Non-default Mikus

Its been a while! I'm still drawing sometimes, but recently I haven't liked anything enough to finish or post it. This is another one of those, but I felt like posting something for once. I did them standalone to see if I could do left- and right-facing poses without mirroring... I did ok from that perspective but you can see that the face style kept changing, and it put me off colouring it. Its fun to just doodle Miku though.

Touhou - Flandre is Love

Just a quickie for WTFR's Flandre Friday. I thought I'd get some perspective practice... its not terrible, but I rushed through it so much that i didn't learn anything from doing it. The skin contrast is a bit off too. I still kinda like it though, but it needs some finishing that I can't be bothered with.

Unfinished GM

Tired

Hot

Sick

:(


Tried doing some painty stuff in Sai, but couldn't see how to get it to do what I wanted it to without spending a month on it. Do people really paint over the whole layer a million times, even when shading block areas? Seems like too much of a pain in the ass to me... or I just don't have the patience for it. Might try it again in Photoshop though.

Saber expressions

I've been doodling the past few days, but I've produced nothing but rubbish... this isn't too far above that.

Wanted to try random expressions like you often see for character designs, it's Saber because she came up first in a google for "anime". The range isn't as great as I was intending... Took 90 minutes, which is ok for the linework, but I was intending it to be rougher (so I could do more). No point in applying good linework to all those distended heads. Apparently I'm also bad at being consistent in size since they all needed scaled to match. Sigh...

Lol Comic

Lol comic.

Same as before, no real story, I just drew a typical everyday situation so that I could test some stuff. Need to work out something for speech bubbles, the ovals are easy but seems like anything hand-drawn is going to look odd. Not sure about the fonts I chose too...

Seems I'm really not good at a) guys, b) hands, c) speech bubbles, so from now on my comics will be about mute girls wearing mittens. Really though, even just from these 2 tests, while I can make it look passable it feels like I have a ways to go to have the artistic range to do a comic...

Random panels

I've tried comics once or twice, but I always found it pretty hard to lay out what I was trying to show, so I thought I'd get some practice.

I need to pay more attention when reading comics, since I found there were a bunch of expressions I couldn't remember well enough to draw (should I be inventing expressions myself then?). Also need to pay more attention to clothes and haircuts, almost everyone is wearing "acme t-shirts". Didn't take too long though. Might look decent enough for a lazy comic if I didn't totally skip blocking it out.

There's no rhyme or reason to these by the way, I just drew some boxes and plucked random things out of the air to fill them with. But why not make up your own story? (since you must have lots of free time to bother reading this far~)

Black Magic MA-77

The MA-77 anti-tank marionette from Masamune Shirow's "Black Magic". I only left myself about 20 minutes to do this so its pretty rough. The fact that it has 8 limbs doesn't help...

The general idea was to have it looking as "human" as possible, despite the fact that the only human elements are the face, rough torso shape and legs, to try to capture the freaky "doll" feeling of the original. I actually prefer Shirow's old stuff, where he drew slightly weird mecha with vague (I mean imperfectly-designed) concepts, as opposed to his current stuff where he draws super-designed mecha which don't leave much room for imagination (along with increasingly ridiculous numbers of girls who are a skirt short of an outfit... just sayin'). His stories are still awesome though.

It's surprisingly hard to do something with 6 arms which don't have hands. If I take this any further, I'll probably redo all the arms (with some actual planning this time), along with the head.

Rucky Stal

No time

Tried doing some pressure-varied lines Penny Arcade-style, but either the tablet can't register changes very quickly or I'm rubbish, as it didn't vary smoothly with large changes in pressure. Guess I'll post it for the sake of posting because Icey's a slavedriver

BTW its Konata Izumi