Details, details

Workin' hard or hardly workin'. That seems to be me lately. Due to some personal issues I've been dealing with, I haven't gotten nearly as much art up this month as I'd have liked to. I'm hoping the next few months will be a little more productive.

Whew, this one took a lot of time! I was trying to pick things that I could put on this sheet that would be helpful, not pointless. I ended up cutting out some stuff due to crowding and relevance. I'm particularly happy with that aerial view, and I had fun playing with some background effects, even though they were relatively simple (the background shouldn't detract from the main image, right?)

And yes, I'm sorry, it's my avatar. Again. I have no life, what do you expect?

Note to self: Any image with 25+ layers and a size exceeding 3000 pixels is probably pushing my computer's tolerance levels.

Good night.

Strike a pose

Here are a couple more drawings of my avatar. Just trying to get some different views of it here for reference.....or because I was bored......take your pick :)

I was going to add at least one other figure to this sheet, but I've noticed the last few days that I've been running out of artistic steam, so I think I should take a week to recharge. Plus, my hand is cramping something awful (I never learn) so I should probably give it as much of a vacation as I can.

Taelifoe Ref Sheet

Okay, so maybe I'm a little insane, but I'm reeeeally happy to have gotten this done today. I've been thinking for a while that I needed a new reference sheet for my avatar (which technically is not named "Taelifoe") since the last ref sheet I did went bye-bye when my old laptop crashed....again. I don't know why I didn't back that file up. I guess I didn't think it was very important.

I used a trick during the inking of this that I picked up off of another artist named NeonDragon. When you are marking paths with the Path tool in Gimp, you'll see an option on the left menu called "Stroke Path". What this does is to open a dialogue box that allows you to select a line thickness and color, and after you've hit OK, it will create a nice solid line along your paths. You can erase the ends of the lines so that they have a tapered look. Since my hands shake a lot, this has been incredibly helpful to me when inking long lines.

Oh boy does my hand hurt. I about pushed it to the limit getting this sketched, inked, colored and put together today. My theory of "practice helps!" is still holding, too. Wasn't nearly as hard to sketch out my avvy this time as it has been in the past. Hurray! Done in 5 hours in Gimp......I think :P

Tsag Reference

(EDIT: Okay, the first one was bugging me enough that I went back and cropped out some parts so that it was cleaner and hopefully makes more sense! It's at the bottom)

Wow, my hand hurts. This took forever to complete, though I did get to tinker with a few design elements to see what I liked best. Still, I'm wondering now if I might have to adjust the price I'd ask for these, should I ever get commissioned to set one up (I was going to charge $20, but based on the time and work that went into this, I'm thinking that $25 might be more accurate. Thoughts, anyone?)

So I got to play with some of the different options for viewing layers (overlay, multiply) And I also got this guy drawn in his full armor uniform. He's one of the characters from my trilogy and I like his coloration. Up until now, I've only ever had one bust shot of him drawn, and that's at a few years old, so I wanted something updated. Had a lot of fun with the armor, wish I could have drawn his big lance as well, but it wouldn't have fit very nicely on the sheet.

Oh, that top right corner is woefully empty! In my defence, there really wasn't much on him that I wanted to reference.

This one was a test run to see how I could set up reference sheets. I figured that if I had something to present to people as a sample, it might help garner some interest, instead of this happening:

me - "Hey, I can draw those! They're fun."
interested person - "Oh? Can I see some of your past work?"
me - "Um, I don't have any.....but I know it would look good!"
now disinterested person - "I see."