Cintiq!

After a long, long time saving up for it, I finally have a Cintiq. And it is wonderful.

Everything feels so much more natural, and I've been playing with the new hardware with that character height chart when I'm not working. My hours have gone back up lately, so it's been a good chunk of my time.

Time for some progress images, then.

 Before the Cintiq arrived.

Costume change.

Cintiq arrived; started playing around with it by doing some finished lines.

Next, explored some sketching ability while trying to fix the pose of the troll.

Removed two figures to work on the elf. Also noticed some mistakes on the troll and put down a note. Whoops.

Fixed some pretty glaring problems on the elf, sketched on the troll's arm (still have fixes to make there) and played around with some flat colors. Excited to get to rendering, it should be a lot of fun on this monster of a tablet monitor.

I am so glad I decided to buy this thing. It's a fantastic tool for digital work.

Catching Up

Work seems to have been kicking my butt lately.

It's been a while since I've made an update to the blog, so it's time to play a bit of catch-up.

Visited my boyfriend back in July and had a wonderful time, then came back and went right back to work. Between now and then, the newest iteration of the Pokemon franchise has come out, and I have to say I've enjoyed it. X and Y have put some fresh new mechanics into the games, something that they've needed for a long time. On a more subjective note, the designs of the new batch of monsters have been pretty fun for the most part. I'll doubtlessly produce some scribbles documenting my adventures at some point.

But for now, a bit of sketching.

Playing around with old characters.

 Having fun making an alien species. I knew I wanted it to have horns, four arms, and a goat-like aspect to the feet, but beyond that it was experimentation for a direction to go.

 Four eyes made the species appropriately alien, so I set about playing with the skull: the placement of the eyes, shape of the horns, etc.

 Good lord, I have played entirely too much Mass Effect. Just some color scribbles to experiment with the look of the things.

 I wasn't fond of the armor from above, so I did some more playing around with that and a more "conventional" space suit. The podcast Welcome to Night Vale is a great motivator for art.

A monster sketch, incorporating a few animals into one beastly ogre.

A fantasy-themed mount creature. Drawn on the plane.

In other news, I've got an idea for a short-story-comic. Still drafting the script, though, so it may be a while yet. Stay tuned.

Photoshop Crashed

More progress on my monster! Or, there would be more, if Photoshop hadn't frozen up and wasted several hours of my time during which I'd been playing around. OH WELL.

There's at least this, which took somewhere around an hour.

Have to get past my frustration at the program crash. Then I'll have more progress on this guy. Yeah.
Need to get back to that Gears of War redesign, too. Hmm.

Monster Guy

Started scribbling the other night in photoshop after browsing around on conceptart.org looking for new and interesting techniques to try. Let's see how this goes! Hopefully, I'll learn something new, or at least expand my abilities a little.

The first rough sketch. Just getting an idea of the action and taking the monster's previously-established build into consideration.

Much further along, after a few corrections, including several times of re-posing his left leg, and hammering in details. Started to get some linework in, doing so as quickly and tidily as possible.

For anyone interested, this is the tutorial I'm looking at and trying out.