STUDY: Legend of Korra S2 sketches + TOONTALK

One of my favorite things to do on a lazy day is to just sketch while watching a movie or tv series.
The key animation on Korra is fantastic, so much so that I even ordered the blu ray so I'll be able to frame by frame it (also to support a product I love).


I also want to recommend a new podcast I've been listening to called TOONTALK! It's very similar to the "Animation Podcast", but that podcast has run a bit dry unfortunately. I would recommend you start with the interview with Jason Ryan.  There is a ton of great information and some general tips about managing your time for personal projects.

Headless Horseman Finished + Step by Step Process

As you could see in my post yesterday, I wanted to go an entirely different direction with this. I might have strayed too far from the topic but at least I like the result more.

PS: I don't know anything about motorcycles, so this might offend the motor enthusiast for lack of research :P

I originally intended it with some text, but I don't think I like it enough to clean it up:

BREAKDOWN

Lineart: I had to keep the lineart fairly sketchy due to time constraints (I only had the evening to do this drawing starting from yesterday's extremely rough thumbnail idea.)

Below a more clean thumbnail image and the rough pencils next to it...well, it's extremely rough but when the clock is ticking you just need to have a bit more confidence that you'll sort out the drawing problems during the pencil stage.

COLOR PROCESS:

Picked a very simple colorset as a base:

I then pick some colors and paint at 50% opacity, The colors I pick will blend with the base color, and I then colorpick the image to paint more detail with the brush at 80-100%. It's a way that works well if you know nothing about color like me.

Headless Horseman WIP 2

I reworked the drawing a bit this evening, unfortunately the line quality clashes with the more sketchy version from yesterday, The idea is that the silhouette reads as a headless horseman, but his head is buried in between his shoulders.

I was also shading but I lost sight of the bigger picture

Overall I still hate this image, so I doodled another idea which I'll try and do tomorrow, just revamping the headless horseman to a headless Motorhead-cycling dude. It makes sense in my mind.

Headless Horseman WIP

Been putting off this Sleepy Hollow Drawing challenge for a long time, it's just not something that gets me excited...but hey, I tried my best tonight and here's the result so far. Those shapes coming out of the ground are meant to be tombstones but no time to flesh it out more.

I kind of like the horseman, but everything else is kinda meh...the deadline is saturday night so I can either finish this one or do something completely different..we'll see what happens.

Lines:

Greyscale rough:

Thumbnail:

Some other thumbnails...it would be cool if Ichabod Crane would be hanging off a cliff with hell below him while the horseman and Ichabod's girl are making out...really, the story is that she just played with him to get the other guy to want her more, and they then scared him into an early grave by dressing up as a headless horseman.

I picked the thumbnail below because it was the least amount of effort to make it look good. I wanted to finish it in one evening, but clearly a bit too ambitious :P

I also drew this some few evenings ago ...I really hated it and didn't want to give it its' own post entry :P

Zombie Bull

This month I'll be spending more time animating, so expect to see less random sketches again. I do have a piece I need to do for that monthly forum challenge, the theme is the story of Sleepy Hollow so that should be fun. As a warm up I guess for that, I created a zombie Bull. The coloring was done pretty quickly and it's looking a bit muddy but you get the idea hopefully.

As you can see I am still trying to keep my lineart more simple and do the detail in color instead of lines. I think the result is more appealing.

Below the rough sketch and the stages of coloring.

Wolverine versus Danger Mouse + Breakdown

There is no substitute for learning under pressure on the job, without Boulder Media I would've still just been this guy who kind of can draw but just does a normal office job.

It's kind of cool to be in a situation now where I can start to think about future projects with the company (fingers crossed). One of their new gigs is Danger Mouse, the show is looking pretty awesome, so here's a DM sketch..oh, and I also drew Wolverine in the background if you look closely.

Thumbnail and lineart. I'm trying to force myself to draw simpler lines and then fill out the anatomy in the coloring..

This was my first stage of color, it's kind of easy when you're doing an existing design since you don't need to think about choosing colors that fit

Red Sonja: Ruff Concept II

Feeling a bit under the weather, my apt has become a fridge again with the sudden switch of weather so I think it might be that. Hopefully not coming down with a flu.

Still did a little sketch of Ruff who I drew yesterday, I think I'm quite happy with how he looks. He's only a secondary characters anyway...if you couldn't tell, he likes money.

Red Sonja : Rogar & Ruff concept

The 5 page sequential script has more characters than what the average full 22 page comic from Marvel has. So I'll have to design quite a few characters before I can pencil out the pages. Here are 2 secondary characters, Ruff and Rogar.

The aim of doing the comic is to give purpose to my figure drawings (on a side note, no reference used). I also need to figure out how much line I want to put down to describe form. On the drawing below I started quite simple but as you can see I started to get into a render mood on the little guy :P

This is how the little fella looked yesterday, didn't have that "little guy" feeling, but instead just a stompy giant.

Posh chick

This is based on a posh woman I saw today while out sketching.

Red Sonja and Wonder Woman

This is some sort of productive procrastination I guess, doodled a Red Sonja I liked, and it sort of gradually looked worse as I cleaned up :D

Even though the final result looks like a love child of Red Sonja and Ghimli (LOTR), I do like the coloring style. It's something that looks decent without me having to actually understand anything about color or painting. Line is challenging enough as it is! :)

This was a wonderwoman clean up from a sketch I posted a few days ago, I also painted this one...badly..that's why I experimented with the drawing above to go back to a more simple style of colors. The pose is also quite...meaningless. Can't wait to dig into my comic project to actually draw characters in context.

Red Sonja & Wonder Woman sketches

I'm prepping myself mentally to finally draw that Red Sonja sequential that I didn't get time for last month. I'm planning to do it the hard way drawing out the pages in pencil on an A3 pad. I'll then correct and ink in Photoshop.

Here's a sketch of my Red Sonja re-design for he comic on an A4 page with some red colorpencil for the hair...not sure if that works though.

While I was at it, I also drew a Wonder Woman, not very good though :D