I’ve been doing some reading on basic graphic design principles lately, so I thought a re-vamp might be a good excuse to practice a them a bit in InDesign.

Here is my spectacularly unsuccessful flyer from two years ago.

In order to make the redo, I needed to make two short lists based on the original poster: one of the necessary elements, and one of what’s wrong with the original poster.

Requirements: Header/Teaser, three informational statements, tear-off contact info, and what is hopefully a good graphic.

Fixes: Too low contrast. Everything has approximately the same visual emphasis, which defeats the whole ‘eyecatching’ requirement. In an effort to show as many drawings as possible, I’ve pretty much eliminated true white space, which doesn’t help with the contrast issue. Also, alignment? What alignment?

Much better. Still, there are a few things I think I could improve if I wanted to spend more time on it. The graphic is not my best work, I’d prefer to replace it with something a little more recent. And I’m not sure how to resolve the header. The zapfino font ‘d’ makes horizontally centering the header problematic. Also I’m pretty sure the alignment between the header and the three statements should be consistent, but that leaves the header looking like I meant it to be properly centered and didn’t succeed. Foo.

The original flyer is old, but the special is current! Valentine’s day is approaching rapidly, and now would be a good time to begin to panic… that is if someone weren’t to hypothetically offer you a totally affordable and unique gift option. Just sayin’.

I’ve already done two color studies of this character, but while Sylvannas in her Undead Queen persona turned out really well, the younger Ranger General Sylvannas was, um, bad. (For one thing, I misread my reference picture and made her hair blue. In my defense I was playing a blue-haired elf at the time, so it didn’t seem weird at all.) So when I needed a subject for my adventures in painting faster and with less useless detail, I thought I might give her another chance.

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Zeetha!

I’ve mentioned Girl Genius before, so I’ll just point in that direction and say read it. Zeetha is an awesome character but while I like her, I’m not totally invested in her, which is probably why I felt comfortable taking her quite tight character design and flubbing it as part of my learning process.

This is the ‘go faster and be looser’ part of that process. Again. The process is a cyclical sort of thing. On the bright side, there has been some clear progress. This one took about three hours total, and there were no outlines at any point in the coloring process.

Now, I implied there was news.  I’ve been spreading my branchy little dendrites over the internet.

Ever wanted to buy any of my drawings? I am now a member of a little artist’s association called Paper Ribbons, where you can buy both already made pieces and commission things based on a style choice and a short statement. Paper Ribbons is aiming to make art buying make a little more accessible. Pricing is based on size, so it takes some of the uncertainty out of trying to assess artistic value. (They make it my job, rather than yours.) My Paper Ribbons page.

If you’re more into my jewelry, I also now have a facebook page. Mostly because two people in one week gasped in horror when they wanted to ‘friend’ me and found out that I didn’t have one of those buttons. (They don’t actually issue them at birth. Surprisingly.)

And there’s always my etsy, which has been updating lately. Which reminds me, I’ve got some new pieces I need to take pictures of. Boo pictures. Hooray updates!

I realize there’s been a bit of gap since my last communique, but that’s because this is my 200th post.  Noticing that resulted in a nasty case of the Specials: I was struck with the sudden need to do something memorable… something special.  Which completely got in the way of making the damn post.

But hey, 200th post! And I have something very pretty to show for it.

I wanted to do something similar to an old piece I was very proud of at the time, both to try to do something awesome again, and to see how far I’ve come. You guys remember the first post-apocalyptic lady? This is like that, but more awesome. In part because this time the set up is better. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with your basic near-futuristic world weary lady warrior, but I think the idea of a private school punk who learned to survive after the bombs fell to be a lot better of a story. I mean, the husk of a dead city? The gattling gun/shillelagh dual wield? The ratty plaid skirt? This is a moment in a narrative, not just a moody girl in armor. (Not to insult the long and occasionally glorious tradition in illustration of brooding females with accouterments of implied violence.)

It’s also just flat better stylistically. Last time, I couldn’t build anything non-organic from scratch, I didn’t have a great grasp of texture, and an extremely simple angle for the lighting. This time? The only time I really needed to have reference in front of me constantly while I was making it was for the gattling gun. I made the scree field by hand, and I’m much better with texture. Still not totally happy with my texture technique though- Mr Donkey looks a little sandblasted rather than furry, but I was getting testy by that point and it was time to be done.

I finally feel like I’m learning to sketch on my Wacom tablet. It’s a different skill from paper sketching, maybe because the physical motion of the pen doesn’t have a static relationship to the movement of the cursor, (a tiny movement can have very different consequences depending on how zoomed in you are) and maybe because the picture is appearing on an entirely different surface from the one it’s being drawn on. Regardless it’s taken me about four years of practice to get reliably tolerable results.

So I had a passing fancy to draw my three main comic characters in their underwear. I justified this on two counts: One, I should really know what the character’s body looks like, not just their clothes. Two, I think one’s choice in underpants can visually say something about a character.

Here’s Adiyenko. She’s all about practicality and is even a little modest, but she’s also entirely aware that boyshorts flatter her butt. (Digitigrade legs predispose towards some serious butt.)

I saved this study for last because it was in some ways the easiest. She was the first of this set of characters so I have the most practice with her and have a pretty good handle on how she stands, glares, and holds a sword.

Because the universe has a sense of irony, she’s also the hardest.  I need her to be demonstrably the same character while having two different appearances: One as she actually is, and one a disguise she wears to not freak the squares.

So I tried to make her appearance as consistent as possible:

-Though I loath the  ’all women wear 3-inch heels’ aesthetic, (It’s stupid. The character design should reflect the character. Heels aren’t a default, they’re a decision.) in this case it actually made sense. I decided that the glamour she’s wearing to create a human appearance has limits: it can’t make her look like someone else, it can only obscure details. And it’s not very good and being sensorily consistent: her hooves click as she walks. Heels help explain the sound plus her her height (digitigrade legs give you leggier proportions) and the glamour does the rest.

-I designed her to have large areas of solid black. Keeping these blacks in the same places on both forms helps her look consistent. If she were done as an eight-bit character, she’d look much the same in both forms. Being able to identify a character even in a fuzzy or simplified form is one indication of good character design.

-Her hair, face, and jacket only have minor changes. Readers don’t pay nearly as much attention to limbs as torsos: changing the shoes on a person doesn’t make them harder to identify, but changing their hat definitely does.

Having already done one character sheet, I had a pretty good idea of how this one should go. Which was a good thing, because children are hard.

Particularly this one. Eris is in latest, most gangly childhood, which I think makes her about eleven years old. This is the skinniest she will ever be, but she also has an adult-size head on a child-height body. Which kind of makes her look like a pez dispenser.

But the challenges I’ve set for myself don’t end with Eris being a child. I’ve also made her mixed race.

Comic artists handle racial indicators in different ways. The simplest is of course just to use color. But I want my comic to be done, oh, this decade, so I’m mostly going to be sticking to black and white.

In black and white, there are three options: Blackface (awkward), hashmarks, (which generally looks like some kind of skin condition) and actually being goddamn good at your job and drawing faces with a specific shape to them.

So… I’m trying to go with that last one.

Harpies. Why did it have to be harpies.

World of Warcraft harpies are considered humanoids, (meaning you can’t skin them for profit. A comforting definition, no?) but otherwise they seem to be only marginally above animals: they lay eggs in nests, don’t keep houses as such, and don’t talk. And yet they wear metal bikinis. The resolution of this is left as an exercise for the reader.

I really, really like how this came out. Conceptually I was worried about the feathers, as detail work has a tendency to trip me up. But I managed not to focus too much on edges while giving a good amount of color variation. The placement of the feathers on the wing is only loosely related to reality, but I’m okay with that.

And this is a big step up in the background department. I wasn’t sure how to integrate a character study with a full background, (and if I’m honest, I wasn’t totally sure I could do a full background) so I simplified matters by using a limited and out of focus background with a border.

And yes, I’m doing the orange/blue thing. So sue me, but goddamn it, that contrast works.

The colors are kinda gnarly in this one… like the Cenarians were egged with radioactive easter eggs. Cenarians do come in other colorschemes, but I liked the naturally colored fur in this palette so I was willing to put up with the pink and green.

Harder to deal with than the colors is that these forms are partially human. (Humans being really good at seeing the slightest mistake in the depiction of other humans.) Given these issues I’m really quite pleased that this came out as well as it did.

Favorite part: The female’s legs. The hooves look dainty and pointy while still being weight-bearing, and the leg bracer-thingies have nice definition without looking pasted on.

Worst part: Ladies’ torso. Ick. I’m really quite good at lady torsos in silhouette, but I clearly haven’t figured out how light falls on them. It has to hit the ribcage and the curve of the tummy under the bellybutton, but knowing that and making it look right are apparently different things.

This series is going to be fun, I can tell. I’m flailing around madly trying to figure out how to make it do. ( ‘How does make do?’ is a common refrain at my house while dealing with electronics, photography, and elementary plumbing repairs.)

But I’m pleased by my spasmotic twitching, because it means I’m learning. As I’ve mentioned before, rapid and not necessarily linear changes in style are a strong indicator of learning. (Check out the difference over a period of months between a webcomic like Questionable Content, where the artist has only been drawing these characters for a few years, and Girl Genius, where the artist has been well established for a long time.)

To bring this back to specifics: I really didn’t do a good job on the areas of high contrast here. (Oops.) The fur is full of abrupt changes that aren’t particularly well mapped to the topography of the surface they’re supposed to be describing, and the gauntlets of the male look absolutely plastic. However, the skin shading and arm wraps on the female (the parts I did last) actually look pretty good.

From the Wowiki:

Centaurs are a half-humanoid, half- horse, war-like tribal race. They abound in central and southern Kalimdor, primarily in Desolace and the Barrens, where they engage in constant war against other centaur and Tauren tribes.

Each tribe of centaurs is lead by khan, who is generally a leader of above-average strength and intelligence. Some of the clans, if not all, practice cannibalism and will eat the flesh of other sapient races as well, such as the Tauren.

Centaurs follow a shamanistic faith, but their brand of shamanism is far different from the more gentle practices of the Horde. Curiously, most centaur shamans are female.

Filthy creatures, centaurs are always followed by swarms of flies, which are attracted by the centaur’s repellent odor. Centaurs have no qualms about leaving piles of dung strewn about their encampments, and no concept of privacy.