Free Sutff!

Me on the left, with Paulo(fellow CA) on the right.

So, I went to a little demo by Prismacolor at my campus book store today. At the end of it they had a drawing, and a bunch of my friends got cool free stuff(such as Paulo and his Warm Gray set in the picture). I didn't win anything, unfortunately :(

Luckily, I was in the convenient position of having brought my laptop along, and was showing a friend a marker render that I did, so that he could see what color the French Grays come out to. When Diana(the woman giving the demo) saw it, she decided to give me two marker holders full of markers, and asked me to e-mail her the pictures!

BOOYAH!! :D

Here are the pictures I had onhand.

More Norse

So, the day before we had a little sketch thing here. The assignment was to spend the hour drawing a design of a "space viking". I was stoked, since I was looking to do an actual Norseman as part of the previous character design bit. Unfortunately, I showed up for the last 10 minutes of the little event, because I got caught up animating in the lab. So I madly scribbled away whatever came to mind in light blue pencil, so that it would be easy to edit it if there was anything interesting to salvage from the rushed doodling.

Anyway, afterward I did a short little doodle of a more cartoony image of a space viking(below). Then did some scribbles, making a random robot shape or two.

Tonight I took a few minutes with the Space-Viking and quickly markered/inked it in. I really want to learn how to ink well enough that my fantastic inking can overpower the shortcomings of a drawing. This would make me most happy. I think I'm going to start inking up more of my drawings so that I can start moving toward this goal.

Still Life

I hate traditional still lifes. You know, the fruits/bowls and shit? I just don't understand the motivation to spend so much time regularly drawing mundane objects. I understand studying them to understand the structure, but this never seems to go under the "still life" designation. Those always appear to be called "studies", instead. It also seems that teachers never want to assign to go break down how chairs are built or something, instead I get an assignment to see if I can render value, with my subject being a bunch of mundane objects. I think that the issue is that I want to draw a specific thing. For example, don't tell me to draw a house, or some pears, tell me to draw THAT house. I suppose the core of my negative attitude is that they're non-descript subjects(which means they're very uninteresting and lacking personality), I have to do a strict render(which means I can't stylize and ADD personality), and that I feel like I've done enough of these to finally merit the opportunity to try rendering exercises with imaginary forms. Instead of all of these mundane subjects, how about letting me practice imaginary forms?

I know that the extent of my aversion to still lifes is uncalled for. But for whatever reason they just bother the hell out of me. I'm fine with the idea of doing a study to understand how to execute some object's look in a larger project.... but spending several hours doing a composition with such objects is somehow devastating to my work ethic. Granted, I still do it, though I somehow can't help but bitch and grumble :/

Basically, if I'm going to be drawing lifeless objects, don't make me do just 4 shots and spend hours on each, let me do quick breakdowns. If I'm going to be doing an intensive render, let me do it of a more interesting object, or let me add life and a piece of myself to it. Strict renders of simple objects don't let me do that.

Ragnarok Is Nigh!!

So, I sit here at almost 6 in the morning, working on designs for characters present at the Ragnarok.... posting up some in progress images, partly to keep myself in this habit, and partly to show others working on the same thing where I'm at.


First is a Frost Giant. I was originally thinking of Modi, but my understanding is that he was on the side of the gods(Thor being his father). Also, I have another little sketch that I feel is more in keeping with what I've read of Modi's character, this one's intended to be scary and menacing(part of my sketch for his face is in the upper right, where his big grin is visible).

Granted, Modi could be friendly to the gods and still be menacing. Reading into Norse mythos, it's pretty aparent why the Giants hated the gods. The gods were dicks. Still, the character in my mind is a little less visually frightening, so I'll see if I can get something done for him.


This is the above Giant's axe. I was thinking of naming it 'God Slayer', or something along the lines of killing the divine, or bringing about a terrible death. I'll ask my Icelandic friend if he knows of something fitting that I could use, along with appropriate symbols in the design. Currently there's a symbol that, according to some chart, can mean man or death. The triangle thing is a valknut. My thinking being that it bestows men with the valknut(knot of the fallen).
Jormungandm, The Serpent.
Still working on this marker rendering, bringing out the form. I'm implementing my nice new French Gray markers I got for christmas and my new large, chisel-tip Copic markers :D
The thing on the right of him is a possible tail, still haven't decided whether or not I want to put it on(hence my not having gone around that area yet). I was thinking of something slug-like when I began with this. I know the descriptions are of him as a serpent, but I was hoping to make it scarier by disconnecting it a bit from more conventional creatures. Having the teeth run all the way up the jaws would probably help make it look more menacing.... though i've markered in too far for that now. But I suppose when I start making digital variations, I'll try that out.This is another version of Jormungand that I did. I sort of think this looks cooler, but it's also more conventional. Personally, I think I could make this look good more easily. However, I'm going to stick it out with the other, in order to facilitate greater opportunity for exploration.

Enough chatter, back to work!

Perspective

So, here are two of my perspective drawings from the semester. I am still trying to build that accursedly difficult habit of uploading things regularly. I had to scan all of my life drawings for my final, but neglected to sift through for the ones I feel like posting. Also, I've sort of fallen a bit further out of the blogging habit. We'll see if I manage to stay more on top of it this semester.

So this first one was my final assignment. It wasn't really our "final", per se, since we only had a little bit of time left in the semester to do it. I think I went further than most people did with there's, taking the time to do some basic lighting with a ball point pen. Still, the structure of the building is all just whatever geometry I had the time to figure out properly and draw before I ran out of time. The giant dice falling toward it were sort of a random addition, because we had to have an object falling toward our 3pt construct. So I decided to have two dice throwing snake eyes at the building.

This one was our second 2pt project, which I neglected and just sort of rolled with this idea I got in my head. The building and any perspective I had to figure out is sort of dwarfed by the relative size of everything else. I got all into the idea of doing some sort of tibetan building up in the mountains, the result being this tower over a waterfall. Hopefully in the future I'll feel more confident with my digital drawing abilities that I'll be able to design a more interesting building, without worrying that I can't actually execute it.