[120103] – [120107]

This update features the continuation of my Love Hina character doodles.

I noted that the order in which I draw these characters is more of less arbitrary. The order in which I’m posting them is also such. With Haruka, the overall drawing quality starts to increase. I didn’t actually think she was going to turn out too well at the lineart stage, but sometimes it’s amazing what a little bit of shading can do for you. Other times, it’s not so impressive.

With Naru I encountered quite a few situations where I just wasn’t sure how I was supposed to draw something, but surprisingly, it also turned out quite well. Here, as well as in the next drawing, I start trying to fill out backgrounds with hybrid shading. The traditional pencils are really good at texturing surfaces, so it’s kind of unfortunate that I ended up contrasting a lot of that shading away in post-processing.

Shinobu’s figure is only okay, but I think the bushes here are great. The bench is actually based off a Google Images hit for nice bench”.

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[111220 - 120102]

The first illustration in today’s update was actually done before the last picture in the last update, but everything in the last update flowed together better, so I didn’t include this.

This is basically a remake of what I consider the crappiest painting as of late, the Akemi Homura 2011 painting. While this colored pencil piece is obviously somewhat less polished than its digital counterpart I think its also a lot closer to what I originally wanted. In part due to the immaturity of my colored pencil process, the lighting here is also fairly ambiguous.

There’s a less-than-interesting process photo I took a little more than halfway through too. A little bit of color testing on the side; for whatever reason it was significantly harder to settle on Akemi’s colors than it was to settle on Inori’s colors. You can also see that there’s actually a lot of “junk” lines that the colored pencil covered up really well. Overall, fairly satisfied, though. Satisfied enough that I wouldn’t attempt another in the near future.

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[111205 - 111220]

So this post features some doodles I did not during Thanksgiving break, but, surprisingly, during the weeks after.

I’ve kind of gotten at this in the past, but I think one of the issues I’ve been having in general is that the more I try to “polish” a drawing, the crappier it gets. To be more specific (in a really vague way), I just feel that things get “stiffer” or just less “fluid” when I actually try to commit to doing a full painting or whatnot. Often enough, I think the sketches leading up to a particular painting are, with respect to lineart mostly, better than the painting itself. The most telling manifestation of this phenomenon is something I’ve written about many times in the past; it’s that the lineart for a painting always turns out worse at the end.

And obviously I’ve tried various things in the past to get around this, the latest being that I’m using pencil linearts straight up with only a little bit of erasing, but even then I still find something just isn’t preserved.

So this colored pencil thing initially didn’t have anything to do with the whole polished = rubbish thing. I was just using the colored pencils to indicate the colors on some thoughts, and I was just messing with how exactly to apply the colors (like as shading or ontop of shading, etc). That’s the top left. Then I had this thought, and I was talking to J about this, about doing like shading and coloring in parallel rather than in series, and that’s kind of what’s going on in the bottom left and right. That didn’t go far, but I got two sketches out of it.

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[111128]

Another month, another update (though it’s more like 1.5 updates a month, given the last three or four). Today’s is admittedly weak, but I basically didn’t do any drawing this quarter and I basically didn’t do any drawing over the break as well.

These first two pages of doodle were done in August. This is a general redesign of Bradly’s yacht from Reflection. I don’t seem to have a drawing of the original posted, but the general gist is that lines became straighter and the ship became less obnoxious. Also present are Charles, Bradly’s pilot (chauffeur? butler? secretary? we’re not really sure at this point), and Bradly donning his traditional Founder suit over a Steve Jobs-esque black turtleneck.

This is a little more recent, but it’s another general redesign, this time of the Wind Charmer Wynn from TIAIIS. Again, I can’t seem to find my original sketches on the site, but again, the lines became straighter (though this one wasn’t particularly obnoxious in the first place). I think the general result here is that the ship is overall more “professional” than it used to be. Meaning, even though it is still built from two ships, it looks like the military did the conversion, rather than John Doe.

… and switching gears now, shortly after the last update, I was effectively able to turn over the x200t for more than 85% (gross) of the price at which I bought it. I’m a little bit surprised that it has held its value so well; I may have only had it for a year and a quarter, but those things are coming up to three years of age. Typically the price drop in the second or third year is still pretty significant; I think my TC4200 lost most of it’s value the year that I bought it. Whatever the case, the hunt was on for a T400 replacement…

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[110921/111015]

Well, this update was originally scheduled at least for sometime in September, but with J not making any posts, I’m falling back on a more or less monthly update schedule for now. Today’s update (ultimately completed sometime in September, as mentioned in the last update) is like the fourth for this year.

As with the Tales 2011 painting, the lineart for Makise 2011 is a “complete” drawing by itself. While some of the scratch lines have that did not get contrasted away have been erased digitally, basically nothing has actually been added (unlike some older paintings where the entire lineart was basically redrawn). Furthermore, all of the painting is done on a single layer.

When I first said that I wanted to try doing a “proper” painting this way, I envisioned something on the lines of the character sketches, but I don’t think the last two paintings have turned out anything like that. I think they’ve turned out well in their own way, but it’s definitely a hybrid rather than a straight up “full-painting” implementation of the former.

I actually spent more time post-processing this than I would have thought. There’s a beta version with black gears, which I apparently didn’t like as much a month ago – in retrospect I think both are fine (though it might have been a close call back then as well).

Since we’re kind of failing on the update side of things, I’ll try to add a couple more tidbits into this one to make up for it. I don’t know why this one never made it onto the site, but toward the end of summer, J and I (after our Gatling gun) also made a K’Nex clock, which, although kept time fairly well, only had a run time of a couple tens of minutes.

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