Character Design Process Part 2

As you can see here, I cleaned up this second comic page, simplifying lines, the lettering, and keeping the shading strictly to black (which turned out only to be hair in order to convey a sense of color). Go figure, I simplified, and the number and design of the panels got complicated instead, heh. But I already had a particular series of things I needed to show, so I don't think I could have cut down on the panel number without splitting the comic into two pages.

The second orc is named Surtha, and he's also from Elendor MUSH, although he's the creation of a fellow player and not myself. I seem to be on a big ear pattern, hmm. It fit him in my imagination, and I loved making the ears aid with the expressions. Not much to say about the comic itself, since it's pretty self-explanatory (or I hope!). But you'll need to forget the laws of physics for the moment. Obviously that snowball would have broken up when hit with the bat. Shh, just pretend. It's a cartoon; it doesn't need to make sense. ;)



Is that color?? No way! I've been very traditional with my art, and I haven't really done anything digitally..a friend of mine introduced me to the program GIMP (which is sort of like Photoshop with some of the tools, and it's free), so I decided to check out the 'layers'. Very handy stuff! I kept the color for this sheet basic, leaving out shading since it wasn't the focus of this excersize. Instead, I went back to expressions. Now that I had been doodling ideas for a while, I also tried making sketch pages purely of mouths, eyes, noses, ect so that I could figure out different styles and whether I like them or not. I simplified (again!) the way I drew his nose (as opposed to some of the more detailed ones in the previous expressions challenge), but the rest pretty much stayed the same. I made the hair using less and smoother lines, and decided to always color it black even if the rest of the picture remains black and white. Before, I had not bothered. The eyes I'm still experimenting with. I didn't want them to look too much like manga, but a 'Disney style' approach didn't look right (closing up the lines of the eyes). For now, I chose to leave a small gap open at one side of each eye.

I had never really tried drawing cartoons (original stuff, mind, not copying SpongeBob or something), hence why I and tried to make the original Bagaglok picture more realistic styled. It was sort of an awkward transistion -- shifting to cartoon all of a sudden. I noticed that I tended to "tone down" the free-flowing and simple style of drawing them. My lines were pretty stiff and, at least in my opinion, lifeless. I had a hard time making the full exaggeration found in most cartoons. So, peeking back at this drawing after looking at the first few, I'd like to think this one is more "loose". I was more comfortable with the way I drew the character, and I knew better about what I wanted it all to appear as. Again, compared to the first expressions sheet, the expressions in this picture felt less stiff and restricted. The faces are indeed more exaggerated, with me particularly focusing on how the eyes conveyed the "mood". I ended up playing around with the ears once more, mostly with the "devious" face at the top left, and the "nervous innocence" one at the bottom left.






Okay, and here is one of the most recent ones (aside from sketches and other doodles). I'm still a newbie with digital art, but I tried out a type of "cel shading" here. And there we go, that's all folks! For now at least. ;)