FROM THE QUILL'S SKETCHBOOK!

[crimsonquill]

It's been a decade since I joined this community and grown so much as an artist, skoper, and sound pack creator in that time. Now I've pretty much kept to myself all that time because I did not have much faith in my art skills or hope that I could ever make something worthy of being published. Guess it's finally time to change all of that.

I've been experimenting with an story idea I had awhile back and drawing horrible after horrible designs trying to get on paper what I pictured in my mind's eye. So, I started collecting every single "How To Draw Manga" book I could find in used book stores, hobby shops, and libraries to do a crash course in completely overhauling my style and art techniques. Then I have been taking all of my character notes from the story scripts I had written and translating them into character designs.

The feedback I have been getting from friends has been pretty encouraging to keep going and seeing what I can do and make improvements as I go along.

Character: Vanity


Character: Wolfy


Character: Laureli


They are just concept sketches and very rough pencil forms but I just was curious what you folks thought of my ideas. It's hard to believe that fifteen years ago I had almost given up drawing altogether due to lack of time and feeling that my art talents were never going to evolve much beyond then where they had been in High School.

Thanks again for taking a moment to read this,

CQ

[DrMike2000]

Hey CQ.

Nice character designs.  You know I used to draw a lot like that too?

Here's a few things I'd recommend to focus on.

Eyes - I think Wolfy's got vertical slit pupils like a cat (or wolf?) and I think Laureli has gumdrop eyes (ie different colours) but I'm not 100% sure of either. With both of them you can see the top and bottom of their irises, I don't know if this is intentional to give them a hyper-excited look or not. Check out the PDFs I link to below for some guidelines on eyes and how to construct them. then work back from realistic to manga.

Noses - the Archie style snub nose is cool. Front on noses are one of the hardest things to get right on a face, so you've picked a good shorthand here, but do try branching out when you're ready to try more realistic noses.

Poses - Laureli's arms aren't long enough to reach over her head. This is intentional stylisation, right? I'm not the most familiar with manga conventions and how you're chibi-ing the figures. (Hope I used that word correctly:) ) Either way, its not a very threatening pose if she has her axe handle behind her head, maybe a one-handed Thor-style heft would have worked better? I really like her brass-knuckles blade on her belt, by the way.

My general advice, is keep going. You're on to something here. But take the time to stretch out of any habits you're getting into. You're obviously developing a set of lines for front-facing stylised figures, and its satisfying to keep working on that, because it gives good results. But make a deal with yourself, like every 3 of them you do, you try something like a non-stylised figure, or a profile, or some other exercise. At first, these can be demoralising because they look wrong, but they'll pay off. I did this with myself with profiles last year - getting noses and lips right when seen side on. It was annoying and hard, but now I'm really glad I did it.

Have a look at this awesome resource that I found recently:

http://illustrationage.com/2013/04/02/free-andrew-loomis-art-instruction-downloads/

Andrew Loomis was a real-life Don Draper, an advertising artist in the late 50's/early 60's whose highly regarded instructional books are now public domain and thus free for download.  He's got some great sections on figure and face drawing, which would complement the manga instruction books really well I think.

[crimsonquill]

Thanks for all of the comments and advice, DrMike.

I'm trying to achieve a unique chibi/toon style for my characters but it's a mesh of various techniques from many artists in the manga field. Getting the anatomy down is still a bit tricky since some characters were based on poses of actual models which I based the characters on and others were just totally taken out of my head. I found a very good character model sheet on DeviantArt which seems to be commonly used for Chibi/toons characters so I'm planning on using that as a reference for more polished designs from the front, back, and sides. Should help me eliminate any errors in limb stretching and placing the feet and hands at odd angles just to cheat on proper placement (I am not a huge fan of the Rob Liefeld shortcuts in comic art).

Eyes - Yes, Wolfy's eyes are supposed to be Wolf like but I think I just threw on the vertical slit pupils because I felt they looked better. I'll need to fix that with the proper animal pupils in my next version. Laureli usually wears a contact in her right eye that is called the Marylin Manson style (makes the eye look all white leaving only the center as black dot with a black line around the iris) but I'm pretty sure that my quick version didn't quite pull off that impression or not.

Noses - Yeah, the snub nose is pretty common in Chibi/Toon styles unless it's supposed to be obnoxiously huge or ugly.

Poses - I'll be able to make major improvements on posing once I get the model sheets done so I can adapt their "standing" pose to whatever position I need without mucking up the anatomy in the process. Heck knows that I will need lots of practice to get that down perfectly. Laureli's pose is supposed to have her holding it over her head like the very pose she did in the photo that inspired it but with proper arm length the handle ended up in the middle of her face or behind her head. Probably should have had it behind the head instead of fudging the arm length without thinking twice about how odd it looks.

Thanks again for the link and encouragement.

- CQ