iPhone gesture drawings

I did these quick gesture sketches on my iPhone, using the Adobe Ideas app. It's super fun, and it makes these great little vector images, even though it is a bit hard to draw with my fingers. I based these off the theme of "Sorrow."

Roverandom Concept Sketches

Lately I have been doing some exploration sketches for my senior project in college. My senior project will involve doing concept art for the children's story Roverandom, by J. R. R. Tolkien. My idea is to design characters, environments, and props/vehicles for an imaginary animated film based on the story.

The main character is a little black-and-white puppy named Rover (later changed to Roverandom to avoid confusion with other dogs named Rover). He rudely insults a cranky wizard, who subsequently turns him into a toy dog as punishment. The story recounts his adventures to the unlikeliest of places as he tries to get turned back into a full-sized real dog again. Along the way, he crosses paths with a little boy who teaches him about what really matters in a dog's life.

So here are some preliminary "possibility" sketches of Roverandom, the Moon Dog, the Sea-Dog, and the wizard Artaxerxes. They are nowhere near the final designs, as I will continue to work out problems and explore the characters.

Roverandom:

Moon Dog:

Sea-Dog:

Artaxerxes (younger version): 

(older version):

"Swamp Temple" Painting Process - Part 1

One of the things I've been doing lately is going back over my old stuff and figuring out what I've learned since I made it. I'm also putting together a new portfolio of visual development art, so I want it to be as good as possible. As I've been going through all this stuff on my laptop, I came across a digital painting I did two years ago for a scholarship application. This is what the original version looked like:

Eh, it's not terrible, but it still feels like it's lacking depth. There's not much story here, for one thing, but also the whole thing feels flat. The environment is not clearly defined, and the colors are a bit cliché. I felt like I could do better.

I opened up my original Photoshop file to look at what was beneath the final painting layers, and I found a wonderful series of color experiments I'd done with adjustment layers. Some of them are a little too wild for my taste, but they are still fun to look at. Here are a few of them:

When I came to the last one, I immediately became inspired and I knew I would have to retry this piece. I still have a lot to learn about art and composition, but I thought I could improve on this design.

Last night I sat down and messed around with the colors and composition in Photoshop. This is what I eventually came up with for the improved composition:

It's rough and unfinished, and I'll still probably tweak the composition as I start painting, but I think I fixed a few of the problems with it. I put the character in the foreground as a silhouette hoping that he would help the image convey a stronger sense of the story, and my hope is that this alternate color scheme is more mysterious or intriguing. What do you think? Is it more interesting? Which of the color experiments is your favorite?

Figure Drawing

I love this figure and gesture drawing site. Today I spent an hour doing some practice sketches because I want to improve my figure drawing skills. Here are a few examples from today's session:

A Faun and a Pink-Haired Goth

Some recent character doodles from my sketchbook, including a young faun...

...and a pink-haired retro-goth girl named Sydney, who also happens to be a superhero. Yeah, she really is all that. And I didn't even mention what her superpower is. (Don't worry, she'll probably show up again...)

Carewick the Candlemaker

Here's some more concept art for my Bluewillow project. This is Wendell Carewick, the candlemaker. He's a gruff, old widower, but he's got a soft spot for the blue-haired girl who appears under his willow tree. This isn't the final design, but I like it so far. 

A sneak peek at my current project

Now that I'm on Christmas Break from school, I've returned to one of my personal projects: a short comic based on the first chapter of my fantasy novel, Bluewillow. (Read an excerpt)  I've been working on the thumbnails/layouts for each page and designing the characters. Here's a work-in-progress of one of the panels I've been working on.

(Click to view larger)