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.

Personal: Signing off an Old Design

  Circumstances on my end has calmed down a little, as March was a very busy and unexpected month. So as way of an unwinding I went back to an old favourite of mine. The way I keep drawing something similar suggests one of two things: Either I have run out of ideas for modifications, or I have hit upon a final design, long time coming this is true. But that means one part is out of the way for something potentially more fun and creative to explore:

Costumes!

  The other good sign is I've shown this pose to a few friends and they said it looked "noble," "majestic" and "regal" which is what I'm largely going for. With the icons out of the way, I can approach something more out-there or alien with a clear head and a confident approach now that one of the more major designs in my head feels settled. I need ot get my head out of this one design and into the more weird and wonderful world of other aliens and monsters .

It should be a more wild endeavour from here on out.

Personal: A few Posing Designs

  While I may be going back to an old subject, I've been thinking lately on using my ideas. To build a lifestyle. The one thing I was told on thinking of such a direction was whether or not there was a market. I intend to use these images to look for that market. While dragons are perhaps a rather saturated direction, preliminary research always intrigued me that dragons and armour had almost two constants beyond the "anthro" communities, which unlike my ideas used human torsos and human spines:

• Armour featured scale patterns, scallops and thorns, reminiscent of Gothic plate amour
• Reptiles of any kind are frequently draped in all kinds of Mesoamerican motifs and designs

Some of it could be explained in how scales can sometimes (especially on much larger reptiles) be depicted as an armour of its own.But the Mesoamerican connection for any reptiles always confused me as to why this was the principle.

  I believe i could go further with these, I will be doing research in the coming days on whether there is a market for this kind of thing.

  It can't be all boyhood fantasies, one thing I'm aiming for with my research is variety, something to build off of. So it's not just warriors and swords and all that, what other avenues could be explored?

Reworking the Dragon Man: Face and Feet

  Looking to get back into creature modeling so I'm making some tweaks to my Mudbox model to try a more convincing design. One of the largest changes I'd say is with the head. As this creature is a flier I had taken to the idea of adding a few avian qualities to the head to make it more streamlined and aerodynamic. 

I might add nails to the hands, but their design will be slightly different to the talons on the foot due to slight differences in geometric complexity. But this is something that will be sorted out during that construction. The current design of the foot came with a fair deal of research into the feet of birds and therapod dinosaurs, while also considering how the hands are arranged by comparison, as quite often hands and feet are anatomically similar. Proportions can be different but in a number of cases the number of digits or bones is quite similar between the hand and feet.

Reworking the Dragon Man

  Didn't mean for the blog to become this quiet but I'm back on another project at Butch Auntie,, (thank my eagerness over opportunities for that) which means most of the day for the next couple of weeks will be is spent in Maya. Before I got stuck in I looked into reworking my dragon-man model to see if I could streamline it or generally use what I head learned making Colo Colo to improve on the design.

  I didn't spend much time as I quickly found myself engrossed in work but the progress I have made on this model so far is primarily improving the snout, eye sockets, brows, leg and tail, while also adding a bit ot the geometry and cleaning  a few things up. Unlike the previous model I also look to create a UV map for this, it might reduce the pressure on my PC when it comes to applying textures as it means I can use a standard normal map instead of a complex PTEX normal map.

Mudbox Workshop: Final Character Design

   The final stage of the current series of Mudbox tutorials involves the creation of a 3D model using Mudbox. So far progress has been good, and I am enjoying sculpting and texturing.

  Even though mush of this model is likely to become far more blocky as most of this becomes a normal map,  it feels like an enormous step up from previous work in terms of visual quality.

   Wiith most of the scales done I plan to move on to the undersides soon, which will be a much more leather-like texture than what currently dominates the model. And after that would come colouring, this model has been PTEX-prepared and I feel enthusiastic for making further progress.