Bastille vs. Birthdays

 

It's that time again! That magical time of year that's somebody's birthday. For this year, I drew the character Bastille from the Brandon Sanderson series Alcatraz Versus The Evil Librarians. Specially, this is an image of her from the final book in the series, based on one of the covers. To anyone who hasn't read it, I can highly recommend the whole series. I did some exploration of what I wanted the drawing to look like before I tried the final product. It took some doing, and I could have made it even better, but I'm proud of how it turned out. 

God's will be done. God bless you. Yes, you specifically.

Better Spider-Man Drawings

 

 

Today I drew a lot of Spider-Man drawings. So in this post, I'm going to do something different where a few of the newer drawings come before the older ones, mostly because they look nicer. So in class this morning I was drawing Spider-Man just because I realized I hadn't really drawn much of him in a while. I was recently looking over some of my old sketches back when I had no idea how to do foreshortening, and it was very obvious. So I wanted to draw him more now that I'm much better. 

So in class, obviously I didn't have anything to go off of, but when I drew the pictures immediately above and below I used references. Strange, I know. Obviously it helped. I discovered most of Spider-Man's legs are blue, which is genius in a way. It makes his design a lot better and is much easier to draw.

I had a hard time deciding how to draw Peter. Originally he was bigger than this. I wanted his shirt to be loose enough that he could realistically hide his muscles underneath, but I still wanted him to look skinnier than he is.

So the drawings above and below were the ones I did in class this morning. Obviously, they have much better form than a lot of the Spider-Man drawings I've done in the past. They do, however, have patterned pants rather than the classic and simple blue from the actual design.

Poor Octavius looks terrible in this drawing. Still, it's better than some of the drawings I've done of him in the past. I like Spider-Man's expressiveness here.

I really wanted to draw Mary Jane. She's really fantastic in the comics I read as a kid. You can clearly see the inspiration from the Into the Spider-Verse design, which I think is a great design.
 

Overall, I like the picture above. I like the motion lines on Spidey and the idea behind the drawing. Somehow I managed to make both swinging drawings of Spider-Man have the wrong foot/arm correspondence, so they look awkward. The wrong leg is swinging forward in both of them. Ugh. It still looks pretty cool.

I was worried when I drew Black Cat that she would look to much like MJ, but as I was exploring her shape language, she just came together on her own. I'm actually really happy with this design. She really looks like she's up to something. I was going to draw another drawing of her and Spidey swinging through the city, but I wanted to make sure I had enough time to post this tonight. 

I realized halfway through drawing these that I should switch off of lined paper because I wasn't going off of references anymore. Also, apparently this is my 200th post? So that's fun. 

God bless everyone. Stay safe out there. I love you God. Thank you for everything. God's will be done for all of this. Amen.

Inspired by Sweet Carole

There's a new game coming out called Bye Sweet Carole by Chris Darril with an art style inspired by Disney's Silver Age. Anyway, I really like the look of the game and the aesthetic/premise. So I drew some art with screenshots of the game as references. Then I drew the two drawings you see above taking what I learned from that exercise. I still have a lot to learn, but this was fun. I'm slowly being able to draw lips without them looking weird and gross.

God be with me. I love you. God save me. Amen.

Sleep and Remember

 Today in class I did more of the same drawings. I was thinking about the upcoming game, Bye Sweet Carole. I really like their Disney-inspired art-style. So I figured I would take a stab at drawing something like their main character and then go home and see how different my drawings were from theirs.

I wasn't satisfied with the first drawing, so I tried to do the lips in this drawing. It's funny, the way I drew here hair reminds me more of Miriam from Dreamworks' The Prince of Egypt. I'm not satisfied with these lips, but it is nice to know I can draw something that looks okay. 

And then here we have an unrelated drawing just for fun. I was actually very happy with how I was able to do her eyes and head-shape. See how the irises are made up of little dashes instead of a circle?

God be with me. Lord's will be done. I love you. Amen.

Tilt

 

These are some more drawings from class today. I'm still working on drawing women. The above picture was an attempt to copy a similar drawing I've seen without looking at it. I did not get it to look like the original. Also, the eyes need more symmetry. At least it has a good sense of depth. I've been bringing my regular notebook to class, which is why these are on lined paper.

For the picture above, I was trying to see if I could do a pose like this and if I could correct my issue with knees in one of my previous drawings. I also tried to put more effort into her clothes and the folds of the clothes than I usually do. Overall, I'm happy with the result. The arms are slightly off proportion with one another.

I drew this drawing based on a pose I remembered Hobie Brown making in Across the Spider-Verse, the film. You should see it if you haven't. Everyone who's seen it knows how incredible it is. I think it's actually made people feel like they don't have to say anything about it. They think everyone already agrees how good it is, so word of mouth doesn't spread as much as it should. 

Anyway, because of the pose she was doing, I wanted to put more effort into her clothing as well. Someone told me a while ago that my characters drawn here need more personality. Kay. So I gave her distressed jeans. I despise distressed jeans. Distressed jeans are one of the dumbest creations of humankind, which is saying something. It really bugs me when I can't find any jeans in the store that don't have an ugly white patch in the middle of the thigh for no reason. Anyway, so that's why I gave this character distressed jeans. Originally, I wasn't going to do anything for her t-shirt. But after some thought, I decided to go with something simple and straightforward.

God be with me. God help me this year. Help me to get everything done that I need to get done. I love you. Amen.

Human Study

 

More practice working on drawing people, hands, and drawing people from a worm's-eye view. I think I was able to capture the perspective much better in this drawing. I'm also getting better with drawing hands. I've been having to model and remodel hands in Blender for a project I'm working on. So, I think that actually helped a lot with figuring out how hands are supposed to look.

I've been reading the Three Body Problem series by Liu Cixin, also known as the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. It's a really great series. I had some time in class, so I decided to try to draw my imagined version of Luo Ji, the protagonist of the second book, The Dark Forest. I wanted him to look older, like he's supposed to be, without making him necessarily unattractive. It took some playing around with different lines, but I finally got it to a point that I'm happy with.

 

 I drew this Spider-Man drawing as a test to see how much better I've gotten with posing from imagination. Answers were mixed. I should push this pose more.

 

Simple practice drawing. Just a regular person. The hands look a little better than normal, however. 

 

This is actually a redrawing I did now that I've got a better handle on perspective and anatomy. I might want to draw this again at least a third time someday-- but not today. 

Usually in my drawings I default to male anatomy because that's what I'm most familiar with. Recently, I've been trying to get better at drawing female anatomy, with mixed results. The above pictures is of the first Batgirl from DC comics. The proportions are a bit off, but I mostly like the pose. I also like how much of her expression I was able to convey even though the drawing is pretty tiny. Her left leg should be rotated out. Right now her knee is bending at a weird angle.

 This was the last drawing I did in class today, and it shows. My hands and "eye" were all warmed up. I was better able to catch some mistakes I made. I had to redraw the hands a couple of times, but I'm pleased with how they turned out. Drawing the figure beforehand definitely helped.

God be with me. Help me to be with you. Please help me to improve and do what you want always. I love you. Amen.

Superman and Bizarro Animatic

 

 

So now I drew out an animatic of the rough boards I did for this concept before. This is a short video as a proof of concept for a short animation. Everything was done in Blender, except for the audio which was recorded and edited in Audacity. The silhouettes are made up of symbols so I could animate them that way. The drawing and voice work is not my best, but I think I managed to improve the audio quality significantly compared to my previous videos. Ultimately, this was meant to be fun and to teach me some things about Blender. 

I definitely learned a lot about how to do things in Blender. I understand materials, grease pencil, rendering, and audio a lot better. I'm much more comfortable with the program and with digital drawing. Overall, I'm very happy with how it turned out. I plan to revisit this in the future and animate and color it.  

God be with me. Lord's will be done with this project. Thank you so much for helping me to get this done. Love you.

Sailor Moon Inspired

 

So I recently became a fan of Sailor Moon. I'm enjoying the series so far, but I also saw Spider-Verse recently, so I couldn't help but wonder what Sailor Moon would be like in a more American-style, streamlined superhero costume. I did some experimentation with the design and I landed on something like this. Most of the doodles will probably never appear on this blog. 

I tried to keep elements of her design in the costume. Originally it was much more complex. I played around with the mask style before deciding on incorporating her bow. I also made her moon symbol much more prominent.

I wanted to somehow keep part of Usagi's iconic hairstyle even if it was just partial. So the above image is experimenting with her double buns. I looked up some reference pictures from real life so I could reinterpret the buns instead of trying to copy the original art style. While I think that the perfectly circular buns are aesthetically pleasing, they wouldn't have fit with this art style. So I tried other styles.

This is a doodle I did at work. Here, her chest symbol is more pronounced and the arms are less complex. I also forgot to fix the legs. I could've gone back and done them, but oh well. It's just concept work for now. 

This is perhaps the image I'm most happy with. I didn't get the pose exactly right, but I'm still proud of how this turned out. 

God be with me. Lord keep me safe. Amen.

Janet Again

 

Today in church I redrew Janet from Abbess Janet (my short story) in pen. This time I got the proportions wrong, but I like what I experimented with. I was practicing line confidence with the pen, since I couldn't draw the outline underneath first. And I practiced with folds and varying line widths. Overall, I'm very happy with how it turned out. 

God bless you all. I love you, God.

Messy Batter

I wanted to sketch an image in my head for fun. It was inspired partially by the indie game OFF and the anime Paranoia Agent. I first discovered OFF through this wonderful series of animations. I was looking up images of bats that have been dented or broken, and I sketched this one really quickly. 

I've been so focused on improving lately I haven't really done anything super loose and fun. Thinking about the art style of OFF reminded me to do that. I like how the cross-hatching makes the character and the bat look dirty. I was imagining this character using the bat to fight internal demons and things. But I don't know what kind of story that would be. I'll keep it in my head.

God bless everyone and keep you safe. I love you, God. Amen.

Superman and Bizarro

This drawing is a redrawing of the one above with different perspective. I wasn't satisfied with the perspective of the first, and I'd forgotten to use my forms.

You can see I redrew Bizarro's head because I didn't like the pose of the first one on the right. It looked too much like I just spun the head instead of it turning.

This series of pictures is inspired by Scott Lobdell's version of Bizarro, the imperfect Superman clone. I imagined what it would be like for Superman and this new Bizarro to meet. So I drew some character interpretations and drew out a rough storyboard. I could polish this storyboard up, but since it's mostly a reference for me, I figured I'd leave it. The smaller images would be in silhouette. 

In explanation of the storyboards here, this would be Superman and Bizarro meeting for the first time. Superman notices that Bizarro is different from the other Bizarro's he's met (the evil ones), but Bizarro mistakenly thinks Superman means "you're different from me." Because this Bizarro wants more than anything to be like Superman.

Lobdell's Red Hood and the Outlaws is one of the few modern mainstream comics I respect. I know that sounds pretty harsh, and I guess it is. I owe them some respect because at least they've published something and I haven't. That takes guts and hard work. Anyway, if you're interested in reading a bit about the series, this website makes a good case.

https://thecomicvault.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/how-red-hood-and-the-outlaws-makes-you-care-about-bizarro/

I really like this version of Bizarro. Anyway, I hope everyone is doing well.

God's will be done. God bless us all. I love you. Amen.

Kanna Endou Take Two

 

This is my second go at drawing Endou Kanna from 20th Century Boys the Manga. This time I used a reference from the manga as well as my tapered lines. Then I went back over the drawing with my mechanical pencil. I still got her proportions wrong and I should've used my mechanical pencil for some of the finer details like her mouth and eyes, but I'm pretty happy with this technique. 

God's will be done, now and forever. Amen.

Tapered Lines

 

So today I was practicing gesture drawings, and I decided to look up what tapered lines are because I've heard that they're important. So I learned what tapered lines are, and I drew Jin from Avatar: Last Airbender with them. It's not a terrible drawing. I need to practice this more. 

Happy Sunday, God. I love you. Have a great day.

Vacation Drawings

 

 All the images I did on this post were during my most recent vacation. The two images above were inspired by thinking about medieval tomb raiding and the dangers of toxic gas inhalation. So I drew the characters with medieval clothing. I've also recently watched a video about how to fake detail, so I tried to practice that on the background of this picture. I didn't get the perspective of the coffin exactly right.

Swordsman with gambeson. The perspective of the sword is still not as good as I want. I'm going to need to do some studies.

The above image was inspired by Akira. I was having a hard time with eyes that day, evidently.

Thank you God for everything. I need you all the time. I love you. God's will be done for my art. Please help me to get better. Amen.

Blind Drawing

 

I did this drawing a few days ago with my eyes closed. I opened them a few times to check my progress, but almost all of the actual lines were done blind. Charmingly, it looks like how my drawings used to look when I had my eyes open. There's something nice about that. It's nostalgic. 

Something else funny is that it looks like I have more line confidence with my eyes closed than I do with them open. I might need to practice this more in the future. 

God be with me. Lord's will be done. 

Gesture Drawings Again

 

I usually don't like gesture drawings, but today I woke up with a hankering for them. I actually liked these better than some of the ones I've done in the past, so I thought I'd put them on here. 

You may have noticed I went back to lined paper today, because gesture drawings don't deserve clean paper.

God bless everybody. God's will be done. Amen.