Concept Art Done Quite Lazilly

An old collaborator of mine has asked for my help in helping flesh out parts of his world and I was happy to oblige. Such as I am, I wanted to streamline the process somewhat by the creation of some templates to draw over in order to simplify the process.

Here one sees the male template that I started with first.

And here one sees the (as of yet unused) female template. It was the last drawing I made in my last brainstorming session over this.

 

You might be thinking, "what WAS he drawing that he would need all these weird templates?" Well dear reader, I was helping my collaborator Deftbeck design some clothing for his world. I've drawn a comic depicting his world before, and had fun doing it despite the great number of pauses mid-production to deal with schoolwork.

The general themes asked from me are generally "woodsmen", "elves", "Victorian aesthetics", "New England", and "fantasy setting", with a current focus on summer wear. Deft also chimed in that the aesthetic of the woods elves had cowboy elements, and so I cranked out some of my Clint Eastwood and I copied some of Blondlie's wardrobe from A Few Dollars More and parts of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The reason why I copied Sergio Leone's aesthetic is not just because I enjoyed those films very much but because I was focusing on the entire archetype of the cowboy, and there few better archetypes for the cowboy than Clint Eastwood himself.

In the first drawing with the hood, I think the design was too medieval. The general description of the conditions - early industrial period in terms of technology, guns still being quite rare and expensive, the rural countryside still being a sizable majority, and a few other details that escape me for now - make me imagine that the loosest real world equivalent would be 1500s to the 1600s in most areas, and 1700-1800s in some others. The development is somewhat asymmetric but it makes sense in-world due to the isolation of the more advanced peoples and how a lag of a century or so (in our standards) would be somewhat arbitrary due to the difference in development in their world. A large segment of the world were still indeed in conditions that were positively medieval as late as the 1900s, some places on this earth are still in these conditions in many ways.

The second drawing shows some of the aforementioned cowboy influences in the dress of the woods elves, mainly the vest which I distinctly remember Clint Eastwood was wearing in two of the three Dollars trilogy films under Sergio Leone's direction. As I drew this, some 

French soldier's dress flew in my mind and likely influenced what I drew that day and the next few days (at least I swear the soldiers were French).

The third drawing deals with casual wear that woods elves might have when they want to be more fashionable than focused on a long, grueling day of agriculture and hunting.

The last four drawings show the martial aspect to their culture and world where every few persons are at least somewhat armed and outfitted with armor in at least some capacity. Given the general 1600s to 1700s feel of Deft's world, I've

cobbled together what I feel would make sense and what pleases my preferences: a line of pike and a series of musket to volley shots behind them, or magic as it were rather than ball in this case. As the notes make clear, the elves in this world have wands and are capable of magic. I might replace the goendendag with a halberd or polearm and maybe scale back the dress of the pikeman. I was imagining Mamluke soldiers, Byzantine cataphracts, and English men-at-arms when drawing these, too ancient I think to be sensible.

I'm definitely revising these soon. They are just sketches though, to get the general idea of what Deft might like and what I had in mind. These are far from final. I should study a more on 17th century armies.

To the right, one sees some other things I've been up to this week, the usual requests for the draw thread.

 

Screw Names, I'm Bad with Them

I have an off and on again relationship with the lineofaction website: I pop in there once a month to draw a few hands, maybe a couple faces and then I buzz off for awhile until I feel it's time to go back to the place again. This is unlike quickposes where I visit near daily for my thirty minutes of grinding. Speaking of grinding... a copy of Bridgman's Constructive Anatomy I got a couple weeks ago has been collecting dust. Its pages have just been leafed and somewhat studied for its information on sculpting the hands and upper body. I need to use that thing more as I have paid the equivalent to $10 USD for it.

My amateurish skill displays itself in certain features of the drawings. The eyes of the first two pictures are flat. I have also been unable to replicate the features of the same person twice (bottom-left in the first picture and the man drawn in the second are the same one). I had also drawn the ears poorly in general, they're just blocks with little squiggles in them to imply the various features within them. The way I draw the Adam's Apple also needs work too.





The next four drawings were some random stuff. I wanted to break back into drawing more normally and using my imagination again to draw just whatever pops in my head. It seemed to me that I could only do that in relation to the storytelling for my comics, good thing that isn't the case. I should move to more complicated pieces in due time. The last two were done with a random emotion generator which gave me some general prompts to work with. It offered me some amusement, like line of action I should make a note to visit it often.

All in all, while the faces were just okay there is a lot of subtle work that needs to be implemented, mostly the eyes, ears, and the neck, as well as . Promising, but not enough to be good enough just yet. One day...

I only just noticed those stray hairs on the bottom half of the drawing.

Random Sketches

Part II of my ramblings on art won't be coming this week. Putting down my pure, undistilled thoughts on paper takes a lot out of me. The problem lies in how I have to weave the main ideas together in a comprehensible manner and explaining them enough as to be understandable (and I doubt I was able to do that in the last) thus I must tread much more carefully, plan how I write better rather than just going off the cuff. Formalism is integral in fine communication after all. In any case, here are some things that I've been up to lately.

An eternal bane is our law of undulation whereby we humans enter peaks and troughs of zeal, skill,
 and emotional attachment to anything we do or anyone we speak to as our faith in ourselves and our victories attained gives way to self-doubt and losses. Why do I bring up a paraphrase of Lewis' concept of the emotional business cycle here? I don't fucking know, I've been listening to the audiobook of the Screwtape Letters and I've just been loving the wit of it, its lessons, and Cleese's charisma. If it isn't obvious, I'm using Lewis' (or Screwtape's) Law of Undulation to highlight the lack of figure drawing in my posts for awhile now is because of my journey of late with said law: the drawings just haven't been up to par with how I want to draw.

My main goal in drawing at least on the technical aspect is to have dynamic and emotive figures with reasonably realistic proportions and shapes. Realism is not my goal, though I'd like to attain the skill to draw realistically enough, my goal is to cartoon and to cartoon well enough. Such is why I deeply study comics and impressionist works more than others, the abstraction from life while still retaining life-like notes and frameworks is for me the best of what I would like to achieve, anything beyond that is welcome but not required. Recently, I've taken figure drawing and capturing the essence of the figure seriously again, enough for me to be proud enough of them to show to other people. My work isn't the best, but I'm proud of what I can do with my shabby, lazy self.

I really like some of these.

Also, I took all of these within a few minutes of each other early in the morning. Why some are bright as all hell and others blue like a shadow, I do not know.

Of course, with figure drawing exercises must come the spurts of creative drawing, just letting loose and having fun so that you can maintain the imaginative aspect of art and creativity along with the refinement of one's artistic skill. For my desires (to make a webcomic), it's integral to have both if I want to do well (by my standards). Such is why I still hang around draw threads and draw random junk.