Shine and Cherry, spooked.

This one isn't a big deal, but it's a fun sketch and I like it...and again, art. So up it goes.

It's Shine and Cherry Blossom, two of my friends OC characters being spooked by a 'ghost'.

Spoooooky

Fun sketches are fun.

"Oh ALAN!" 

Trailer Park Boys Shirt Project

I'm going to do my best to be neutral about this one. It drove me crazy for nearly three weeks and the result is...pathetic at best. Oh damn...well, there goes my neutral stance, and we're not even three sentences in! I'll make up for it by making you look at all the sketches, because I scanned them, so you have to see them.

First of all, a little backstory. Some members of the Karma Incarnate team (not me) are going to see the Trailer Park Boys perform live in the coming weeks. As is becoming our custom, they wanted shirts they could wear to help spread the brand. Now, I'm not a fan of the series, though when this began I had seen several episodes, so I was somewhat at a loss at first.

They told me what they wanted - more of the same stuff. Them as characters from the show. Since I didn't have enough of a knowledge base to come up with a scene, I started with how I wanted the characters to look.

Sketches of the look

 So at first I was going to go somewhat realistic with them...well, actually the first thing I was going to do was make them take photos dressed up and then vectorize them...but that was somewhat unrealistic.

So the next step was the sketch on the left, which is somewhat close to my normal manga style of characters (at this point, I was working off memory of what they looked like, so the drawing is far off, but I was working at the time) but after staring at it a few days, I really didn't think it would give the best sort of result for this...

So I came to the style on the right. It's a bit more cartoonish, and somewhat inspired by the Haunted Mansion shirt design I didn't use. I thought maybe it would be a good way to convey the idea...and since time was quickly running out, I couldn't afford to spend hours upon hours attempting realistic coloring which would ultimately turn out shitty.

Next then came the layout design. This was...problematic, again, because I didn't really know enough about the show to make it look natural.

Layout sketches

So I ended up doing something a little simplistic. Sue me. This ended up being a little better than it might have been, because at least I got to use all primary characters which was almost not the case. The trailer in the right image would end up saving my butt in the end since Ricky's car (which is featured in both) ended up being cut.

Ricky and Julian sketches

Once I had the style I wanted down, it was a matter of posing and merging the characters' looks with those of the people going. You'll no-doubt recognize some of the people from my other shirt designs, but two of them were new.

Additionally problematic in this was that those additional two had very similar facial structures to the characters they were supposed to be represented by. This was especially a problem with 'Julian' because essentially the only thing that separated the two of them was the hairline.

Gentleman Jim Layhe sketches

It was at this point that I began forcing myself to watch the show. I made it through 4 complete seasons by the end of this, and while I still don't enjoy it, I was able to get a better feel for the characters which I think ultimately comes through in the final poses and designs for them.

Jim Layhe, the alcoholic trailer park supervisor was the one I really sort of went wild with. his design for awhile and had to pull it back a few times. He's a drunk and an ass, but he's not really a psycho...and even when he is, it's a quieter drunker sort of psychosis which generally means waving a gun around in his underwear.

So how did they come out? Well....

Ricky

Julian

Bubbles (yes those are Jakes real cats)

Layhe

In the end the simpler, more cartoony look worked out for me (and saved the coloring stage entirely). The line art isn't as strong as I'd like, but the inking process was remarkably smooth for a change.

Final design

Custom back

The typeface and look is meant to mimic the logo of the show, which you can find easily enough online. I got pretty close, I think.
The trailer in the background is a quick vector I made off a photograph of an actual trailer...which may be cheating, I suppose, but it makes for a nice background, I think. Simple yet effective?

Trailer vector

Sadly, as I mentioned above, Ricky's Car did not make the cut... the reason for this is that I am something of an idiot. When making this piece, I did each character and background element separate so I could color them more easily. Unfortunately I used the same pen to ink each of them...for consistency...but obviously the characters ended up being much smaller than the car, which meant that the line weight of the car made it the dominant object in the drawing instead of the characters. I could have fixed this...but not in the time I had. While this meant I would need to redraw Layhe, it ended up being simpler in the long run, even if I think the initial drawing was a little more...dynamic.

Ricky's car (unused)

Layhe (unused)

The hell of it is, that's one of the better cars I've ever drawn...yes, I'm aware that's not saying much.

So there you go, I hope you've enjoyed this exhaustive look into something that a competent artist could have crapped out in a few hours.

"It's a shitnami, Randy..."

Five Nights Fever

Hey blog world,

I said I'd post stuff whether I liked it or not, so here goes. Two quick work sketches I did while listening to old people prattle on about their health problems and general racism.

First, Toy Chica from the (slightly less) amazing (than the first) Five Nights at Freddy's 2.

Yes, it's the one with the panties.

Yeah, I don't know either so don't ask a lot of questions. The game is great though, all the same and if you haven't played it, you should. The payoff is jumpscares, but the tension is what makes the game scary again and again.

(Wind noises)

This one is from the same day. I promised my sister I'd draw her a Disney-inspired thing for each day we worked together. Not a terrible skull, I suppose.

Anyway, art. Yay. See, I do occasionally keep my promises.

"I'm supposed to be at acting class! I'm letting down my scene partner!"

Universal Shirts - Behold my failure

Okay so I showed you the Haunted Mansion shirts for the Disneyland trip, but on the last day, we're actually going to Universal Studios as well. I had a really simple design for a shirt for it...it was pretty boring honestly. I sort of made it quickly, but the guys liked it. Turned out certain bad habits prevented it from being used and so I had to start from scratch. Coming off a relative high from the other shirts I decided to make something more unique for Universal as well.

It turned out to be a rather serious lapse in judgement on my part.

Here's the lineart...which, I don't know. I still don't hate.

Lineart

Can you tell what it's supposed to be? Yeah, don't feel bad. No one else can either. I'll give you a hint. The Wolf Man, The Monster, Dracula, and The Bride. No, not Uma Thurman. The other one.

Colors...sort of. 

And as you can see in the shading phase, things went tragically, horribly, terribly wrong. I suppose it's my fault. Because I did it and all. Maybe I'm just out of practice with my tablet.

The design

Anyway, as I said, I'm going to post things here that are good and bad. This is the latter, but I posted it anyway. So I'm still ahead in the point spread!

"As 6?"

Haunted Mansion shirts

Hello,

So I managed to make it all the way through September without posting anything. I would have taken this as a failure of my goal at one time, but ah, not this time. No, because now we're only a couple days into October and I'm posting something I actually like. Woo. 

So the company I do volunteer work for, Karma Incarnate, is taking me to Disneyland in a few weeks time and they wanted shirts made. I made a fairly poor showing which I'm not going to post here, because it's terrible and as soon as I'd finished it, underwhelmed as I was (but working with a fairly narrow deadline) I accidentally came up with something I liked better.

Before I show the finished piece, I'm going to post the originals because for some reason, all my best work is done in pencil. I don't think there's been a single thing I've ever drawn in which the inks and colored version look as good to me as the pencil sketches...but who knows? I've gone ahead and added the vector version next to the pencil one for comparison sake. 

Ghostly Rex

Ghostly Jake

Ghostly me

Ghostly Brock

Those are the individual versions. I think they came out quite well, all things considered. Here's what they look like in a set with a background (this is also the image which ended up being on the shirt).

Hitchhikers

Yeah, I think it's pretty great. Don't know about you, but I do. The coloration ended up being a little different than I'd wanted/expected, but it's not terrible and sort of has the look I wanted. 

Oh, hell, okay. Here's the one that I didn't like very much...

Rejection!

Yeah, it's a pretty poor bit of photo manipulation. May have been an off night, maybe it was just a stupid idea to begin with. Probably both. Maybe I just suck at it? Yeah, it's probably that one. Just know that the elements are there for something not quite so terrible. Maybe. 

So that's it for now. Some lovely character and vector art. Oh, and as a bonus, since almost no one ever sees my blog, I'll post some bonus art that I did for this. Enjoy!

It's bonus, so just deal with it. 

Now this one, I did it as an afterthought. I did the sketch first and was like...oh, I have three hours to kill here at work, so I'll just bang it out. In the end, obviously it falls apart on many, many levels...most notably the shadows which...ugh. Went way further than they should have. Still. I got all the way through the inking stage. Go me. 

"It's her own fault I didn't save her." 

                        - Tom Stewart

Bitter Springs Concept Art

This is just going to be a short post - something I've been meaning to put up for awhile now. I did this pencil sketch of a town I created for a game called Bitter Springs. It's a town built on the side of a mountain. I like the sketch quite a bit...it's a little different than I'm used to working, but I hope to get better at it.

Bitter Springs b/w

The town is in a fair state of disrepair, obviously...I think that comes across fairly well. I like the clock tower too... I don't know why, but lately I've just been really enamored with the idea of them. I wish they were more culturally relevant today...

I suppose they'd be more useful if we didn't all have clocks everywhere we went.

Color Treatment.

I'm not gonna lie here. I stumbled pretty bad on the color pass. I was trying a new thing...sort of attempting to mimic water color and I failed pretty spectacularly. It gets the overall mood across, I suppose...in some areas. I don't know. I'll really need to spend some more time messing with the look in the future. Or begin painting with actual paints again.





In the end, I don't hate this piece. It's not one of my strongest in some areas, but in other ways, I think it's quite good. If I could just keep the pencil sketch and have that be useful, I'd be quite happy.

"Hey! Those are street shoes on the gym floor!"  

Karma Sculpture Project

Hey folks,

Been awhile since I posted last. I really am going to try and do that more frequently as I do projects, regardless of how I perceive their quality. So with that in mind, today I am going to show some in-progress shots of a sculpture I've made.

First, a little background on the project.

Next April, Karma Incarnate is going to FanX in Salt Lake City. It's going to be our first booth and we needed something of a draw -a centerpiece sort of thing. From that, I came up with this. The idea was sort of a shrine-structure, something that represented how long the idea of karma had existed. Since we primarily use Japanese -and especially Buddhist- imagery I started there, researching mostly shrines found in Japan. I found some pretty interesting ones, but it wasn't until I stumbled upon a specific pagan shrine that I found what I was looking for in terms of design.

Sample Sheet 1

Through the concept phase you can see where I toyed with the Japanese style shrines for awhile. They tend to have vertical stones set into a flat base (the original idea came from one that a co-worker took while in Japan). But the more I thought about it, the less I liked it. Mostly because though it would be easy to construct, they looked very similar to one another.

Sample 2

As you can see from the other samples, there was a lot I considered, even before I found the shrine shape I liked, there was a lot of mess about the base. While I like the ideas behind many of these, none of them really worked for me. In addition to being incredibly difficult to fabricate at full-size, they all look...wrong.

I did also begin toying with the idea of something besides stone. I worked with the idea of a cracked boulder...which I still really like, but never really worked out as well as I hoped it would. It was also here where I settled on the basic shape for the main stone as well as the overgrown look. I wanted to push that a little further...but I just wasn't sure the payoff would be worth it.

Final sketches

When I finally had the shape I wanted and found the shrine type I wanted to use, I began making a few final concept sketches for what I was looking for. I used reference again for the vines, and I liked the extras, I think it looks more natural that way, but they began to interfere with the base...again, making final fabrication too difficult considering my experience. I didn't want to go too overboard.

Final Turnaround

At this point, the design was finalized. I was happy with the overall look of it, smooth on the front, deliberately showing off the logo, rough cut on the back with a bit of an arc to keep the silhouette interesting. The vines were still a bit sparse, but I think I reached a good balance, and if I want to add more foliage later, I can do that in other ways.

That's all for now. Next (related) post I'll have pictures showing off some of the construction process for the sculpture (the model version) and then as we get closer to FanX, I'll show pictures of the full-sized one under construction.

Until next time!

"My dad just passed away- I stuck his head in the DEEP FRYER!"