Oh, Hey, More Pictures

Looks like it's time for another post.  Decided to try my hand at something non-human this time:

It's a dragon, of sorts, which, I hope, is obvious.  Not really much else to say about this one so I'll just move along to the next one.

This is another potential character design for another character for the Word Smith project, if I continue it.  I imagine that I'll probably end up changing the character's outfit as I develop my concept of who the character is and all that, but it's a start, anyway.

That's all for today so until next time,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Details, Details

Another Tuesday, another post, or that seems to be the habit.  To start off, we're going back in time slightly for the one drawing I skipped over in the previous post.

Trying to practice drawing objects as I see them so I decided to draw my (replica) katana.  The sheath is probably a bit short compared to the blade and the wrappings on the hilt actually have ten "diamonds" rather than the nine that I drew (should have measured things more carefully).  I also kind of fudged all the little details on the hand guard which I didn't feel like dealing with at the time.

For some further practice drawing smallish details, I scoured my apartment for some appropriate object and settled on the following:

One of the Argonath statuettes that came with my collector's edition of the extended edition of the Fellowship of the Ring.  The text is from the book which is different from what Aragorn says in the movies which has something to do with looking on the Kings of old.

Something slightly different for the final piece today.  I decided I wanted to get some practice drawing clothes so I stuck various outfits on some random characters:

Not being a fashion designer, most of the clothes were based on reference photos found via Google's image search (handy thing, that).  The only one that wasn't was the one in the top left which is just the sort of thing I tend to wear during the summer.  If the Word Smith's shirt was not partially covered by his jacket (top right) it would read "Grammar Rules" - pun very much intended.

And with that-
Freak Out,
-TFitC

Under Cover

Lets just jump right into things today with a potential cover design for my first Word Smith mini-comic:This was a fun one to do, though a bit time consuming (took about three hours). All of the characters from the first mini-comic (including the minor ones) are represented, though the titular Word Smith is only represented through his mask and, I suppose, the croquet mallets.

The next one sees the return of the FR characters that have previously appeared in the blog, this time for experimenting with various action-y poses.
The pose for Kyoujo (top one) I actually tried out in front of the mirror - it's doable, but not particularly comfortable. Both Gillin and Mordel have swords because, well, I like swords.

Next up is a close-up portrait of Gillin, which had the goal of trying to pay a bit more attention to detail than usual.
Turned out reasonably well, I think. The text at the bottom is her name - Gillin Eledhwen - written in Tolkien's tengwar script. For any tengwar purists that may stumble upon this, my no doubt idiosyncratic usage of tengwar is, ultimately, derived from my personal adaptation of it for writing english based on my understanding of how the script worked back when I was in high school and, I expect, probably varies somewhat from other more standard usages.

Anyway... for the last drawing today I'm going to deviate somewhat from my thus far standard practice of posting these in chronological order because the next drawing just fits best as a follow-up to the previous one. It should be obvious that my drawing style is heavily influenced by anime/manga. While I'm generally fine with that (I like the general manga-style look), I nevertheless sometimes think that I should try branching out now and then for practice and diversity and what not. So, I decided to try drawing one of my FR characters in a more realistic style. The natural choice was, of course, Gillin, since she's probably the one I've drawn most often:
Since manga hair tends to be rather gravity defying at times, it was interesting rendering her hair in a way that looked like it could be plausible while still recalling her original hair style. I'm not sure how well I succeeded in that, but it didn't turn out too badly. Also I think her eyes are a little too far apart. Overall, though, I was quite pleased with how this turned out. I may have to try this with some of my other characters in the future.

Well, that is all for the moment.
Freak Out,
-TFitC

Playing Ketchup

It seems I forgot to do a second art post last week. Oops! Oh well, that just means the queue has gotten a bit longer. So lets just forge ahead.

I've lamented more than once (and will likely do so again in the future) that I can't draw hands. And there's good reason for that - they're tough! Just look at them! Go on, take a look at your hands right now and wiggle those fingers. See! Hands are these amorphous things on the end of your arms that can take on a frightfully large array of configurations. It's really no wonder they're so tough to draw. Thus, I decided to spend some time practicing drawing hands:
These are ten configurations of my left hand because, well, I'm right handed and can't draw with my left hand (though trying that might make an interesting exercise in its own right). I will, no doubt, do further hand practice in the future since I've only just scratched the surface here and aside from the one hand holding the eraser, haven't even touched on hands actually interacting with things.

This next picture is a design for a character from another project that I might do something with one of these days (though I say that a lot). It's mostly just a slight update from an earlier sketch, attempting to make it a bit more dramatic.
She's in her "magical girl" mode since the project in question would be (mostly) a magic girl (mahou shoujo) parody, should I ever do anything with it. Only time will tell. (Though I keep thinking I should watch some more mahou shoujo anime to build a broader foundation.)

Last up for today is another drawing from my small sketch book. It was drawn to help me survive a very long and very boring meeting and, thankfully, I won't have to sit through another one of those for the foreseeable future.
This is The Pen from the Word Smith mini-comics in her fencing outfit. Of course, it looks a lot like her super hero outfit because it is, actually, based heavily on a fencing outfit anyway. Only drew the fencing mask in the one pose because faces are more interesting to draw than fencing masks.

And that is all for the present.
Freak Out,
-TFitC

Post-It Post

I thought I'd take a bit of time to talk a little bit about my PhD research. I'm currently preparing a poster to submit to an upcoming computer graphics conference (being held in Toronto this year) and, since my research relates to comics, I figure doing a comic-style poster would be fitting. Here is one of my drafts:I've done a few different drafts so far, but I think this is probably the layout that I'm going to go with. Take a look at it, hopefully it's relatively self-explanatory.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Cats Are Awesome

Yes, yes they are.Just a silly little thing I decided to sketch, and I don't think there's anything more that needs to be said about that.

Did some more perspective practice - this time a rendition of my apartment in one-point perspective. Didn't really feel I needed to get all fancy with two-point for my humble abode.
So, there it is, in all its cluttered glory. Drawing the perspective grid was a bit tedious, but turned out ok, over all.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Not A Yak

Once more, back to the drawing board... Starting today off with another two-point perspective piece.
This one was drawn in my small sketchbook (which I don't use often) and was faster than my previous perspective drawing, partly since there are fewer details. I ended up fudging things a bit around the vanishing points and the subway cars are too short (or too tall), meaning I should have spent a bit more time planning things out and/or establishing a scale before randomly drawing stuff. Oh well - practice!

For the next one, I decided to try drawing something else I don't draw very often: animals. And since I like cats I drew, well, a cat - not a yak.
The smaller one (not to scale) was closer to what I was actually going for.

The last drawing for today is of Mal Vandor (only his alias), the main villain from a project that I refer to as "the Kyoujo RPG".
This is, I think, only the second time I've actually drawn this character and I followed the original character design fairly closely, at least for this drawing. The main pose is a bit awkward - I think the spear should probably be held closer to his body and there's still something wrong with the back leg (I think), though it's better than the first attempt.

Anyway, that's all for now.
Freak Out,
-TFitC

Wining

I attended a wine tasting event at the Grad House on campus last night with a few of the other CGL students. While the event was intended to be at least partially educational, I mainly went for some cheap wine (not that the wine itself was necessarily cheap, but tickets were only ten dollars - a bargain!) And while I did actually learn a few interesting things, it mostly reinforced my notion that "wine tasting" takes itself far too seriously, in my humble opinion.

For the event, we sampled eight different types of wine - four white and four red. Some salad and bread was served with the white wine and some lamb skewers (tasty, tasty lamb skewers) with the red. We also got some port (which was very sweet - I liked it), accompanied with some brie and crackers.

We were provided some papers with the wine list on it along with some space for taking notes, ostensibly for recording our impressions of the wine, though mine consisted mainly of things like "tastes like wine", "yup, still tastes like wine" and "remarkably, this tastes like wine." My palate is rather underdeveloped (I don't drink wine very often). I used the "notes" section for drawing a few sketches which more or less summed up the evening:

Overall, with nine glasses of wine and some food for ten dollars, the event was quite affordable (putting those grad association fees to work) and fairly enjoyable - I'd certainly go to another similar event in the future. It was more than I usually drink in a two hour time span (and wine seems to have a higher alcohol content than most things I drink), so yay for public transit.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Fly You Fools

It's time again for another post! Yay! Or not, your clickage may vary. Anywho, as I've previously commented on my need to practice foreshortening, I decided to do just that by doing some practice on perspective and foreshortening in the human figure.
Of course there's still a lot of practice to be done, but it's a start. The numbers in the image simply indicate the order in which the different sketches were drawn.

The next image was inspired by some dialogue from The Lord of the Rings. I've been a fan of The Lord of the Rings for a long, long time now, though it doesn't seem to come up much on this blog. Anyway, Gandalf's words when he faced off against the balrog on the bridge of Khazad-dum had been running through my head for about a week or so (though I'm not entirely sure why) and I decided to draw a sequence of six panels inspired by that particular encounter.
Obviously, the character in the sequence is not Gandalf - as I mentioned, this was inspired by the scene in question and is not meant to be an illustration of it. I used the text from the book version of the scene, though the movie dialogue is fairly close - it drops the first "You cannot pass" and uses "shall not" instead of "cannot" at the end. The character above is actually one that I borrowed from a drawing in one of my older sketch books that was fairly close to the image in my head and saved a bit of time in having to come up with a character design. (Incidentally, the older drawing was labelled "mahou kiepu shoujo" or "magical cape girl", for the curious.)

And that, as they say, is that.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Have Some Perspective

Most of what I tend to draw is human(oid) characters, I don't usually draw other stuff like, say, scenery. This was one of the more challenging parts of doing my mini-comics - drawing all those things that I don't normally draw, especially when trying to use some sort of vaguely realistic perspective. So, I decided that I should try practicing drawing some perspective and other things from time to time:
The above is a drawing in two-point perspective. While I don't think that the perspective turned out too badly (given my relative inexperience in the subject), I clearly should not be allowed to design buildings and should stick with reference photos, at least until I get some more experience with these things. My reference for perspective is the book "Perspective! For Comic Book Artists" by David Chelsea. I didn't bother with the full construction for two-point, as it's somewhat complicated and time consuming, rather, I used some shortcuts for people who don't care so much about accuracy and just want something that looks reasonable. Even with those shortcuts, it still took me a while to draw - spread out over three days, though I'm sure part of that is due to inexperience.

The next drawing is another of my FR characters:
This isn't one of the characters that I draw very often and I didn't bother going back to check old sketches for reference since I don't mind exploring alternate designs for this character (though I don't think it's too different from previous versions). There are multiple things wrong with the pose - I was trying to work without a reference but, as will no doubt be a theme in this blog, more practice is clearly needed.

Last up for today is the above sketch which is a potential character design for a character that will show up at some point in my Word Smith comics, presuming I end up doing any more with those. Overall fairly happy with how it turned out. No other comments at this time.

And that's all for today. Hope everyone's brains are still firmly inside their skulls.

Freak Out,
-TFitC