"Oh look, it's Guy Fawks Nigh*VOOF*t... I mean Thanksgiving."
Partly this was down to the excitement of having shipped another game, and it being reviewed very well, and also being really really fun to play. Yes, I've played rather a lot of Saints Row: The Third recently. I only spent six months of so working on it, but it's hard to miss what I did.
Pretty much every ship in the game is something I built, as are a couple of vehicles. They all got touched by other people after I was done (and quite a few people when I was still making them, for technical aid and so on), but they're still enough of mine that I can point and say "I made that ship!". Anyway, enough excuses and prattling, I'm a month behind, we stuff to catch up on...
Free Sketching
Click to enlarge of course...
So you should immediately notice something different this time. get used to it for it is the way of the future. Basically, another reason I'd put off writing this post was that I couldn't face another month of organizing all the worst work of the month into an image for people to cringe at, so the showing the bad stuff is gone. Prepping these sketch images for online takes a while at the best of times, and since I'd drawn a ludicrous amount in October, and the usual percentage of it was bad I just couldn't face the workload, so I put it off. Eventually I decided I was never going to get around to doing any of it unless I just got rid of the fat, so it's gone and I'm making this post, so that worked. Showing the bad may come back in the future, but right now I'd rather post something than nothing.
With the bad gone I'm dividing the work up into whatever categories work best for a given month, so these are "free sketching" Which is really just a fancy way of saying "Doodles". No reference, very little planning, just sketching. This is what 90% of my sketching consisted of anyway.
I'm quite pleased with a lot of these, although you'll note the lack of full figures. I'll address that last further down, but there are a handful of them there, and they look reasonable. Of the portraits I'm happiest with the girl who's also the thumbnail for this post. In the main I'm pleased with the expressions I'm starting to improve at, with a range of emotion on display here rather than just flat and dull "waiting for the bus" faces. The princess in the top right has a bit of that, but she's a princess, they're supposed to suppress their emotions for the public. ;) I haven't decided if cat face girl is in Halloween makeup or if she's a hybrid. One is pretty hot, the other pretty scary. I'll let you make up your own minds.
Reference Sketching
Here we have the referenced work - drawn from life or photographs (mostly photographs). Actually I can't recall if I drew Iron-Man from a reference or not - I have no recollection either way. It's too good for me to have made up though so I must have.
The girl on the right was not in fact wearing that cloth, but I liked how it looked when I placed the images, so I left it.
I can't remember what I base some of these things on - they're usually very quick sketches while I wait for the kettle to boil and then I forget about them until it's time to scan them in. Not terribly professional, but am I charging? No I am not. :) The unhappy chap at the bottom is me though, for my facebook profile picture - I may have posted it before. Time I did another I think.
Figure Perspectives
And finally this is what I'm calling Figure Perspectives. They're not really figure studies since I'm not actually studying anything and the anatomy is weak at best. What happened was that I finished my old sketchbook and realised looking back through it that the vast majority of my good stuff was heads. I would quite often draw a half decent head and then decide to continue it only to muff up the perspective and ruin it all. On top of that my anatomy was middling to poor, so I needed to do something about it. Back, as the title says, to the drawing board.
So now I'm doing lots of these things. They're a bit like gesture drawings (that I've posted a few times int he past) but they take longer - the idea is to work on perspective and pose and then work on my anatomy more as I go along, but now with a reasonable grounding in three dimensional space. After that I can work more on lighting, which I've always been dreadful at. Anyway, expect to see a few of these from now on. I'll still be doing portrait sketches, but I need to move my focus if I'm to become more well rounded as an illustrator.
I didn't really do anything else in October, and I did less sketching in November (October was 15 pages of sketching, November only 5 or 6), so I'll get the sketching for November up ASAP. I did something else in November too, I don't like it as much as I had hoped, but others have said it's petty good, so I'll share that with you soon too. I've got more game assets to post as well - I'll get around to that eventually. Fingers crossed that the next couple of months go better than the last couple in terms of updates. My fingers that is, what you do with yours is your own affair.
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