So many commissions and I’m on serious burnout. This is kind of a sketch of my mood.
The world’s going up in flames? I really don’t have the energy to care.
I wanted to do a pic something like this, but I couldn’t think of a scenario to draw or a good pose for Sonic, so finally it just turned into “meh”.
I’ve been very “meh” about art lately. Burnout is a terrible thing.
I’ve dreamed up a couple of oddball characters lately, and I thought it might be fun to blog them. Second: to sketch them!
Anyway, writing follows.
Continue reading “Character sketches”
Someone commissioned me for five character pics, and prepaid for the lot of them, so I’ve been worrying about having nothing done on any of them.
So tonight I sat down and sketched them out.
Angry hero of Middle Eastern descent, glaring into a shot glass.
Female character having to chop onions while her “friend” is off having fun. Also, I’ve never tried to draw really curly hair before.
The “friend” the previous girl was resenting.
Twin Italian royalty guys. I get the feeling that they’re bad guys, but I could be wrong. I’m afraid they didn’t turn out very well, but I shall work on it.
Mysterious masked and armored bad guy with a SOWRD. And Asian-Samurai-Ninja-Chinese-Japanese-Korean armor. No idea what it really is.
All that in a couple of hours! I’m proud of myself. I’m only coloring them one at a time, though.
Back from a week without internet. It would have been nice, except I have commissions that I owe people, and it was annoying not being able to contact them about stuff.
In the meantime, I worked on our Spacetime Chronicles stuff. Here is the angel in charge of the cat-people planet.
This isn’t quite how I pictured her (less furry and more rawr I’ll tear out your jugular), but I was just doodling and doodling large cat faces is kind of fun.
This time I had a bit of fun with the composition.
Click for full size
I started off and just drew a long, skinny spiral. See, it starts from the guy, travels up through the tree, and curls around to the moon in the middle. Kind of oddball, but interesting (to me)! We’ll see how the commissioner likes it.
Somehow, it gives me very strong Hexwood vibes. Like, this is that cabin they build, and this is Moridon brooding about his past.
Except Moridon has a face like a skull. I ought to try to draw him.
Edit on the 12th: And here’s the blocked-in colors!
Click for fullsize
I stuck a blue-to-black circle gradient back there, then painted in some black trees and the tree-cabin. I used the Oil Paints > Wet Brush in Painter, which is probably my favorite brush for doing big smeary chunks of color.
Then I added the light sources and did some early shading on the guy to give him a little definition. I still think he has Mordion vibes.
Well, I got his skintones looking a little more natural, darkened his shirt, and spiffed up the plant. Getting close to being done, I hope!
Working on another commission pic, this time more of a portrait of a character. He’s the owner of the garden in this other pic, and he’s busy planting things.
That was the blocked-in colors. It got the thumbs up from my commissioner, so I went on with some more shading.
Painted all with the oil pastel brushes in Painter, with minimal blending. The trouble is, the highlights are too red and the shadows are too green and blue. Like, Frankenstein. (Frank-en-shtieen?)
I’m shelving it for the night because I can’t see how to fix it.
I have discovered the wonder of stamps and fonts. First, fancy stamps.
I needed some hieroglyphics for the background of my echidna palace pic. I snagged some photos off the Google image search, increased their brightness and contrast to leave only the shapes, and made them into custom Photoshop brushes.
Viola!
I had problems making them wrap around the pillars, but then found that I had grabbed one set of horizontal glyphs and the rest were vertical. So the vertical ones worked much better. See?
I was working on that Sean Connery pic, and I needed some runes. So I searched for “rune fonts” and found TONS. I grabbed an Anglo-Saxon rune font, typed the word “protection” and slapped it on my pic.
Except some of it got erased on top. Whoops. I promised my commissioner that I’d go back and fix it later.
But yes. Custom brushes, stamps, and fonts. They’re all a wonderful resource to make your art look better than it is. 🙂
K. M. Carroll, Author 