The thing about monsters is that okay, yeah, sometimes they prowl around slavering and growling and they do strike menacing poses, but they also get itchy, roll on the ground, paw things over, stretch, investigate, and eat. I like seeing monsters doing those things as well as menacing people - it suggests that they’re actually creatures instead of props.

The same thing goes true for characters, too. Okay, yeah, characters do look appealing and play to camera and hit great poses and have dialogue carefully crafted to move the story forward. They take on a whole new dimension when they want things, though, and are the stars of their own story even if they may be only passing through someone else’s story to drop a line or two of dialogue. When they have wants and needs and some show through, it’s like seeing a rancor fussing with some dirt in the corner of his pen.

It’s all about feeding the imagination.

You can translate the behavior of dogs, cats, squirrels, any kind of animal into monster behavior. You’ve got to understand the animal’s motivation in order to give it to your creature, but it’s all there.

Filed under: monsters, thoughts on art, sketching — Emma @ 9:08 am

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About a month and a half ago we started playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition, which has proven to be totally awesome, epic, and gory. The gore part is about 80% our Dungeonmaster and 20% our halfling; the rest of us specialize in other useful areas, such as trying to heal each other, being stabbed by projectiles, and making up elaborate plans involving lots and lots of rope.

All the groups I ever gamed with kept a quotes pad; gaming with animators is great because instead of a quotes pad, we keep an illustrated chronicle of the game as it happens. Sheets of paper with gags drawn on them fly just as furiously as dice in the thick of battle; and our adventures are online here, and in the Seasoned Adventurer’s Sketchbook.

Our resident awesome dragon guy is below lovingly rendered by Austin; a taste of life on the road of adventure follows.

I read online about how strategy can be useful, so we tried it, arranging marching order and advancing in an organized and precise way…

Fat lot of good it did us, too. All in all, we lost probably 300 pounds of gear, nearly 100 gold pieces, two eyeballs, a hand, a serving of innocence, and about three cups of faith.

Filed under: d&d, monsters, sketching — Emma @ 11:16 pm

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Filed under: modbook, monsters, photoshop — Emma @ 12:30 am

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Werewolves are pretty awesome in theory, but hardly ever awesome in design… as evidenced here. Oh well.

Filed under: werewolf, inking practice, animals, monsters, sketching — Emma @ 9:31 pm

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I was driving back and forth places a lot this weekend, and five minutes after I got into the car on my first trip, my secondhand ipod choked and died, leaving me with only the road and my thoughts. I wondered what would happen if a unicorn got bit by a zombie? And probably what would really happen would be that the zombie would be cured and either become a normal dead person, or become a normal alive person, but a zombie unicorn would be pretty cool too. It was a really long time in the car.

I just switched up drawing materials, too. Same sketchbook, but I picked up a rollerball extra-fine pen and a .5 mm mechanical pencil on my way home. I haven’t used either one of those for months, and it’s weird how playing with different pens or pencils opens up a new area of things to draw - drawing with a liquid ink ballpoint pen brings out different shapes and angles than drawing with a thick-ink ballpoint pen, and the different weights of lead in mechanical pencils affect the detail and looseness you can get, and an actual wood pencil is something completely different. Colerase give you solid, round, anchored shapes, and brushpens give you kind of sinuous creatures.

I wish I could get the cintiq to mimic more different real media. Here’s a lunchtime zombie unicorn.

Filed under: unicorn, monsters, photoshop, sketching — Emma @ 10:29 pm

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CHAracter DESigns.

As dreamed up by Austin and Vi-Dieu Nguyen, I’m not entirely sure what the rules are but right now everyone is drawing elderly mermaids, so this is mine.

Filed under: monsters, photoshop — Emma @ 10:46 pm

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Lunch hour doodles, testing to see if what I think I know about color is right. Andrew Loomis has an amazing book on painting (or else it’s the one on illustration) that someone let me read, and the whole color thing just finally sunk in. I had values pretty much figured out, but every time I tried to translate that to color I would end up getting completely mixed up and turned around and have a page full of mud.

One thing that stuck with me out of that book was this that he said: You can’t look around and be like “oh that table is burnt ochre, and that chair is alizarin red with some spring green toads on it,” you look at things and identify it by primary colors - say “that table is yellow leaning towards orange, and darker in value and less intense in saturation,” or “my hat is blue leaning towards purple, higher in value and totally saturated.”

That helped a lot, because just to be able to trim it down and have a system for identifying colors in the world as they relate to the colors available to me in Photoshop is amazing. I don’t have to look over there and try and scrub the slider thingies around to get the right color HOPING I’ll maybe get something that doesn’t look like crap… I can start with yellow and make it oranger, and then decrease the value, and then I have something that works pretty well.

There was also a bit in the book about how complementary colors lessen the intensity of each other when placed against one another, but colors that are neighbors on the color wheel will intensify the feel of the original color.

So in an attempt to apply these ideas, I tried to make Pumpkin Baby really intense, and pirate monkey not-so-intense but also not a complete swath of mud.

Filed under: monkeys, pirates, monsters, photoshop — Emma @ 10:35 pm

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My eyes kind of hurt from sitting there with my face inches away from teh cintiq all day - I need to get new glasses so that I can actually see things again.

I’m finding that it’s easier to work out composition on the cintiq, because of all the cutting and dragging you can do with the lasso tool and the transform tool… but poses are still easier to work out with a pen or pencil on plain paper. I think it’s got to be because the cintiq cursor never quite matches up with the pen tip, no matter how many times you calibrate it. It gets really close, but not as close as actually drawing on something.

Here are some doodles from Photoshop… playing around with shapes, a little bit of color, and a totally rockin polo shirt. Evidence of restraint : collar is not popped, and the cute chick does not have a fauxhawk. I don’t want to alienate anyone or anything.

Filed under: cintiq, monsters, photoshop, sketching — Emma @ 10:22 pm

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I gotta work more on consistency, being able to move the guy around while keeping him the same guy. Sometimes it’s almost like you can get a character in your head, and then all you gotta do is life drawings (which works the best), but sometimes it’s like you’ve got a mannequin drawn in white on your page, and you’re just trying to tug it into something vaguely resembling emotion with all the black lines you put down…

also some monsters!

Filed under: comic, monsters, photoshop, sketching — Emma @ 10:11 pm

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Farscape! Farscape was the Firefly that died - everyone knows how when Firefly ended, the fans ran into the streets and bit people until they got a movie made (and released into theaters!). Unfortunately the fan mobs of Buffy were not behind Farscape, which died quietly, lamented only at ’scaper cons.

Anyway. Farscape was this science fiction show that aired on Scifi, the product of the Brian Henson’s union with Australia. The show followed an earthling who got stuck on a ship full of alien convicts, and their escapades across the universe. Two of the starting six characters are muppets - but not yer old Kermit the Frog type: fully articulated robo-monkeylectric, acting characters. It’s a great show with very cool characters, bizarre situations (explosive alien urine?), and a huge metaplot. Where they really shone, though, was the aliens.

Because, see, when Star Trek needed aliens, they stuck a rubber mask on a guy. When Star Wars needed aliens, they leaned a big fake alien up against the wall.
When the Henson Company needs aliens, however… well, that’s pretty much what they’re all about. From giant steam-shooting spider guys to weird little toad guys to fire-barfing fish guys, they totally nailed it.

ANYWAY. Yay Farscape. Check it out if you haven’t. The following picture is my rendition of a couple of fire-barfing fish guys, the vegetable priest, and one of the ship’s little yellow robots.

And just random drawings.

And go look at the Dailyscribble for your art fix - it updates daily, way more than the week or so I’ve been managing here…

Filed under: farscape, monsters, photoshop — Emma @ 7:12 pm

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