More character designs.

 Been into designing characters and trying to push myself really hard at some concepts I've been tossing around for a while, so there should be more updates on these and my tumblr over the next few days. This is all part of the Green Asphalt Project and I really do intend to get this back on track soon.

This guy is a loan shark who's pretty self explanatory. I tried to keep his actual shark qualities pretty close.

Also in this idea he has 2 thugs that work as his enforcers and I'm still developing the ideas for the situation but I want really fun silhouettes for all the characters.

I've also been revising the worms for the current Green Asphalt story with the worms having a more leech-like appearance.

More should be coming over the next day or two.

Character Designs

Lately I've been bitten by the character design bug. Here are a couple of designs to show my tendancy to explore characters and so forth.

This is Vespa, a female wasp character that I've had in mind for quite some time. Often times when people create cartoon insects they tend to add aspects to their anatomy that really bothered me (especially when I was younger), but with her I've tried to maintain a very insect like structure as well as allowing for expression and an appealing design.

This next character is something that I've been somewhat struggling with for Green Asphalt. Lately I've had to set aside this personal project but I have high hopes of getting it off the ground in the very near future. The basic premise of this is that this is a town mayor who had a tapeworm that mutated and is now controlling the host body who is now just a shell. Pretty gruesome but thanks to a friend's suggestion the tie really shows that this is a comedy first and foremost.

Creating a Green Asphalt Comic Page

Even though I'm still plugging away at it, I'd like to share some of my thoughts on developing my own personal comic with a page that went through a rather radical change from it's creation and finalization.

So here's the initial sketch. Fist off this sketch shows one of the big no-no's that I tried to avoid from the very beginning of my comic that being that panel 3 is offset from the line that panel 2 is. Not to mention I felt the last panel is very bland and not particularly interesting visually or from a narrative standpoint.

Ok so here is the newer sketch after a bit of thought in between gigs. I felt the first panel was perfectly fine but made a major overhaul on the other panels, by combing panels 2 and 3 I felt it made a stronger narrative and was overall more pleasing to the eye. This also allowed for a slightly larger size for panel 3. By changing from a closeup to a longshot of Lucky walking away I felt it emphasized the relative smallness of Lucky and the moodiness of the town.

Now I that I have this set, I'm basically on autopilot for the inking process. The only step inbetween these to note is that I slap a simple perspective grid over the last panel to ensure that everything looks correct. Unfortunately the building on the right, while nice compositionally didn't make a lick of sense so that had to be altered.

And a few more finishing touches. It's done.

With Green Asphalt there's a large emphasis on keeping my backgrounds looking nice. I feel that it's just as important as the characters. And I think I might share my thoughts on developing characters with my next post.

Character Designing Peppamint

Since I got a lot of positive feedback about the paintings I did of the Robo-shark Kid and Peppamint I'm going to show my process for painting Peppamint.

My initial stage was to come up with an interesting shape and I started by shaping out what would ultimately become her hat. After having a face that I found appealing, my next step was to come up with a simple but interesting outfit the sort of fit with the overall design. Once all that was in place I considered the sketch phase done.

With the sketch out of the way, I wanted to have a nice "clean" look to the finished piece so I decided to ink the picture. My preferred method is to do my inking in Paint Tool SAI with the Pixel Brush for an extra clean look.

Now with the inking finished I got to work laying out the flat colors. My goal was to use a lot of bright and vibrant colors that I don't normally use, this one especially. Again I laid out my flats with the pixel brush to make it easier to fill large spaces of color with the paint bucket.

Now that I finished this, I went to the rendering phase, which is the most fun part of this after the sketch. For this step, I actually take the work into photoshop which I feel give me a bit more control over my brushes with painting. With all the careful planning on the previous 2 steps, this part goes by very quickly. Also, after working on the rendering, I felt that the bunny she's holding was too similar in color scheme so that was changed by selecting his colors and using color balance.
And here is the finished result.

I hope this helps share some of the help on the matter of my coloring process. Every time I paint I always learn something new.

Work in Progress

A small in progress shot of a pic I'm currently painting.

Pet Croc

Since my previous post showed more of my conceptual in progress work, I thought I'd show a short 6 page completed comic to show what the end result of that is.

The finished comic can be found at the Book of Lies site.

Space Comic

I was recently working on a Sci-fi/action/horror comic for Book of Lies that unfortunately fell through for me, but I thought I'd share some of the my initial concept to help show my thought process and design sense.

I knew that there would be a small but large enough group of characters that several would be in frame a large portion of the time. So my initial attempt was to concentrate on the faces and shapes then work on the overall look of the space suits. Later down in this post there will be a partially cleaned up page to show the changes I made from this picture to the comic itself.

After getting the human designs down, my next endeavor was to work on a few of the more technical stuff, so I did a few sketches of the spaceships and an important prop to help me visualize the story.

 After these preliminary sketches I went about the most fun aspect of the story, the alien that attacks the crew, I quickly sketched out several versions of the alien until I got something I felt interesting and appealing to me.

And finally here's 2 partially sketched in pages of the comic before I had to drop the project.

 

 I hope this sheds some light on my design philosophies and take on this sort of thing.