Undead X-men Finished Inks

I finished the "inks" on this piece and will move on to coloring now, might as well try to get it done today. All I can say is that I definitely learned a lot, but I am still not quite good enough to do something like this well. But of course the only way to get better is to fail...over and over again :)

This is probably the final composition with BG (the sky and moon will be painted). The biggest problem I think is that I draw each character individually instead of considering the composition as  whole. I will try to unite everything together with colors though.

Some of the characters look quite good on their own:


I think Wolverine looks cool-ish, should just fix up the way that hand with the claw goes inwards a bit too much.

Colussus could look cool as a stand alone pin up stype drawing:

I think Cyclops and Jubilee are easily the weakest, and they were also the most difficult because of the forced perspective.

Rogue was super easy to draw, even though she takes up a very small portion of the composition :(

EDIT: I deleted the previous post with my WIP update, since I like to stick to just 1 post per day. Anyway here is the ROUGH pencil which I inked. If you look back, you'll see I trashed the first pencil rough I did.

Wonder Woman heads + The Secret to becoming a great artist!

I've really been quite serious lately about progressing as an artist, and I've been putting in quite a lot of work in expanding my technical knowledge of the human figure. But to truly "master" the human figure takes decades...yet there are fantastic artists out there who are barely 20. Does this mean they are masters of the human figure/ perspective / light & color theories? Well of course NOT!

so..here we go, I think the secret to becoming a great artist is....
To draw from within. I think the technical knowledge is really just a reinforcement of you as an artist. But the artist is already there, you need to be able to trust yourself and draw from a place within you.

When I think about my own "career" as an animator, I don't have an extensive knowledge of the principles and tricks of animation. I really just animate to what "feels" right, "feeling" is not a science...but if you can tap into that, I think you'll get a response from people who watch your work. Because when the regular bypasser looks at your artwork, they didn't study anatomy either...but they can tell if something "feels" wrong.

So anyway, keeping that in mind I tried to "feel out" this evenings head drawings (without reference). I'm not going to say they are perfect, but they definitely feel a lot more natural to me. The big difference was the thinking process when putting down that first line.

If you start of from a technical idea, it could be something like this: "Ok, I have a piece of paper. I am going to construct a head using the loomis template." This will most likely end up being a stiff drawing, while if you trust yourself with that knowledge and just feel out a head....you get something like I did below.

While I still used the "loomis" template. I didn't "think" about it, I didn't measure distances. You can see it's more scribbly and organic than yesterdays' one for example.

Of course..there are no secrets to being an artist, I think most importantly..enjoy yourself, nothing is worth doing if you don't get any pleasure doing it.

Wonder woman heads

Just wanted to draw some heads from imagination (no reference) using the Loomis template..or at least what I remember from it :P That head on the right is completely wrong, the brows are pushing in to the eyes, that would only happen with extreme foreshortening.

So I ignored that wrong head and just did 2 different versions of the first one. Wonder woman is a strong female character, so I tried to push that jaw in the 2nd and third one, but had to reel back in since it was looking too much like a man.

Just for practice sake I slapped on same greytones. I'm considering getting a new sketchbooks to just draw heads in, from reference and memory.

Earlier this evening I also took the time to explain a few things I do when I do my quick (2 minute) gestures in Photoshop. I actually write these things so I can go back to it myself if I feel stuck, but I'm sure someone out there might find it useful as well. --LINK

Undead X-men : Stage 2 - Rough pencils

First of all a big thanks to a user called Veritas71 over at penciljack.com who suggested the below change to my thumbnail . He really took it one step further, and it really feels like we're properly in a  grave now.

I also started my first rough pencil pass..it took me a while to get started because...it's hard..haha! No reference used...you could only really reference this by using a 3d package like Poser, but I'm only doing this to test my ability..no shortcuts!

I'll go in again for another round on Thursday most likely

I did quickly critique myself for some change that need to happen:

Undead X-men : Step 1 - thumbnails

I haven't really done any creative drawing for a good while, that's because I'm quite content putting my creativity in my dayjob (I can't really call it a job, I call it free education). I've been using my off time to study and develop some fundamentals (drawing the figure mostly). But it's also fun to put your skills into practice once and a while.

So I've joined a forum for amateur comic artists that hold monthly drawing challenges called penciljack. I used to participate in those, and I think most of my "illustrations" have been done for those monthlies. They have a league set up so you go up against another artist and the community votes on the "winning" piece. As you get more wins you move up in the league. Sounds fun? Well, feel free to join in! The forum is over here.

Anyway, I normally just draw whatever first comes out of my head, but I decided to take a more professional approach and really try to push myself and who knows create something I can be proud of :P

I had to pick the theme so I picked Undead X-men. I actually had the idea that there is a mutant with the ability to summon dead people. But doing this drains his own life force. He himself is very weak, so he summons dead X-men to fight for whatever he'd need fighting for. I think this could be a neat idea for a one off issue of X-men. Who knows, maybe I give it a go at some stage.

Anyway I did a couple of thumbnails but I really liked the first one the most, I also liked the warped perspective in the one below that, but not only would that be hard to draw, we wouldn't see their faces..which I think is quite important to engage an audience. So I decided to merge the two ideas together. It's really like they are looking down into the ground, maybe another mutant that has just awakened.

Couple of heads

Wanted to practice drawing some more heads from imagination, specifically in 3/4 looking up and down....heads are...difficult to get right...

Figures from imagination

Figures without reference. This time I took a gesture from one of my 30 second gestures as a base to build a figure on from imagination.

First one wasn't great. I realise that I've been drawing too many females, so I had a hard time trying to figure out that midsection between hip and torso.

Second one is probably my favorite attempt so far, especially from the waist down. I also worked on a larger resolution which is why the lineart looks a bit more pleasing.