Tiger Up Yer Butt!

When I set out to do this, my mantra was "simple, cartoony", but as it went along, I added more detail, and now it's become "awkward, weird." That's cool baby, the T-Man rolls with the punches. I did play around with some new coloring techniques, so it's not a total wash. I used Adobe Illustrator's Live Paint for the first time, and I worked light to dark rather than dark to light. If I had any confidence in myself to follow through with it, I'd say maybe this was the beginning of a series of Street Fighter characters. Since I know myself better than most, I say this very well might be my last post ever.




This was an experiment I did while I was fucking around with ways to manipulate photos in Illustrator. It kind of looks like shit, but I learned a lot of stuff. Primarily that Suzy's dad looks pretty awesome in shutter shades.



Click on those sumbitches to biggerize them. You all know this by now, right? I get paranoid sometimes that my resized, pixelated images will be mistaken for the final product. I mean, they'll look like ass either way, but I want to ensure you're looking at the RIGHT ass. I want you to look at MY ass, the way God and I intended it.

The Fatman Cometh...

Killing time at work on a Saturday night.



Sorry I've been MIA lately. I'm a busy little bee(otch).

Doodles...

I was goofing on a Long John Silver image for possible participation in a thread on DrawingBoard, but wasn't happy enough with it to deem it worth showing in public. The hands are a lazy mess, but I can't draw that shit with a pencil, so I don't feel that bad about failing to do it with a mouse. Also, I don't know why I'm an idiot and made him leaning AWAY from the crutch. Unless your "crutch" is alcohol, I'm pretty sure you're supposed to put all of your weight on it.

When I colored him, he came out looking less like a pirate and more like a crippled leprechaun. In art we call this a "happy accident."


(click to enlarge that sumbitch so it doesn't look so pixely and weird.)


Half finished junk I have no intention of turning into whole finished junk:

Pirates of the AIRribbean! Har.

Another in the kind of air pirates theme we seem to have going now, for some reason. Not that I'm complaining. I was aiming for Ass Pirates, but I'm willing to compromise and get half of what I want.




I don't even know what I'm talking about most days any more.

This one's so wide, I had to shrink the preview image down a lot to get it to fit. As always, click for the bigger version.

Airship mechanic?

I feel like those arms are the mayors of Wonkytown, the face is at least a 6 pack away from attractiveness, and the wrench is all out of perspective, but I'm not positive about any of that. I did use reference for this, so it should have been cake to fix those issues, but the photograph was dimly lit and hard to make out detail in. Ah well, you win some, I'm handsome.



Original sketch.



Off topic, but while I haven't exactly been setting the group blog a blaze, I AM happy to see that looking back I've been a lot more consistent about trying to contribute the last couple of months. I'm going to go ahead and give myself a tiny bit of credit for actually somewhat sticking to at least ONE project for once.

I'm an ass.

5.17

Huzzah!



Reference is for suckas! Look, I even threw a CHAIR in that biotch!

....I think I need a new "background" shtick.

....Is her head too big?

EDIT: I thought it might be fun to sort of compare notes, so I threw together this little thing that documents how I've been approaching sketching in Photoshop. If any of you sees something I could do to improve, can make suggestions/recommendations, or want to critique some crucial error I'm making in my process, I'd love to hear it. Fuck, if you want to make your own to share, EVEN BETTER!

My Process!

{blah blah blah, filler text because that link is really hard to notice when it's at the bottom of the post}

Texturds...

I was reading Photoshop tutorials tonight, and I came across one for importing and using textures. I thought I'd give it a whirl on some random sketch I had already scanned:



Looking at it now, I probably should have used the texture just on the jeans, and then maybe a different one for the shirt, rather than pasting it over the entire image. Ah well, I get carried away when I learn new stuff. I'm definitely going to implement this trick more often from now on. I think it's a real help if you're as shit at coloring as I am.

Oh, and I added some links to texture libraries to the "Useful Resources" thread on the forum, if anyone else ever needs some on a whim.