Colouring Tutorials + Art Styles

Throughout my work I've been pondering on what possible colouring style I would like to achieve within my work that reflects on what skills I'm building up at the moment, including skin colour theory & improvement on anatomy. I've found the following tutorials to be helpful in my "work in practice progress" or at least worth a look into further once I complete all my sketch work for this project before coluring takes place:

"Loish Portrait Tutorial: ImagineFX Issue #65"

"Charlie Bowater: Drawing/Colouring Video Tutorial"


Video Tutorial from charlie bowater on Vimeo.

"Arnold Tsang: Whistler Step by Step Colouring Tutorial"

"Vinegar: Bite Me Drawing Tutorial"

My drawing style is more sketchy and messy rather then neat on most occasions so I feel these tutorials suited my work best. I will continue to practice using a variety of techniques from each, as well as from various other guides and my own knowlege.

Great Article on Character Development

"Figures: They Speak for Themselves"

http://dresdencodak.tumblr.com/post/3583964949/figures-they-speak-for-themselves-mildly-nsfw


Here in this article written by artist Aaron Diaz are the important key elements on creating a good character, including sense of style, which role the character plays, how to reveal it's personality through expression, clothing & unique features and body language. It got me thinking on how I would like to finalise my characters and what could differ them from one another and on possibly future improvement in other characters I may work on in the future. This is incredibly helpful and the good news is there's a previous link to another character development article. Worth a read if you're a character design artist.

Update on the Daily Sketching...

So for the past few weeks I have been sketching ideas for my character designs & illustrations as well as and a basic outline on the following key notes:

• Costume design + overall portrayal of characters as themselves.
• Possible alternate costumes, weapons, what are their personalities.
• Composition of final illustrations + variety of themed sketches.
• How I could express the narrative of my game concept through the artwork.
• Possible styles of colouring eg. skintone, shadow, lighting etc. 
• Overall drawings will be semi realistic.

I'll post several sketches here of what I've been working on.

The Stan Lee Foundation: Superhero Contest

A message was brought up through email from my tutor about a competition that revolved around creating a original, creative and inspiring new superhero character for the Stan Lee Foundation over at TalentHouse, a website full of great contests for artists worldwide to participate in.

As creating a character would go towards my character development skills for brief BA8, I created a superheroine named "Jelluah" here:

The story behind Jelluah:

Tallulah Gale aka "Jellulah" is budding freelance underwater photographer who lost part of her soul to the heart of the ocean after a viscious attack by magical jellyfish, which left her unable to continue living a normal everyday life. As night falls her body morphs into that of half a jellyfish and she must keep hydrated by drinking only sea water. With her new form, Tallulah has the ability ease through spaces such as cracks and underneath doors as a clear slime, making her practically invisible to the human eye. With criminals constantly lurking around at night, Talluah uses her basic fighting skills and a powerful ability to sting using her hands which causes severe pain to them. Once her victim has been attacked they slowly become paralyzed, leaving them to never to harm the innocent or bring evil to the world again.

I find jellyfish fanscinating so creating a character based on them was very fun in the end. Now I can only hope she will at least get viewed and complimented on in terms of her design. I'd appreciate any comment I get.

Contest entry is here: http://www.talenthouse.com/creativeinvites/preview/a4da852f3a6a79c0b4951b9941b0ee77/154

Character Sheet 001

Here's some quick and random character portraits I did today in Photoshop, I'm rather pleased with them. This is part of my Drawing-A-Day plan. :)

Presentation Blues

I think I did fairly okay in my presentation I had yesterday, though I felt I didn't explain my game concept idea or my plans for the BA brief enough for everyone to understand. I had over 20 slides worth of information that felt like I only explained half of it in 5 minutes so lets not hope this is the case.

I am indeed happy with the predictive grade I got for BA7 (69% is great!). I aim to at least graduate with a 2:1 or a 1st if I'm lucky enough. Already I am thinking of ideas to create brilliant work for BA8, such as sketching in Photoshop/Corel Painter everyday or so to build up my drawing skills that could possibly be good enough for the industry in the end.

Working On Presentation: Part 1

So my presentation on my research for my studio work in BA7 and aspects of my research report is to be done this Friday arriving. As of now I have the layout of each of the slides in Microsoft Powerpoint and rough notes on what I would like each slide to contain and how long they should roughly be as I tend to talk rather fast during presentations due to nerves. I shall be fine though! I'm going work on several rough concept pieces for the presentation that are newer and better than those shown in my research document for BA7.