Sunday, April 5, 2009

Gundam MkII

So, I started watching Zeta Gundam ages ago. "Awesome!", I thought, "this will inspire me to do some mecha fanart practice type stuff. I'll just draw the ones I like as they turn up in the series."

So, now that I've finished watching the entire series, here's one from the first episode!

The MkII is probably my favourite Gundam design. Even though it's the oldest after the original one, the detail still stands up now, and doesn't bother with weird gimmicks (ignoring the daft G-Defenser). Plus, I'm a sucker for underdog mecha, and the MkII is outclassed by everything other than grunt mecha from the moment it starts being used, yet still survives the series (and ZZ too!). And so on.

I think I've gotten the hang of layout out mecha parts now - previously I was having trouble turning bones into individual parts, but rendering each jointed part as boxes and then sketching in the details seems to work better (although it's somewhat time consuming).

So far this took:
2 hours for the layout (could have been faster, I got caught up in the details as usual, plus i couldn't settle on a pose)
3-4 hours for the rough sketch (which looks much like the lineart here, but with piles of corrections and random line widths)
4-5 hours for the lineart (2x resolution of the rough, otherwise it would have been faster).

I'm not actually sure about the times, since I kept doing it while tired and was getting distracted, but it was way too long... still, at least it looks like a good chunk of time went into it.