Colored using techniques from an excellent tutorial on Deviant Art. It was nice trying something a little different, and while I don’t think this piece was a complete success, the process did give me an idea of how I might integrate this kind of soft lighting into my normal coloring style (which is not so drastically different to begin with).

To be honest, I think I got carried away with trying to get the tree part right, and failed to really nail the facial expression. I’m lame!

Anyways, while sketching, I also drew a tree of woe with no face at all, emphasizing body language instead. I quickly tightened some pencils over it, scanned it, and slapped some colors on:

I realize this in no way makes up for my failure to get the face right on the first one, but I just figured I’d share it since it was a by-product of my first attempt.

Comments and critiques?

Check out the Practice Makes Perfect Blog for everyone else’s entries!

**EDIT**
Well thankfully, Charles got his computer in order, and he posted the mystical fish’s extensive background story, entitled “The Children of the Gods”!

• Check out the blog of Charles AKA Lord Shen
• Read The Children of Gods, Act I
• Read The Children of Gods, Act II
• Read The Children of Gods, Act III
• Read The Children of Gods, Act IV
• Read The Children of Gods, Act V
• Read The Children of Gods, Appendix

Go read it! Go!

The colors are not quite what I expected–they looked different after I imported the image into Photoshop. I think maybe I need to adjust my color profile in Illustrator or something? Maybe someone who, unlike me, actually knows what they’re talking about could offer some helpful advice about this issue?

The whole purpose of this was to practice my vector skillz, and on that note I think this drawing/concept was just a little too involved for a vector rookie like myself. To achieve what I’m envisioning in my head (in terms of vector illustration), I need to learn to simplify shapes a bit more, and general simplify and stylize my drawings. I am however, happy with the way the bamboo “print” on the tunic turned out. It’s far from perfect, but as an experiment to gauge what I can do with vector illustration, it was a success.

Since the completion of this piece, I’ve done a few simpler vector sketches, which I will, of course, be sharing over the next few weeks, dear reader.

Tight pencils (in my less often seen anal-retentive style) with the usual Photoshop colors. I was afraid this was going to be another bland one, but I ended up being happy with how it turned out. Or maybe I just like the color blue? The pose is a little static (he’s supposed to be poised to make a powerful sumo palm-strike) and the hands are a bit clunky, but I think I did a decent job with giving a sense of this dude’s volume.

I started off with a very rough pen sketch, which I scanned and inked over in Photoshop. The colors are a bit lackluster, and I think if I had to do it again, I’d leave the line art in black. I am a man of few words today. Go, and be merry, dear Reader!

I definitely took a different approach this time–this one was completely digital. I just started sketching in Photoshop, without knowing where I was going to end up. I refined the line art for the hobo in a separate layer and started shading the hobo and rendering the background in the original layer. For the final touches, I used a half-tone filter on the shading/background layer, adjusted the hue/saturation on the whole thing to get a sort-of sepia color, and then dropped in my signature and URL in an old-timey font.

There are some bad tangents and clutter where the hobo’s upper lip eclipses part of his left hand… I need to be more aware of that kind of stuff in the early stages of sketching, because by the time I noticed it, I was too lazy to go back and re-do that whole section of the drawing.

Not a style that I’ll be going with all the time, but this was quick and fun. It’s good to mix it up so I don’t feel like my stuff is getting stale.

I’m happy with how this turned out… am I too self-congratulatory on this blog? Should there be more “artistic” self-loathing? Rest assured, dear readers, I am merely putting on a brave front for you. This bravado, this devil-may-care attitude, this John Wayne-like swagger–an act, all of it. Inside, I am suffering like the most neurotic of nebbishes… But nevertheless, I’m pretty happy with how this turned out. There are some problems with perspective (which is sadly standard for me) but I set out to do something with a bit more action and to mix it up with the colors, and I think I accomplished those goals. Admittedly, the all-cool color scheme is something that was inspired by Jacob’s mime from last week’s challenge.

I’ve been having fun playing around with this new, somewhat more painterly style. But, wow… it’s been like a week and a half since I put up a nerdy fan art. I promise I’ll post something very dorky on Tuesday!

I took a little time to design this character’s build and costume, did a quick rough in blue pencil, and tightened it up in the inks. My “sketchy” ink style is starting to get cleaner the more I do this–I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing overall, but in this case it worked, because the inks turned out pretty clean on the face in particular, so I was comfortable leaving the lines black, rather than softening them with color, as I have mentioned before. The coloring on this one was again done with the Nina technique, rather than the Skeletor technique. Surprisingly, I think the Nina technique is faster sometimes! The biggest difference on this piece is that I actually added some lighting effects from the gem’s glow. The lighting effects are a little sloppy and a little inconsistent, but for a relatively quick sketch, I’m okay with it. And hey, for me, any lighting effects at all are an improvement, yes?

And as an added bonus… last week’s assignment from Rick was a lumberjack. The entries can be found here. This is mine:

I didn’t quite have time to finish a new lumberjack illustration, so I sent Rick this, which was originally commisioned by my friend James Bates for an animation pitch a few years ago. This is a pretty good example of the anal-retentive style that I often make reference to. Extremely tight pencils and inks, but not many details on this one, because I was going for a simplified look, knowing that this was supposed to be an animation design. Looking back on it, I wish I had made slightly different color choices on the skin and undershirt, but overall it holds up OK, I guess.

Post Script: For those who did not notice–I posted a couple of reviews. Scroll down to the previous post to check ’em out!