Thursday, September 29, 2011

Fight the Giant, WIP #4

I've added color and reduced everything to three layers: background, giant and warrior. I reworked the warrior's leg and arm muscles and shifted the position of the giant's right leg. I'm still not sure what to do with the giant's eyes. Still, I like how it's progressing.

Snowboarder Vector Art

At work this week I was tasked to create a series of video-game type images of a snowboarder at a 45-degree overhead view in three positions: going straight, steering left, and steering right.
I started out with a pencil drawing in my moleskine sketchbook and threw it on the scanner. I placed the image in Adobe Illustrator and created vector "ink" line art by tracing over my sketch with the pen tool. I love the Stroke Width tool in Illustrator CS5! It lets you have total control over the line thickness at any position along the path.



I could have simply rotated the snowboarder left and right to get the other two poses, but that's bush league and I'm better than that. I made two copies of the line art and scaled, rotated and otherwise modified my paths to create the other two poses. The limb positions and perspective are more realistic this way.

I copied the line art and converted it all to Live Paint groups. Then it was just a matter of dropping in color fills with the Live Paint Bucket tool. After expanding the LP groups I was able to tweak the individual gradients on the helmet and goggles. The snowboards are all on a separate layer beneath everything; I just skewed it a couple times. Done!


Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Fight the Giant, WIP #3

Goddamn arm muscles. I always seem to have trouble drawing them. And leg muscles. And anatomy in general. Since I'm not working from a live model or photoreference I have to invent the pose, and that can require a lot of imagination and reliance on knowledge of anatomy and muscle structure.

So here's the latest work in progress. I completely reworked the warrior's pose, and now I think it's much better. Now that I have everything generally where I want it I'll start adding some details here and there and working smaller. Pretty soon I'll start adding color.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Bearshear Hall, Iowa State University

A drawing of Bearshear Hall at Iowa State University. I've wanted to do a series of drawings of some of the old buildings on campus and I thought I'd start with this one. I like the composition and the ink/marker combination worked well. I hate adding watermarks to images, but I don't trust Google not to distribute this one as per their terms of use (refer to section 11).

Ink and Copic marker on bristol.