day 22: Victory!!!!

Seeing that I drew a character inspired by Kevin Sorbo’s Hercules, why not draw one that’s inspired by Xena the Warrior Princess.  Although she isn’t a viking, all I had stuck in my head was that phrase that Drama was known for in Entourage from his failed show Viking Quest, “VICTORY!!!!”  Maybe if I gave her an axe and a viking helmet she could pass off as one.

So if I run through my checklist of stuff you’d draw in jr high:

• girls - *check*
• swords - *check*
• that’s about it.

I think I can belt out a “VICTORY!!!!” for my inner teenage artist.

day 21: digital cleanup?

One of the many things I got out of my internship at Titmouse was learning how to use Flash as a digital cleanup/inking tool.  And it wasn’t an easy task by any means.  I remember cleaning up animation for one scene would end up lasting a month.  I used to joke around that after doing animation cleanup for the project I was on that I would be able to digitally ink anything.  And for anyone that knows me, I’m not known for having a clean line.

Anyways, while interning at Titmouse, I found out how much faster it is to ink digitally in Flash than Illustrator.  Thought I would take the time out to digitally ink my own art for a change.  I decided to add some tone so it wouldn’t look so bland.  That, and it’s really easy to do with the paint bucket tool.  There are still some parts I would like to fix with the value arrangement, but those changes aren’t destructive when it comes to vector art.  I plan on doing more digital inking on some of my designs, so look out for that in the future.  Cheers

day 20: the purpose of turnarounds

Turnarounds can be tedious and rather troublesome, but they do serve a purpose: It helps keep the character on model when you come up with action poses and expressions.  Seeing that my space alien got a set of action poses, why couldn’t this guy?  Since he doesn’t use weapons, how does he cause damage?  Those questions took me back to the days of Double Dragon, Battletoads, and Final Fight.  After that, I just got in the zone and went after it. And here’s what I came up with.

day 19: space alien action

I remember when I was showing my portfolio around last year and the one thing that everyone wanted to see was my space alien character doing stuff.  They thought the design was so appealing that it’s a shame that there weren’t any action poses of him to go along with the vector illustration.  I really don’t know why it took so long for me to do any more development on the character.  But nevertheless, after a year from the initial sketch, I finally got him doing stuff.

day 18: samurai warlord/prince???

A bajillion times better than the old design/idea I had from 5 years ago.  I used the old idea I had as inspiration and completely went free with it.  As you can see from the previous post, you’d would think that the general is the actual leader instead of the this guy.  I should remove the tears in the cape to make it more regal than battle-tested.

I could have removed the post-its in photoshop, but I thought it would be cooler to show some of my process.  I use post-its whenever I get too lazy to erase because it’s still in the rough stage.  It’s a trick used by a lot of traditional storyboard artists whenever they have to redraw panels.  And that’s all I have for show-and-tell.  cheers!