Back to Basics with Digital Drawing

  I've been going back to basics lately with my drawing skills. I've had a nagging feeling for honestly quite a while that my colour depth palette has been rather muddy. I've noticed I get lost in getting the shade just right at the expense of how clear the composition is. So, back to basics; getting familiar with the essentials of blocking colour first before moving on to tackling light and shadow.

  After all, many projects are 20% crunch, 80% cruft. You want to get that 20% foundation right or the whole thing just doesn't work.

  This new approach I feel has also given me a chance to back away from relying on dark lines to delineate shape. The pictures I have been drawing lately have been moderately popular on Reddit which is good for exposure. I'm getting plenty of feedback and starting plenty of conversations about what I've been working on. It could be some time before I'm back to full-shade digital painting like I've been doing before: I'm taking this one step at a time, so when I am ready to start adding shade again I am definitely ready.

  Moving away from the same old character subject, I've experimented with map design using Adobe Illustrator. I've found it and PDFs amazing for condensing enormous images into something I can easily send to clients. When I tried buildign something like this on Photoshop, it would slow my computer down as the images, plus layers, might be over a gigabyte in size. Which my computer did not like.

  But it was mostly fun to try map-making, which I have found to be an amazing way to build a setting as they say you can tell a lot about a place by reading into how the local inhabitants drew their maps.

Post-Colo Colo Sketchbook Doodles

  With no university projects on top priority and much of my time spent working on a project for the studio  Butch Auntie, I admit this page has gone a little quiet. When I haven't been building and tweaking in Maya, or when renders are on the go, or when I have ten minutes such as at lunch, I try a bit of sketching. Colo Colo was still fairly fresh on my mind so I made couple of sketches relating to how the body could be improved. When it comes to making a better version this summer, I might try polishing him up in Mudbox.

After the design success of Nian and Colo Colo, I've considered focusing on creature design. Though of course that's not deterred me from sketching other subjects. The human form takes time and dedication to master. And sometimes these creatures need somewhere to live.

My hand-drawing skills have gotten a little rusty, and the technique I learned in 2015 regarding facial structure still needs time to embed, but I might be getting somewhere.

I reached the end of this year's sketchbook a few days ago, so I got a new one. I think I prefer 20cm2 layout sketchbooks, they're not as narrow as an A5 and they're not as cumbersome to carry around as an A4, but they're perhaps the best of both worlds. So on Friday I christened my new sketchbook with a pair of alien bugs. They're lacking in your typical bulbous abdomen because for a man-sized bug it seemed redundant; why store all your organs in a bulb emerging from your backside when your torso is now large enough to fit them all comfortably?

Adaptation B: Colo Colo Concept Design

  With some idea down I decided to move on to concept images for a proper look into the creature. The main aim was to look into combining the traits posessed by the animals I was using as a base reference. Looking at rats and roosters to see what shapes could fit where.

  It was brought to my attention that the creature looked a little stiff. And it was suggested to look into understanding the skeleton as something to build on, as is the purpose of a skeleton. It has helped give some idea and I suppose the next step would be to 'flesh up' for a pose sheet. From my attempts to create a coherent structure, I think I have narrowed odwn on a design. One thing that was of particular interest was that I found that the spine of a rat tends to arch upwards between the base of the shoulder blade and the hip when it is on all four legs, likely what gives the distinctive rear arch many rodents possess.

  One thing I considered investigating was the skull. I looked at images of rat and chicken skulls, drawing them in order to understand what forms or intricacies the two may have shared that could be useful in a combinaiton of the two structures. Some leements are indeed shared, but at the same time there are notable structural differences. The chicken skull has a number of large gaps and thin bridges, likely an evolutionary feature to help reduce the creature's weight, while the rat skull by comparison was a lot more block-like, with a more solid snout and a larger encased area for the brain (which might explain why rat eyes somewhat bulge out of the head).

  With all this in mind I moved on to try and merge features of the two, although I wonder if the head I created from the attempt looks like a hawk's. In hindsight I also recall that like in humans and other animals, the nose of a rat is spongy cartilage, not bone, and thus continues forward from the nasal openings. This differs from the beak of a bird, where the nostrils are holes in the skull and any cartilage present is used to reduce the size of these holes.