Turn around bright eyes

I know I've been pretty bad about posting so far this year. In fact this is only, what, my second post? That's no good! I'm here today to talk about what I've been doing lately! As I said in my last update I've been steadily working on turn arounds for characters, starting with the characters that show up in the first five chapters.

I've got almost all of them designed now, body wise that is, and will soon be working on getting the outfits all done. My list was composed of thirteen characters (though most are very minor I wanted to have an idea of their looks, especially with the animal people) and I've gotten nine of them done so far. I've decided to work on everyone's figures first and get their basic body shape down, polished, and inked. Doing it this way will give me a solid, unchanging template to work off of when designing outfits, be they different ones for the main cast or getting the basic outfit down for the side characters.

I'm debating about which of these to share publicly, I know I won't be sharing the base figures of the majority of them, though some of the animal characters might be worth sharing. We shall see!

I've been busy with other stuff too, both the comic with Andrew Mann and preparing for a shorter project for an old client of mine Danny Stone. His project will be designing some backgrounds for a website so nothing that should be too overly difficult to complete.

OH and I've got a new website btw! I don't know if I've mentioned that before! I've updated the 'website' link but you can also just click RIGHT HERE

Rough Seas

It's been ages since I had anything that I could actually post. That isn't to say I haven't been working on stuff for the comic, just that most of it isn't share-able. Some of it will be at a later date but some of it will be very hush hush for a long time.

I've been incredibly busy as of late! One thing I've been working on is a comic with a highschool friend of mine, Andrew Mann, that the goal for is actual publication with a real company (Image) so wish me luck there, that could be really great for me career wise! 

I've also been commissioned by my (soon-to-be) father-in-law to do a painting for our livingroom.  He wanted me to do a nice painting of the Sea Minket and I'm happy to oblige even more so as he's paying for all the supplies and on top of that giving me a commission fee.

Anyway, since the painting is going to be rather large (16X40) I knew I should work out a composition and get color figured out before I start so here's what I have...

It looks pretty cool small, haha, at a larger size you can see just how quick and rough this is though.  The final painting will, of course, be much tighter then this and will be done in acrylics. I should be starting on it sometime soon. I just need to pick up the last of my supplies.

I'm working on some turn-arounds for characters that appear in the first few chapters. It's slow going right now as I don't always have time to work on them on top of the other things I'm doing but so far I'm happy with what I have and hope to get a few of them finished in the coming weeks and ready to share!

Almost the New Year

2012 is fast approaching and I'm letting you all know my goal for this year is to be much more structured and productive with my time. I waste a lot of it and that is BAD!

I have purchased a very beautiful and awesome day planner which I am going to use to track my work progress as well as to set daily goals/what I NEED to get done every day.  This should help motivate me, keep me on track as far as projects go, AND help keep my stress down. It should also, if I remember to add times in, help me figure out how long certain things take me to complete.

I've actually already started using it, the first date it had in was the 26th so I figured I wouldn't let the last days of the month go to waste.  I won't officially start my planning and plotting until the 1st though (I foresee the first 5 days being difficult though as Andy's mother will still be with us and that is somewhat stressful)

Anyway, I wanted to let you all know I'm not dead. I've even gotten a sweet new Wacom Intuos 4 (small) tablet which is a heck of a lot nicer then my old one to help me work more productively on the computer.  I will be continuing to do sketches for both the pirate and thousand projects and will be posting, if sporadically, what I get done.

This year may see somewhat less of my own stuff being posted though as I'm working on a comic project with a friend in the hopes of getting it published. That would be stellar for me so wish me luck and stars!

Long Time No See

It has been a long time since I last posted. It has been very nice not having the stress of posting every week hanging over me but I do feel a bit bad about it too.  To make up for it have a giant sketchdump!

 

Not everything in there is pirate related, there are actually a number of pieces relating to my NaNoWriMo novel, The Thousand. I've been pretty busy with that this month! I'm about halfway to the 50,000 word goal, not too shabby!

The bottom most image is a sort of half-fan art. I've been playing the new Prof Layton game, Professor Layton and the Last Specter and it comes with a fun little side RPG called London Life where you make a character and run around helping people to earn happiness and wealth. This is the outfit I run around in most often XD

If this dump is too small to see head on over to my DA where it is posted a bit larger: DA VERSION

No Post

I am going to take a *hopefully* brief hiatus. I've been having some anxiety troubles recently and think I might just need to take a little bit of time not worrying about making a post every week. 

Sorry folks, just not feeling up to it right now.

Rayearth

This week went by far too quickly for my tastes. I feel like I haven't gotten anything done (I suppose that's normal for me) but I do have a few odds and ends to share...

In a few short weeks my friends Sarah and Eva will be visiting us! In my looking forward to this I decided to do a shot of Bluu, Belle, and Nadine all together (because Belle is loosely inspired by Sarah and Nadine loosely by Eva)  For some reason it's also become a Magic Knight Rayearth inspired work, hah. I finished the linework on Wednesday night and I had hoped to get the flat color finalized Thursday but, alas, I spent much of the day sick in bed reading.  I still have a long way to go with the flats on this, especially with Belle's colors. They just aren't clicking with me right now. Also, that blue background is there to make sure I didn't miss spots coloring the very light areas. I don't know quite yet what I'll do with the background.

To draw this I mocked up a reference image from three stock photos:
Sailor Dagger 5 by SenshiStock (I picked this one because I liked the pose and thought it would be a good challenge)
Sailor Gun 17 by SenshiStock
Sword Fighter 4 by Sitara-LeotaStock

I tried to pick slightly more dynamic poses then I usually do. I'm especially happy with how Nadine came out here as well as the faces of all three.

Also this week I found a silly, but fun little game on DA... Generalzoi's Pony Creator and Andy and I made a bunch of ponies.  I am not ashamed to say I watch the new My Little Ponies: Friendship is Magic series...it's super cute and I really love Lauren Faust the creator. She's just awesome.

I started with the crew and he made some of the gods... you can probably guess who is who for at least some of these. I even went and designed them 'cutie marks' haha.

I think that might be it for the ones I'd say people could guess. The rest of these were designed by Andy and I don't know if anyone will know who they represent...

(she was actually re-designed by me because he didn't save her the first time! But this is pretty much what he picked for her apart from maybe the cloven hooves)

That was a lot of ponies, I know. It was fun playing with these though and I thought it'd be good to share them with people since they're sorta adorable. I did ones of me and Andy as well but I don't know that I'll share them here. Perhaps on my personal blog though.

I really enjoy little games like that, they're fun to mess around with.  I didn't do 'cutie marks' for the rest of them because I wasn't 100% sure what to do with them, hah. Maybe I'll go back and finish them off though, not like it takes more then a few seconds to do after all.

Hopefully next week I'll have more stuff done. I have some gun concepts floating around in my head that I'd like to do (just need to go through my weapons book and pick the right base gun to go off of) and I'll post the sketch work that went into developing the Rayearth piece as well.

The Eyes Have It

Finished one of my freelance projects this week! Yay. Getting money is a good thing.  Haven't done too much comic related stuff though. I have done some personal stuff (mostly writing) but only a few images to share this week...

We'll start with the traditional sketches

This isn't really related to the comic whatsoever! This is just me using myself as reference trying to draw realistically and then stylized.  Drawing from a realistic image changes my stylization a bit I find.  I'm pleased with the stylized profile, that's my favorite of these.

Also, I hate how I look without my glasses and my stupid, crooked nose is a pain to draw.

I decided to practice eyes! These are the eyes of the girls (ran out of room, sorry Andrew!) I can tell who is who but I wonder if anyone else can?  It's interesting that there are a few expressions that can be recognized only with the eyes but so many of the others can't be.

Drew this on the computer Thursday night. For some reason recently I've been in a wintery mood. I think I just miss the seasons and I find myself missing cool weather (not snowy!) and the clothes that come with it.  Don't you just love my phoned in background?

I'll try and have some more fun stuff next week!  I still have a couple of things to finish and am just trying to find the time between Freelancing and Zelda playing (I'm not addicted to Zelda...really.)