Growing up I didn’t have the ready access to new comics that most kids in more developed parts of the world did. Most of the ones I ended up reading were DC & Marvel stuff years out of date, fragments of larger stories I had no hope of being able to collect the full sets […]
Here, finally, is the next #26Characters post. When I started this project, one of the names on the list of characters pretty early on was that of Guybrush Threepwood, star of the Monkey Island series of games from LucasArts. The Secret of Monkey Island had a profound effect on me as a child. It was […]
Continuing this series with a bit of a quickie (as in, it didn’t take me three hours and several abandoned attempts), this is F for Fandorin.
Erast Petrovich Fandorin is the protagonist of a series of novels by Boris Akunin. Fandorin is smart, stylish, and a talented (and lucky) detective. Fandorin is a bit of Sherlock Holmes, a bit of James Bond, and a bit of Batman. The novels he stars in are as enjoyable and witty as such a cocktail of ingredients is likely to produce.
With this one speed was of the essence; even with a bit of dawdling, I completed it in under 90 minutes. I went for coloured linework instead of basic blacks this time, which gives it less of a graphic look than previous ones, but is one step further on the exploratory road that this project takes me on.
V
Well, it’s been a while. When I started this project I made a quick list of names from A-Z spanning fictional characters, mostly the first thing that sprung to mind. My friend @OldMonkMGM on twitter wondered if I was taking requests, and then asked if I could draw Emma Frost next. I said yes, of course — my earlier stand-in for E was pretty crappy anyway 🙂
That means this list is by no means permanent, so if you have a specific request, feel free to drop me an email or a tweet @allvishal. So far, the letters H & M are spoken for, but there’s plenty more alphabets to choose from. 🙂
Emma Frost, formerly of the villanous Hellfire Club, is now the leader of the X-Men. You may remember her from the excellent film X-Men First Class, where she was played — badly — by January Jones. Ms. Frost is known for her telepathic powers, her ability to turn into a diamond-like substance, and for her skimpy outfits.
Seriously, many of her costumes are just lingerie, fur coats and boots. I went with what I am told is her latest incarnation, which at least has pants instead of a thong. I quite like the costume, especially the way the cape sits, and I’m a sucker for anything with opera gloves.
(Now if only I could actually draw hands and feet)
Much as I try, these take a lot longer to do right now, at my current skill level, than traditional drawing. So consequently, I’m never really happy with the results, and the same is true in this case.
There’s several elements I like about this one, but much of it is the result of my hands getting tired. I wrestle with the tablet in ways I do not (and can not) with a real pen. Chalk it up to the combination of a hard plastic interacting with another hard plastic, and the disconnect between looking at a screen and moving your hand somewhere else.
I may possibly need better hardware — my tablet is a simple, cheap one by Genius — but I know where this rabbit hole leads, and I’m not prepared to plonk down thousands of dollars for a Cintiq.
I may have to get looser with these, more sketchy, more painterly, but the latter of those two is completely uncharted territory, and every time I try I end up with a mess. Oh well, this is nothing if not an excuse to fail, and then fail better the next time.
And, overall, I think I am failing a little better with each one.
V
Once in a while, I tell myself I should practice. It’s fine doing something with a goal like #26Characters, but in addition to more structured projects, you do need to spend some time just mucking about.
Here’s the results of today’s mucking about, done in 15 minutes. I tried as best I could to get away from the dreaded “every character looks 28 years old” syndrome that affects many illustrators. It helps to pay attention to these sorts of common pitfalls, and nothing better than random sketches to exercise & exorcise those demons.
V
It’s fairly uncharacteristic of me to go a whole three entries in any project without drawing a woman. Well, here we are at #26characters 4th entry, D for Dejah Thoris, and you will not be surprised to note that I spent a lot of time getting this one right.
Ms. Thoris is the princess of the empire of Helium on Barsoom, sometimes known as Mars. Despite this she does not, as far as I know, speak in a squeaky voice. Mars has very strange weather too, because everyone wears skimpy clothing, yet all of this clothing is made of gold (anyone who has actually worn a gold chain in hot weather knows that it’s the most horrible feeling ever).
I’ve never actually read Edgar Rice Burroughs’s series of Martian novels. I did consider reading the first when the recent John Carter movie came out, but I neither saw the movie nor read any of the associated literature. I know, I’m a rebel.
I have, however, ogl–um, appreciated so much art based on the characters over the years, from pretty-much every major pulp and fantasy illustrator of the last century. So I approached Dejah with a lot of osmotic knowledge of what she and the world is supposed to look like. I wish I’d been more intricate with the jewelry, but I think three hours — yes, three hours — is enough time to have spent on this.
I’m happy that I’ve started to approach these in a more considered way, hewing rough gestural sketch without committing to a finished pose, and then working off that. I even made a half-hearted attempt at being more painterly with the colouring. It’s not great, but it’s a start. The column is a complete botch job, though.
Oh, here’s a little animated GIF of the basic process.
V
I’m trying to do #26characters more often, or we’ll be here forever. 🙂 Swiftly moving on to C, with the ever-lovable C-3PO, the true hero & romantic superstar of George Lucas’s Star Wars movies.
Mr. 3PO — C to his friends — was born (some say constructed) on sunny Tattooine by a young & talented boy named Anakin Skywalker, while he was suffering from a passing bought of the midichlorians. Growing up a nudist, C soon came into money after single-handedly saving the colourful backwater of Naboo from… uh… somebody who was working for somebody else who had a plan about something. He got a gold body.
Anyway, he’s been everywhere and done everything. He is fluent in several languages and can run most moisture vaporators.
Bit of a quickie, this one, but I’m trying to get a handle on just drawing a line without having to re-do it several dozen times. I exaggerated the robotness of him a bit more than he is in the movies (where being played by a man in a suit does impose some restrictions on structure). Onward and upward.
V
PS No, I have no idea why he has a handbag either.
The #26characters project continues with the letter B, and of course, I couldn’t help but do Batman. The answer to most problems is Batman. If you ever find yourself at a crossroads, the answer is probably also Batman. If you ask yourself who you love the most, it is Batman.
Batman Batman Batman.
Batman is the alter ego of Bruce Wayne (or is that the other way around?) a caped crusader against some of the most vicious and wonderful villains of comic books in Gotham City. Do I really need to tell you Batman is?
Still at the very earliest baby steps of learning how to do this, but having fun with it.
V
Despite having a graphics tablet for around 10 years now, I’ve never, ever practiced with it enough to learn how to properly use it. While I have been drawing much more than I used to, over on Today’s Doodle, I like to reserve that space for hand-drawn, pen & paper sketches. So, as a bit of a mini project to just get to grips — no pun intended — with a stylus, I’m going to draw an alphabet of characters.
The first entry in #26characters is Arjun (or, if you’re pedantic, Arjuna), mythological hero of the Mahabharata, master archer and all-round nice guy. I’m not particularly happy with this but I decided to start out simple with the kind of skills I have, which is basic linework and flat colours. It’s okay, I guess, for a couple of hours work, and as a beginning it’s not too bad considering my weakness with the stylus.
#26characters will be added to whenever I get the free time & headspace. Stay tuned!
V
Another twitter sketch request! This is something I did a few weeks ago, for @ashwinpande (who always requests “BOOBS!” so…). Coloured it up in the Gimp. Since it does feature naughty naughty breasts, am keeping the full image behind a more link, so as not to, um, corrupt people? Hell, I don’t know — if you’re here you’re probably corrupt anyway.
More catching up! I drew this on paper last September, on an A4 sheet using a light blue marker for the sketch, and then various black pens to lay down inks. The good thing about this method is that you can then scan the piece in grayscale mode and any amount of rough sketch lines magically disappear! (You can see this in the sketch version below)
Colored in the Gimp, of course, using a woefully-neglected graphics tablet. Actually there was a fourth figure in this, but it was so horribly drawn (a last minute add to fill up the page) that I decided to erase her from the colored version. This is what the original page looked like:
Another image I’d done early in the year also features our lovable interdimensional tourist, and involved food, of a sort. I just realised I hadn’t posted it here on the site:
I should really be drawing a whole lot more.
V
The other day I finally bothered to buy an optical mouse again. The old one had gone wonky and had been replaced, for a few months, with a ball one. While installing it I suddenly realised that the little graphics tablet attached to my work computer — hidden beneath a pile of well-intentioned clutter — was indeed working. Samir had fixed whatever byzantine driver issues were afflicting it, and in typical Samir fashion had now forgotten quite how he did it and when it had happened (btw, have you checked out his spiffy new blog and site?). With another hour to go before The Simpsons, I decided to give it and the new mouse a whirl.
Firing up the GIMP I loaded up a random picture from my vast collection of junk and played around with various unfamiliar filters and script-fu widgets. One I did have some familiarity with but hadn’t used in years is called iWarp, and is sort of like the liquify tool in Photoshop, or like that old turn-of-the-century tech show favourite, Kai’s Power Goo. It allows you to grow, shrink, warp and shift around various parts of the image, and it’s therefore very useful in creating anime-style characters. That’s what I did to the celebrity picture that formed the base of this. The result looks almost nothing like the original.
From there I took it into Inkscape and used the bitmap tracer to turn it into vector art, then fiddled around with the colours, added in details and shapes to make it more graphic and less like a traced picture. Finally, a background and a random caption (from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, of course). The oversized text in the background is done with a stylus using Inkscape’s calligraphy tool. The word balloon is a standard union boolean of an ellipse and a triangle.
Overall, only twenty minutes of work, which by my standards is a blink of an eye (you all know how many months I can spend abandoning… um, finishing work).
I should do these quickies more often. Hope you like it (and I hope you actually clicked on the image to see the whole, wallpaper-sized thing 😛
V