Sparrow WIP

Hoplite

Old sketch, new colors

642 Things: Favorite Wine

Digital Art Practice

For the last birthday, I received a copy of 642 Things to Write About, which features blank panels with sketching prompts at the top margin.  Here we have Dee, modeling a pint of Surilie Bros' 399, as featured prominently in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.  

I figure, if Dee visited Tamriel, she'd be a Nord.

Generals of Westeros

While not a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire on account of the grossly disproportionate level of (im)mature content, I've found the board game by Fantasy Flight tremendously engrossing - such that I spent an afternoon immortalizing my gaming-group as avatars of their respective teams played that day.  In an attempt to hone my digital skills, I resurrected the sketch and tested out a color palette on "Jym, the Warden of Harrenhal and the Stony Sept."  T'was fun.

It is interesting how the imperfections of the sketch come out when colored...

Sparrow WIP

Sparrow work in progress (or WIP, I've just learned!)  She's examining the contents label on a bottle of some-such

Edit: the finished product (for the time being)

Sparrow Concept

Here be a concept page for Sparrow, done a few weeks after Hannah Hammer.  I tend to work slowly...

Hannah Hammer - old concept

An old concept page - may clean up in Clip Studio

Playing around with some new markers - the Manga Basic Set by Faber-Castell.  This set has grey color tones, though I've opted for a greyscale rendering of the image, as my scanner does a weird sepia effect that requires investigation.

Concept for Atrus - beards are a work in progress.  So are glasses.  Not sure yet if I should stick close to Rand Miller like some talented artists are able to do, or if I should pursue this "inspired by" route...

Quick sketch of the Witness while I had a few minutes.  Still working on the hair.

Also, don't use no.2 pencils for art - thick, greasy lines, lots of smudge, never an easy clean-up.

Witness Works - Chapter 1.1 "Glooming"

Ugh ... so I finished this and then realized that it was "backwards"; the bottom two panels are read right to left.  Whatever, I may just switch to the Japanese layout, since it feels more natural.

Witness Works - Chapter 1.0 "The Reveal"

In which the Artist is brutally reminded that hands are difficult to draw...

Yeah, Catherine (the woman in red) had a hand originally, but the nature of robes means that I could pretend that it was meant to be hidden all the while.

There may come a day (probably now, actually) that I will rue the quality of this pic.  But then, this is my first foray into 100% digital art, so I'll take it!

Witness Works - Prologue 11 "Light at the end of the tunnel..."

In which the Artist has learnt to illustrate hands.  There was much rejoicing.

Witness Works - Prologue 10 "Escape...?"

In which the Witness finds himself attracted to a strange light...

Witness Works - Prologue 9 "No Close!"

Armed and Armored

Dee is a diminutive brawler that I thought up a number of years ago, and has since gone through a number of revisions.  She's not a dwarf in the fantasy sense (not anymore, that is) though I'm not sure how dwarfism is applied to individuals that stand less than 5'.

Part of the inspiration for these pics came from an album of "common sense armor for women" on Pinterest.  It was full of photos and concepts of armored women that eschewed the Red Sonya nonsense completely.  In addition to that, I suppose there's an element of Suikoden III's Chris Lightfellow in Dee's costume here.

Witness Works - Prologue 8 "Voices" & a look at what is to come...

Hiatus

I'm back!  So a day or two before I was to post the next page of the comic, my Lenovo died...again.  It did so originally when the CPU literally melted while attempting to run Skyrim.  This was particularly irksome because I had purchased the Lenovo specifically to run games.  It was advertised as a gaming computer.

Except it turns out that gaming laptops are notorious for running hot - so hot as to melt a piece of hardware.  

So my Lenovo died.  I took it to two different shops, which both gave me the same diagnosis (burnt CPU), the solution being to "re-flow" the components - to melt them again and set them right.  The second shop got the OK from me, and did the deed, alerting me to the fact that the poor Lenovo could die in 5 years, or 5 days..."get a new machine ASAP!"

Naturally, I took me precious time, worked with a machine now slow as Christmas and unable to run games (while explaining the diagnosis the technician gave me a cow-eyed look and said with a knowing smirk, "all those games just burned it up!"  I smiled and nodded, internally seething over the notion that Skyrim (now a somewhat dated game) and Age of Empires II would destroy a machine designed to run games).  But upon "updating" to Win10 the machine once again gave up the ghost - and my old Dell (which no longer holds a charge) has lived 2-3 times its lifespan.

So here I am, now typing on a new machine!  I've decided to try out the Dark Side and work on a Mac - I love elements of the machines and the OS.  Now to run some Bootcamp and get Win10 (ugh) in order to run my precious Elder Scrolls and RTSs.

...Oh, and post comic pages!

Witness Works - Prologue 7 "Flashback to Galaxy Quest"

Perceptive readers will note the Bleach reference work in the upper left

Witness Works - Prologue 6 "...*sigh*..."

Bad decisions--every good journey begins with one.

(And the best ninja poof ever...note to self: come back and fix after rereading Naruto)