Tuesday, November 29, 2011

The Indoor Kids contest - getting bodies better

I find it hard to draw bodies in the correct proportions from my mind. It's probably why I tend to draw a lot of monsters and robots and things which don't have traditional proportions. I wanted the body shapes in this drawing to be a bit better than they currently are. What to do - what to do.

I decided to use some break time at work to take some photos of myself in the approximate poses in the sketch. I was able to use some of the props and costume pieces from the department, a tripod and a digital camera to capture these :





From there I erased out a bunch of the backgrounds, and imported the images into the current re-work of the original sketch.
I also changed the orientation of the sword arm on the left 'me'.



From here, I dropped the opacity of the photo images so I could sketch out the vague outlines necessary, with better proportions, with a tablet.



Better already !

It's going to be a little weird turning that left side 'me' into a armored sword-woman though.

Monday, November 28, 2011

Indoor Kids Contest - Sketch 1

A cool / funny video game podcast I listen to is having a 'do something cool for us' contest with Gears of War 3 things up for grabs. I thought I'd give it a go ( even though I have a bunch of other creative things I need to be doing ! ).

I did this initial sketch today while in a staff meeting. I've done another couple, but I think this idea is the best. It's only part of the overall idea ( though a fairly central part ! ), but it's a start at least.



The figures on the left and right of the door are going to be the hosts of the show, or as close as I'm able to draw them anyway ! The next step here will be digitally drawing in the line work. I'll keep you posted on how it's going. The entry has to be in by the 9th of December - so I need to get cracking !

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Dunesteef cover #1 - Uberman - more things / small changes

This thing is progressing like a glacier - small, but inexorable advances :

Some colour shifting on the main chassis, so that the 'hood' can stand out more.
Moved all the 'dial' and detail stuff up more.
Mask-layers out some of the upper pipes so they slot into the 'hood' thingy.
More details.



Still excited about how this is going !

Monday, November 21, 2011

Dunesteef cover #1 - Uberman - stage 1

Haven't updates for ages. For that I apologize to my legion of rabid fans.

So, I recently got in touch with the Powers That Be from the Dunesteef podcast ( which is really cool - and you should totally listen to it ! ) and offered to do them some cover art work, and they said yes !

I'm starting off doing some for past artless-episode, the first one for the 'Uberman' episode. It was a really cool story which had the Nuremberg interview of a Nazi super-soldier, who was being held in some sort of containment device - which was described as looking like a cross between a deep-sea diving suit and an iron maiden. That image really hit me - so I volunteered to do that episode almost right away.

I'm trying a very different style for this piece - more pieces of block colour, which I'll shade slightly later on. This is a very early stage composition :



As I said - it's at an early stage so far - but I'm excited at where it's going so far !