^Click to reveal The Truth
Here’s a thing I worked up yesterday as a gift for a good friend. Probably took about nine hours, including an hour and a half spent trying to find good animal references. There are a few things I would change, but you know how it is with the incessant passing of time and so on.
The Laser Panther is, of course, a nod to Brütal Legend.
No matter how much I work in colour, I can’t seem to get really comfortable. I thought for this one, I might try a limited-palette, solid-colour approach, similar to this image (read the whole article on the artist here, at Leif Peng’s wonderful Today’s Inspiration site). I couldn’t get it to work, though, since I hadn’t started the drawing with that colouring style in mind. As a result, I didn’t design the image with enough big, solid, shapes or with the big contrasty hits of black. On images like this, I have usually failed to think in terms of colour, focusing instead on the shapes, the linework, and describing the things that I am trying to make an image of. That carries over to the colouring so that instead of really visualizing the image as a colour composition, I end up basically colouring within the lines, like a fancy colouring book. It becomes a technical exercise, where the new challenge is giving everything a colour and value that will approximately balance the composition now that it’s in colour and not just black and white lines. I would like to be thinking, “how can I use colour in this image to create the composition” rather than, “well, her boots are brown cause her boots are supposed to be brown, so how do I either mute their colour or compensate elsewhere so they don’t stick out”. I need to be using the colour purposefully and confidently, rather than as an “add-on” or a technicality. So I’m going to have to start thinking ahead.
That said, I enjoy the way images like this turn out, but the process is still too fiddly and technical-feeling.
Blah blah blah. Here’s some images and notes on the process…
Here’s something I started in order to test out some new paper. Also to try and bludgeon myself into not hating the Regency-period style of dress that I had unwittingly committed myself to.
Some work-in-progress pics after the jump…
Only a few more long days until Brutal Legend…
Update: Oh man, what a coinkydink! Turns out today is the 20th anniversary of Tim Schafer’s… uh… being in the games industry. FYI, he has brought you and me such great things as Monkey Island, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, and DURR Brutal Legend. You’re pretty great, Tim Schafer! This drawing is retroactively my tribute to YOU. Thank you for the many hours of my life that you have wasted improved.
