[Drawing] Commission catchup

First up, sorry I missed yesterday's post, I was livestreaming til early hours and totally forgot to update. As with the past few days, I've been working away at my sudden rush of commissioned pieces, some of which you can see below:

ZANON CAKE

The first of a few pieces for this character, I've also got two animations in the works, one of which can be seen here.

ElectroBlitz drawing 2

Second  drawing for Electro Blitz, using one of his friend's characters.


NON COMMISSION WORK:

I drew this picture of Simon from the YouTube group Yogscast to warm up the stream, I'm pretty happy with the results, and it was good to try a different body build to try and expand my style more. I also used the blue and orange contrast, which I'm starting to take as a running joke.

[Drawing] Livestream dump

I decided to get off my lazy butt and do some work yesterday, and what a better way to do that than with a Livestream. Turns out I gathered a fair bunch of odd jobs that I'm now happily working through! The above picture shows a few drawings from the doodle file I added to in this session.
Commission: ElectroBlitz
This drawing of a pony OC is the first in a set of three, I wanted to make the pose more dynamic seeing as the character is airborne, and also to take advantage of the glowing, electric mane. I'm happy with the results and colouring style, and finally found an easy way to draw wings, which have always troubled me.
Pokemon doodles: Sneasel and Ghastly
I wanted to try alternate takes in Pokemon in these drawings. Sneasel is a Pokemon that uses its sharp claws and high speed, so I wanted to reflect this in the art style by drawing all of the lines angular and pointy. The main difference is in the head shape, where a standard Sneasel has a rounded head, this one is almost a triangle.
Business Man
This character was just a pure doodle, I was trying a more lumpy approach to faces and the rest followed suit (OHOHOHOHO!)
Evil guy with swag
This character was a test to see if I could draw a style based on that of Mori's, who I'll be making a comic with in the near future. Commenters pointed out the sheer amount of style this guy had, so I gave him a "come at me" pose. His lab coat was originally intended to be white, but the use of complimentary colours on the red works a lot better to me, and adds to his sheer stylishness.
Self Portrait
Vampire Pixel has had a more cartoony influence on my art style, using basic shapes a lot more now as a basis. This doodle just shows a more up to date version of me with my new hairstyle, and shows me as the miserable bugger that occasionally does stuff.
Commission: Shadowzanon
This pony with a cake is a work in progress. The original idea was to have his character staring at a sweet shop, but we agreed on this collapsing cake for a more dynamic and humorous approach. I also got to play with lighting more, with the ominous shadow of the cake looming over the character's head. I still need to draw a bakery in the background, but we're both currently happy with the picture so far. I've still to create an animated loop using this character too.

[Drawing] Commission: Fairy

Today I started the day by drawing up this fairy character as a commissioned piece, it's something I've not done before, but I was told to base it roughly on the style of Veetoo from Vampire Pixel.

After using Veetoo as a base, I started on the rough wings, which were originally a lot more rounded before I settled with the sharper versions. I asked about the colour pallette to use and adapted that into the picture, adding more contrast around the face and head area and using lighter colours on the more delicate wings. It was requested that I did the wings in rainbow colour, so I used the pink base and made a gradient gradually fading in, rather than solid stripes.
To finish I added a pink overlay highlight to make the picture less flat, and increased the contrast on the main body to add a final bit of delicacy to the wings.

[Reflection] Anxiety

I've been full of anxiety lately over a few things, which was really starting to get to me the more and more I put up with it. Not only am I insanely worried about how my University work will turn out this year (I'm honestly expecting to fail catastrophically) but I'm also pretty damn worried about money and such too. To help counter the latter, I had a run around the internet looking for odd jobs and managed to gather some art commissions to keep me going for now, I've also got the first few bits of the next NBR animation done too, so hopefully I'll soon be able to cross financial worries off the list for a while. As for the university side, I literally keep waking up every morning and hating myself for not pushing myself more. That feeling isn't going to go away until I know how I've done, so I just have to deal with it for now and hope for the best.

[Drawing] Minecraft Teamup

As I posted in an earlier entry, I'm working on a Minecraft teamup picture with Jack, Will and Gary. A week or so into our server, we now have a substantial base and are almost ready to turn that into the background for our picture. Gary has also added in his character now, so the picture is nearing completion. Here's the reference:

Not pictured, my huge underground lab, I'll be showing this in the picture by adding in a Cthulhu style tentacle sprawling from the secret entrance.

[Drawing] Tek concept art

As mentioned in my previous blog entry, I'm working on a comic with my friend, Mori (Mori Illustrations) and we've decided upon a space themed idea. We thought up character types, and he's working on the hero character, while I'm working on an engineer, Tek. Each year I draw up my old character from college to see how my art style has progressed, and look at the current themes I'm drawing and this years Tek shows a more punky, take no nonsense attitude. She's closer to her original personality now, which is a moody technological wonder, far removed from the conventional female stereotype.
I also did a few hairstyle variations, cutting down the length from 2011 (down her back) into a half and half messy and down style to give some imbalance. Finally, I brought her to the future by adding glowing areas and making her goggles more high tech.

[General update] Back on yer' feet

I think not finishing my project this year has hit me pretty hard. We had a celebratory screening to show our work, and compared to the fantastic work I saw and have seen develop, particularly those of Will and Jack (shown below) I feel I've let our "trio" or sorts down. So after a week of moping, I've finally decided it's time to get moving again. I've got a huge list of projects I'm involved in over the holidays, and I feel I should really start the ball rolling again before it comes for me instead in an Indiana Jones fashion.

To do this, I need to remind myself that I do accomplish things, and this is where this blog can come in really useful. Even if it's just one drawing I do in a day, I'm going to try and post it here and talk about it. Don't take this as me scraping for content, I'm going to try and make each update worthwhile, I just really need to have more of them!

So back to the topic of work. I think it's pretty important that you see both Jack and Will's productions, they're truly outdone themselves this time, and I'm glad to have had the chance to help with them, even if it was just advice or an opinion in the production process. Jack and Will are two animators I've worked with in the past and it's great to see their takes on such an open project:

Will Padgett (Vallhemn) - INC

Jack Gray (CurlyPanda) - The Universe of Matt Miles: Cleaning

So now it's on to my work anyway, or more accurately, the future works I'm a part of. I'm just going to list these in brief because there are a fair few:

COMMISSIONS

Solrac Ventures: Episode 1
Working with Carlos Moreno to create the first full episode of his web show, Solrac Ventures. The pilot can be seen below:


Nick Basile Radio 3
I forgot to post up the second episode, but I'll once again be working with the guys at Nick Basile Radio and animating a section of their talk show:


PARTNER PROJECTS

Zictor Team Up
I'll be meeting with my friend Dave Novis (A.K.A. Zictor) at some point early in the holidays to plan a 2D/3D hybrid animation test and write some ideas. You can see an example of his work below:


Marauchettes Team Up
An old friend of mine with whom I made my first stop motion animation has thrown the idea of us making a collaborative comic in the holidays. I love the art style he's developed over the years and it would be good to team up once more.
http://moriillustrations.wix.com/mori

Crusaders

I finally have the submissions and a prospective crew to work on my community MLP fan project, blog at kreidcrusaders.blogspot.co.uk

I'm going to pick out a team and storyboard over the holidays.

PERSONAL PROJECTS

Vampire Pixel in the Neon City

Although defeated as far as Uni goes, I'm still dedicated to finishing this project. Ged Haney has offered to help with this process and I'm going to be making a small team of people to help boost the final project, including a sound designer, Dan Dunkley. 

Oddball: Chapter 4
It's been nearly a year since the last release, and I'm finally going to get my head back in the game and create chapter 4 of my 8 part series, Oddball.

So that's all for now, a list of the projects I have planned and confirmation that I'm still alive and kicking, and not just in my Minecraft induced coma.

[Drawing] Minecraft team up

With work over, I've taken a little time to relax and unwind from the crazy amounts of stress I've been under. In this time, Jack, Will, Gary and I have all been playing some Minecraft, so I decided to organise a joined drawing between us in which we draw our own characters from the game, showing our roles. In this particular game, I'm creating a mushroom farm in an underground lab, so I reflected this in a mad scientist like pose. Jack is also in charge of a potions shop, and Will is providing arms. We're still waiting on the drawing from lumberjack Gary, and once that's done, Jack and I are going to work on the background, showing our base.

[Drawing] The Mural

For this final drawing project, I partnered with Jack and Arron, who I've worked with on previous projects and know I can work well with. The goal was to create five characters each for a huge joined mural between the class, not too dissimilar from one of our early projects, which had us creating a view of a street with all of our contributions to the buildings and characters.
Before the big drawing started, we got a lot of reference poses through the use of life drawing sessions. A selection of these drawings can be found below:

 This sheet of Steve includes a face rotation, similar to that in the earlier sessions this year. In comparison to the start of the year, my facial construction has improved a lot and now has more consistency to it. For the poses below, we drew both a rough sketch and a five minute complete drawing. I kept finding myself more satisfied with the rough sketch at time, this may be because my OCD for detail didn't have time to kick in, so I was putting more focus onto getting the drawing down.

 Some more drawings from this session. This was one of my off days where I couldn't get everything down, and I was very dissatisfied with some of my drawings, particularly the one on the bottom right.

From our final session, we had a variety of poses to put into the mural, ranging from death falls to sneaking around. I didn't manage to get the full body across in these four minute sketches, so I focused on the key areas and gesture lines.
The next step was to plan out section of the mural. Jack, Arron and I all drew 5 poses each and I edited a test composition together in Photoshop, which can be seen  below:

There is a clear circle of action in this image, which allows the viewer to follow the motion, although Arron wasn't present in the first mural session, and someone drew in his space, so our original composition had to be changed in the final product. The characters I drew were wearing Roman Armour, which I researched online into different variant styles. Close-ups of the original paper versions are below:

The next step was to transfer these characters onto the mural. We decided to get in first and claim the right hand side of the picture. The lineart for the entire mural can be seen below, after being pencilled and Indian inked:

Due to the coordination being poor early on, there were a lot of perspective issues in the drawing, some people in the foreground were much smaller than background characters. After the first session ended, Will and I stayed behind to fix this issue by adding a cliff background, where platforms could be used to fix perspective issues. We also left a large space in the middle where a war zone was later placed in the background to add a sense of depth.
With the line art complete, the next stage of the picture was to coat the mural in a layer of charcoal and erase the light. We had multiple light sources to base this off, from a volcano in the background to a burning village behind my Romans. The final mural can be seen below:

To finish, here's a selection of photos taken across the creation of the mural:

To summarise, the mural went pretty well to me, I'm happy with the sections I worked on, including my own characters, helping decorate others and padding out the backgrounds. There were some hiccups along the way with perspective and shading issues, but I think I can say I pulled my weight in tying all these back together for the final project. This group project was extremely fun and rewarding to create, sure enough there were some silly areas in the mural, but hey, we're all cartoony folk, what's an arrow to the butt joke going to do along the way?
With the mural complete, I thoroughly enjoyed my Coke in a coconut.