Somehow I'll Make a Man Out of You.

Oh my gosh. STOP EVERYTHING.  I finally figured out how to draw his face+hair so it looks masculine enough. *tears of joy*

It's all about the cheek bones and the chin! >_< Why did I not realize this sooner?! I went back and edited the sketches I did of his face a few days ago ( X ) to try out this new face shape and hairstyle. Massive improvement, I think...

I feel like years and years of drawing him looking too Asian, too girly, too Elven, and/or too alien have finally been resolved! *celebrates*

Credits for the textures:
"Cracks Texture 01" by ftourini
"Josephine Knot Border 3 Units" by SirenDragonFire

Since we're on the topic of manliness, what could be manlier that My Little Ponies: Friendship is Magic?

All of my closest friends are huge MLP:FiM fans.  A silly late-night chat on Facebook led us to deciding Vahaadi and Flint need to take part in this cultural phenomenon:

"How to Spot a 'Bro'ny."

Slap-dash sketch in pencil + slapdash Photoshop shading. You know, normally I hate the use of the term "gay" as an expression of disgust, but the irony was too funny to pass up. Vahaadi just can't get into this My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic stuff.  SULK FACE ACTIVATED.

New and Old

You'd never guess by the lack of updates, but I've been drawing pretty much every spare moment.  Unfortunately, most of the things I'm working on are long, complex projects that will hopefully end up looking nice--but in the meantime, they're tedious. However, I have a couple doodles for a character design I can share...

( click to see full size, the thumbnail is really blurry DX )
This is an original character of mine, named Thystle.  She is a Huldra, essentially a troll from Scandinavian mythology, with a few liberties taken.  She's been straying around in my mind for a very long time and has a very important role in my story, but this is the first time I've drawn her whole body! This pic was inspired by the work of Kasai on deviantArt, who draws really lovely full-figured women with lots of motion.

Here's a turn-around I did to show Thystle's hair. I'm really proud of this! I've been struggling with Thystle's design for far too long.  I kept wanting to make her very complicated, especially in her hairstyle, so that she'd be distinctive, but finally I told myself that if I don't keep her shapes simple I'll never want to draw her. (fail, I just realized I misspelled "entwine" in my notes. /lame )

Here's a sketch page showing an earlier (thinner) design for her face and hair along with some other notes of her characteristics.  Most of these carried over, but I decided to make Thystle more solidly built and her facial proportions changed.

Thystle is in fact based on a much older character of mine named Dawn from a project called "Delay of the Sunrise." She was originally a centaur, and there's a high possibility she was inspired by Elora (the faun on the far right) from an old Spyro game that I never actually played, but I recall seeing LC's friend Jackie play the game over ten years ago and I guess I was really enamored with the design at the time. Looking at the pic of Elora now gives me a headache! Man, video game graphics have come a long way... I digress! Point being, Dawn is a super old character but one of my favorites so, while her original story has died, she's been revamped. For my amusement (and possibly for yours?) I dug through my archive drawer and exhumed all of my ancient pieces of her...holy crud, these are old. @_@ Lots of photoshopping was required just to make the faded pencil lines show up! This is a huge file, so you'll have to click to see it properly. By way of warning, there are some nudes included in this compilation...

Click the link to see Dawn's/Thystle's character development!

Whew! Hahaha, looking at my old art makes me cringe! So, here's something brand new...

 

I drew this piece just a few hours ago.  I had today off, and I'm tired of my usual pencil and CG fare so I went to Joann's and bought some water colors and experimented! It was fun to try something different. I could nitpick about what's wrong with this, but I should go easy on myself, since I am new to this whole watercolor business.

Here's another watercolor piece I tried, this time with Iryl. Iryl is a color-changing spirit (of sorts), so I went wild with the pigments on this one.

Here's my water-color station at the kitchen table.

True Colors

Evie's character, Van.  This get-up is fancier than what he's used to, but I've always wanted to draw him in cool plate armor...and today I was missing him.

I really liked what Glen Keane (character designer for Rapunzel in Disney's Tangled) said about Rapunzel's hair being a physical manifestation of her creativity that just had to escape.  Van's red cape is like that here. It represents the core of his being: his nobility, heroism and chivalry.  But to me, red is also a very raw color, the color of wounds that haven't healed.  You think all that armor can make you invulnerable, but on the inside, you're bleeding...

For Friends

I finished these two sketches last week when I did the troll pic, but I wanted to wait until their recipients got them in the mail before I posted them.  They arrived safe and sound, so here they are!

First, for my sister LC:

This is her character Demiko, the de facto leader of the commoner rebellion in her story project Echelons. His derpy expression was an accident, but it suits his personality. It makes me think of this face: LOL!

And second, this pic for my kindred spirit, Brit:

This is Sybil, an original character she uses on a roleplaying board called Shadowside.

I don't usually shade my sketches like this, but I was inspired by the work of Jessica Barnes, otherwise known as bluessence.  I bought her 2011 sketch book collection, and in it she included a picture of Vahaadi for me!  He looks so pretty in her style. o_o Vahaadi by bluessence. 

I like her style, and it was fun to experiment with, but I want to be careful to not become stuck on it.  It's super pretty and detailed but I think the style lacks motion and life. Everyone looks like they're posing for a picture. XD I already have a bad habit of drawing that way, I need to ensure I keep motion in my work!

Here are some other drawings I have sent to Britney and LC.  These are from last year.

This is Brit's character Kestrel.  Britney gave me pointers and I came up with her design.  Her motifs are shiny trinkets, culture-clash, ribbons, feathers and bubbles. I photoshopped this one a bit, because the gray tones were driving me batty.  I like this pic, so I'd like to do something better with it sometime, but for now this is as much effort as I want to put into it.

Here's the first attempt I made at drawing Kess...

Please ignore her lame right arm, I couldn't figure out the posing for it so I resorted to the shameful "hide it behind her back" technique. x_X

This is a concept sketch for Kestrel's dragon transformation:

This is slightly smaller than actual-size.  Kess is a widdle tiny dwagon.

Enough Kess-spam; here are the pics I sent LC!

This is Rue, the waifish lone survivor of a terrible and mysterious plague that wiped out an entire generation of her colony.  She is from Ruin of Elderith, another story project of LC's that she's letting me contribute to!

And last...

 This is Fairy, also from Ruin of Elderith.  I love her nails. *w*

I have tons more sketches like these that I've sent to Evie, about 13 pages worth or so.  Maybe I'll post those sometime, but not right nowwwww. <3 Enjoy!

Tryvnah

I don't know why I let my minor characters hog all of my creative brain-space so often, but I do.  Here's a fresh sketch of Tryvnah, enhanced with a little Photoshop.

He looks different every time I draw him, but so far I like this version best.  He looks like a goofy version of Solid Snake from Metal Gear, hahaha...I can live with that.

"Trolllllllllllllll in the Dungeon!"

"...Thought you ought to know." -Professor Quirrel, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

A drawing of a grumpy vampire-troll doctor, for a friend from GaiaOnline. 

It's signed with "Inkdust," my GaiaOnline username.  I could ramble about this pic, but I think I do enough of that.  I need to let my art speak for itself sometimes...

Head Under Water, And You Tell Me to Breathe Easy For Awhile

As a preamble, this update was inspired due to several things...watching the movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire, going swimming at Typhoon Lagoon, a picture Evie drew of two of our characters as mer-folk, and discussing a story project featuring an aquatic race with my sister LC in the last few weeks before she left.  All of this water-themed fantasy stuff made me want to whip up a few new pieces in that vein, and I've also included a lot of old stuff from my hoarding drawer and dusty computer files that I've just been sitting on for awhile.
First, here's a very old pic of mine, which I might have drawn anywhere between 2005 to 2007.

This was concept art for LC for a story project about a person who is entrusted by a dying mermaid with the care of her baby. (You can tell how old this drawing is by how rumpled the paper looks x_x )

Fast forward to 2009, and you get this. (I didn't get around to signing it until I dug it out recently, that's why the date makes it look more recent than it actually is x_X).

This is one of my all-Photoshop pieces, and it took more hours than I care to remember to finish.  I drew it for a client on DeviantArt who paid me $100 for it, the only parameters being that he wanted her doing a back flip underwater, topless, and he didn't want her to look like Ariel. I edited in the shell bra for posting here, not because I'm necessarily opposed to nudity, but it just looked odd.  I sort of think all of it looks odd, frankly--not one of my favorite pieces.  I like the concept and I enjoyed the challenge of the dynamic pose, but I feel my execution is off.  Maybe I'll revisit this someday when my coloring skills and anatomy knowledge have improved.  Oh and I used three textures from DeviantArt to help make the background, so here are the credits:


"Texture 1 - Watery Snow" by Saekaeru
"texture 15" by Sirius-sdz
"Water" by rosalinestock

The sketches in this compilation range in age from summer 2010 to recent, 2011. (click to see closer!)

These are concept sketches for LC's aquatic-race story project tentatively titled Echelons.  I LOVE this story, and I'm so excited that she's let me contribute so much. :D  If I had to describe the plot I would say it's like The Count of Monte Cristo meets Atlantis: The Lost Empire.  The fancy-looking guy top-left is Lord Rhiiyel, the deranged theological powerhouse of the Zanaran society. His "antlers" is actually a headpiece made of coral.  LC wants him to look really glitzy and have fabulous hair.  The bald, one-eyed woman is Aeika, and I don't really know how to explain her role in the story >.> She's important though. I adapted this design of her from an avatar LC and I put together using TekTek.org's Dream Avatar Simulator to use as a springboard.  The next pic is one of my favorite scenes from the story because it's really tense and yet stupidly funny at the same time. The disheveled human man on the left is Kaeden, and the Zanaran man on the right is Audahn. I didn't design either of them, but I've helped LC figure out what she wants Audahn's face to look like, which I sketched below the scene on the left. Audahn is SRS BSNS. >/ The sassy-looking guy to his left is Terryne, and he's one of the characters I got to design from scratch. This sketch is also the newest, which I think you can tell. I've finally started drawing more detail into my character's mouths, yay! Lookee there, he actually appears to have teeth and a tongue instead of a gaping hole in his face.  Speaking of gaping holes in the face, the guy on the bottom of the page that looks like he's been through a meat grinder is Seph, another character design I got to direct. He's my favorite. He's Audahn's head manservant, so he's basically Batman's Alfred.  Like any good head manservant he's organized, sarcastic and fussy.  Oh yeah and he's also a vengeful murderous mastermind. 

Now onto some personal stuff...this is a compilation of concept sketches of an aquatic race for my story project. The bits in this also range from 2010 to recent 2011.

For my story project I wanted an aquatic race.  The natural staple for such a role in most fantasy stories is mermaids, but I also didn't want my folk limited to the sea.  And thus I came up with these, which I am calling Merrows. They have legs and a tail, which they can use to walk around on land, but they can also fuse them into one streamlined "traditional" tail for more effective swimming. This lends nicely to two of my preferences when it comes to drawing mermaid tails--I like them quite long, and I like them to have a distinctive knee join instead of just a coil of muscle and flesh. These were definitely inspired by the Zoras of The Legend of Zelda series, and originally I even considered making their hair look like fins as you can see from the figure on the right near the top.  I've since axed that idea in favor of hair, since I want to play with different styles and don't want them *too* much like the Zoras.  Merrows are more amphibious than they are fish-like.  They have scales scattered over their body, but mostly their skin is smooth and slick and predominately blue. They have dark scleras instead of white and their ears are pronged and frilled.  While most of these sketches would suggest as much, they actually don't run around in the nude.  I imagine them wearing wraps around their waists in a Polynesian, African, or Asian style so that they're comfortable whether they have legs or just the fin. The full figure on the top left is the newest sketch. And the turtle...? Evie should recognize him, I use him to fill up empty space on sketch pages. He's right at home with all of his mer-friends. XD

And last, one purely indulgent piece for me and Evie, drawn a month or two ago...

Vahaadi as a Mer. <3 His current-swept hair was fun to draw.  Originally I was going to deck him out with all of his usual jewelry and his waist sash, but I'm too pleased with the long, sleek lines to clutter him up.  Besides, he'd probably drown under the weight of all of his gold trinkets, mer or not! I made myself quite sore trying to do this pose in a mirror for reference, so while it is possible I must assume he is in motion, because that's not a pose anybody should hold for any amount of time.