, I eventually settled on Grimms' "Maid Maleen".

Today, I finally sat down and worked on getting the story pacing and outlining the general pages. In a slight departure from how I normally plan for comics, the thumbnails were dropped and general plot points were indicated for the story. This happened because I have yet to come up with how everything will look.

We'll see how it goes, and over the next couple of weeks until June starts, I'll be working on said designs. Should be interesting.

T-shirt Animals

Below are animals I drew for zoo summer camp T-shirt. Forgive the watermark, but I'm feeling very protective of the animals, and they are being used for a particular project. They were drawn initially in pencil, then scanned and printed out as light blue copies (also allowing for me to make adjustments when I ran out of room, like I did with the giraffe and tail of the otter), and lastly inked with Copic multiliners. I'm most pleased with the tiger and the giraffe.
As I said, this is meant for a T-shirt, and one that will possibly be colored, so they had to be confined to clean, relatively simple line art. The animals are actually grouped together in the more or less final design, which I may show in the future after final approval.

April Drawing: Day 16 Power Girl

 Here are the finished versions of yesterday's drawing. I kept the coloring simple and flat, but opted to play a little with the lines so one is colored and the other has the original black lines.

April Drawing: Days 13 and 15

I did draw for days 9-11, but they were mostly sketches and scratch work. I have missed two days, which isn't too bad, all things considered.


Day 13: This was my birthday, a rather laid back affair. I got the inspiration for this piece from an episode of Nova about the history of the telescope.


Day 15: I've got progress for this one. The idea came from today's prompt over at the April Drawing LJ community: Draw a superhero. This could be an existing one or an original character. As it happens, I occasionally get really interested in a piece of entertainment, and this time I'm interested in DC Comics' Power Girl. She's just so much fun and I like characters who have fun and don't take themselves too seriously.

I started with a quick pen sketch done during my office hours while waiting for my students to show up. The pose is pretty simple and straight forward, and captured what I intended to do. I used it for the basis of the polished drawing.

The messy messy drawing. I am a messy artist, preferring to get things down and then refine, especially if it's going to on to being inked. Because I usually go to a lightbox and a clean piece of paper, the drawing can be this messy so long as they aren't too dark. Then I go over with a softer lead to make the final lines stand out.

Final inks. Done with Copic SP Multiliners. I like them, but I need to work on using them and probably play around with the brushpen because the biggest drawback of them is the lack of line variety you get with the multiliners. I like getting some variety with smoothness. I got that here, but had to do it with multiple strokes and my hand isn't all that steady. Need to ink more.

I'll probably color this tomorrow.

April Drawing: Days 6, 7, & 8

I've been drawing, I just take forever to scan my drawings in. The last couple of days I was in a funk but started to get out of it a little bit yesterday.

Day 6 This was inspired by a scene in a short story I wrote for the steampunk fairy tale universe Becky and I have been playing with. It's supposed to be my Red Riding Hood pilot, but not too pleased with it. I'll come back to some time later.


Day 7 This was from a Walter Foster How to Draw book, namely Lilo and Stitch. No, it's not scanned upside down. I tend to fall back on some exercises in Betty Edward's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain when I get in a funk or I'm rusty. I like to use images with clean lines, so I took advantage of the WF book.


Day 8 Tonight was also the last night for the portrait drawing class I mentioned in earlier posts. The model was lit from below, and that was enough for me to shift gears enough to get a satisfactory image. Probably my best portrait from the whole class.

April Drawing: Days 4 and 5

Yesterday's challenge was stick figures, so I took advantage of it to do some thumbnails. Today's art were three pages of 30 sec. gestures. I need to work on doing more, getting past a block.
Day 4


Day 5