Pics!

First post of the new year! Hope you're all keeping well.  These are a couple of presents I did for a few friends of mine for Christmas/Birthdays.

The first one is for a friend of mine who asked me one night to draw her a Panda. I was surprised how much a film like Kung Fu Panda had subliminally seeped a default Panda design in me, so when I noticed this coming through in my roughs I went right back to basics blocked out a tonne of new shapes, just really quick gestures. 

Best to keep everything crazy rough at the start so trying loads of new shapes and gestures is a good thing to do and it helps prevent you over working a drawing and falling in love with what should only be a preliminary sketch and never the final product. I always find that when the shapes/pose have been rushed and not planned out/experimented enough always leaves you with a product that lacks that special something and is usually riddled with mistakes. This is the longest part of my process. It deserves the time when this has been figured out the rest falls into place.  

This particular image was when I was playing with some dog-like characteristics and shapes with the Panda. I was told a long time ago that if you're trying to make an animal character likeable it really helps to add some dog in the design/character of the animal. It's something worth keeping in mind, it always helps me anyways. Here's what I came up with. His name is Peter Panda

 The next one is for my girlfriend, it went through a few iterations again. I knew immediately it was going to be a film noir style to it. I got to play around a bit with this one. The original pose of the woman in the pic I really liked but I kept on changing my mind about the environment. I eventually settled on the last. Got to play around with some new brushed in PS that I have been enjoying. I don't think I've gotten the best out of em just yet, but something is starting to click. This is Lady Fatale

One of the many iterations

Here's the Christmas card version

and here's the final one. My fav

And here's another, This is a Mouse Guard pic. David Petersen's Mouse Guard is class! If you haven't read it I recommend you do. This was a present for a few friends of mine ( They're married now so I can cheap out and get em one present :P Ha!) They have some great art hanging up on their wall and i thought that this would fit in with the rest of their original pieces.

Since they're a married couple I kind of liked the idea of couple of mice running away together and the scape of what is at a mice's disposal in these books is huge. I had a lot of fun working on this one too.  I find drawing a good set of wings extremely satisfying. Got to play with a few new textures in this one as well.

More to come soon getting to the other end of the to do list. Hopefully I'll have as much to blog nest time as well.

Snookered

Hellooooo,

I keep getting busy and leaving the blog idle, so I set myself a new goal. I'm gonna start blogging once a week, whether it's work in progress or fully finished pics it's going up. No excuses! The Internet knows no mercy and neither does my guilty conscience. Soooo I'm really gonna try and stick to this. This means 4 more posts before Christmas and I'm going to continue blogging during the holidays. So let's get started.

Almost as soon as I said that I'd blog once a week on twitter I immediately blanked! Perfect timing. I had nothing. What I was doodling was pretty dire and forced, I haven't actually had a block in a long long time just couldn't shake it off.

Yesterday I remembered that I started saving pics into an inspiration folder ( I hadn't used it in a while). It's full of stuff I thought was pretty cool and it inspired me, but I was too busy to do anything with it at the time so I kept the pic until I had some time to do something with it.  This was the pic I used a inspiration yesterday

It's Duffy. Something about this pic just really hit home and I was doodling ideas straight away. Much better ideas, stronger drawings ( anyone else think she kinda looks like a living Gwen Stacy? Just me? ).  So with Duffy in mind and a project I want to get off the ground next year with Gary Reynolds I drew this,

I'll get to colour this next week and I'll also want to draw something so there SHOULD be a couple of things on the blog by Friday 14th. See you all on the blog for them! Laters

Alright so here's the rest of this post, I started dropping in flats. This process usually takes me a while because I'm partially colour blind. But I have a umber of palettes saved for such an occasion. So I took from a couple of em for this one. This usually leaves me with a general early idea of whether the palette works or not. I probably spend more time on this than any other stage, other than thinking about what I'm going to draw. It's time well spent if you ask me.

This is what that stage looks like. I used to paint primarily in grey before I went to colour but now since I use a number of saved palettes i find it easier to paint with colour and cross reference that with a greyscale. I can then make changes in the greyscale or the colour version, whatever one I feel that I'll get the most out of at the time. Here's what that version looks like,

I think you can tell that in this greyscale I played around with a darker skin tone and black stripes on her top. Something about it just wasn't working for me so I ended up going right back to the drawing. I ended up taking out the dangling strap

I just wasn't able to see it in the colour version but when I brought it back to the line I really felt that the strap kinda ruined the whole flow of the pose. I was happy enough from this point on so I felt comfortable making any additional changes while painting.

Here's some flats with a shadow thrown in. The shadow just helps me see the shapes better when I go to paint it, just I know the kind of brush stroke I'm looking for.

The first thing I do when I start painting is always the eyes. If I get this part right I have the character set, I'm happy. If I feel near the end that it needs another touch up, it gets one. I think the eyes are one of the most important part of the pic. It's where people are going to look, if the eyes don't rest there permanently they are def going to stop for a second or two or slow down before they look at the rest of the pic. I'm sure we've all heard that the eyes are the window to the soul, so give em some time to get em right.

From here on it's all painting and texturing. Going back and forth with greyscale and flipping the image so I know It's all working the way I want.

So this is it almost there.  Pretty happy with how it's looking and at this point its pretty much going to look this way at the end. I always feel like sprinting to the end when I get this far, that's when it's time for a tea break/sleep and come back at it fresh so you don't end up spoiling anything. I'm still fixing things at this point and adding in stuff so best not to spoil anything important.

The Thong. I was referencing a pretty unique thong. I thought it looked fancy, everyone else thought it looked wrong or it had fallen down so best nip it in the bud and make the change. Here's a thong we're all familiar with. I think it was the right call, looks better for it.

This is it almost there. I put up some wallpaper, threw in a few more shot glasses and yes the pool balls actually say 69, Hi-Oh!!

So after a few fixes and the final lights put in here's the finished version, beside the all important Greyscale version I use throughout painting it. I think it lets you see how one informs the other

I ran this past my girlfriend Amanda last night ( If you're into make up and similar stuff like that check out her blog here ), funnily enough she said, "what if she had a black top". I thought that was kinda funny since I tried a black top early on in the process. I shrugged it off thinking it cluttered the palette, but I'm willing to try anything at any stage if it makes what I do better and did up a black top version. I think she may have been right, I honestly can't choose between the two.

More posts to come real soon. I'm hoping to get one more out this week and I'll have another one for sure on the blog next week. Trying to do a lot more with the blog from here on my friend Peter McNally is knocking up a load of great posts over on his blog and it's inspired me to do something similar. Check out his blog if you haven't before it's one of my fav's

 I hope you all dig this I'll do more like it soon, Laters