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.

You know who I mean. All those other non-playable, yet clearly intelligent species in World of Warcraft.

That’s right, it’s series time.

Before we get started, let me define some terms: I’m not doing demons, elementals, or anything that could be described as a critter. I’m also limiting this to things that you can speak with in game, and which seem to have a distinct culture. Plus they have to amuse me. Most likely, this means I will not be doing Quillboar. (Frickkin Quillboar. With their stupid death squeal. And you never have to kill just a couple of them, oh no, you have to listen to that squeal eleventy-twelve times.) I have not however compiled my final list, so if there’s any species you’re dying to see me draw, just ask.

On the subject of artistic relevance, this series will serve as rapid-fire, low pressure sketching practice. See, I’m gradually transferring my years of hard-won pencil skills to my digital tablet. Unfortunately, that transfer is not automatic. Something about not being able to see the marks on the same surface as I’m making them, plus the different biofeedback from the digital pen is enough to impede my sketching ability. So I’ll do no physical sketching in this series. Additionally, all these very similar pictures will help solidify my painting process, and the unreality of the subjects will help keep me from getting too precious and narfy about it.

First up: Naga

From WoWwiki: The naga are former Highborne night elves who mutated into vengeful humanoid sea serpents….Naga culture is complex. A clear delineation exists between the sexes. Male naga are larger and more muscular, reminiscent of dragons. Naga men serve as soldiers and guardians. Female naga are more slender, with smaller scales and finer, more human-seeming faces. Naga women are natural spellcasters and rely on magic and poison to defeat their enemies. Naga men are more numerous, but as naga consider their women to be magically and intellectually superior, their society is matriarchal. Women occupy most positions of leadership, and all naga pay homage to their queen, Azshara.

At the head of the list of awkward questions to ask creative people:  ‘where do you get your ideas?’

If you’ve ever asked a creative person this and gotten a exasperated glare in response, try not to take it personally. You’re just the eleventy-seventh person to ask that question, and about 85% of the time, the artist you’re questioning has no idea where their inspiration came from. I’ll save my Freudian speculations on why that might be for another time, because right now I’m introducing an irregular feature on Spiral-Bound Sketches.  Basically, when I title something ‘Inspiration’, that post will be one of  the 15% of the time when I do know where my inspiration is coming from, and I’ll try to explain it. Either you will find this enlightening, or it will convince you that all artists are crazy, to varying degrees.

So, on to today’s post. Recently, I had an excuse to send one of my friends a letter. Normally, I’m not one to send letters. The only time in my life where I sent regular letters was from the age six to twelve, where I was required to send my Great Grandmother a letter once a week. As you might imagine, a six year old isn’t going to be much for sentence structure, so I started out sending mostly pictures, with a few words. Eventually the words got to take up more of the content of the mailing, but the picture part was always there too. So now, when I do send a letter, it feels a little odd if I don’t include some sort of drawing in it.

This friend of mine has a favorite artist, by the name of Alphose Mucha.  I’ve learned that I can influence my sketching style (as many authors can influence their writing style) by consuming an awful lot of one unique artist. So I looked at a lot of Mucha. (I did a similar thing with Mike Mignola in March.) This is a fast process (about an hour) when I share major stylistic qualities with the artist I’m trying to ape.  In this case, both Mucha and I love to do clearly outlined forms, and we like to draw ladies who sit around looking pretty.

So that’s how this came about. As to the exact subject, I couldn’t come up with a single thing to write. So this lady with a blank piece of paper in front of her was going to be sort of an apology for being really bad at writing letters, but then the drawing itself took too long to finish, so I didn’t wind up sending the letter.

Fail.

But hey, blog post.

Just to be clear – I’m not this calm, cool and collected. I also don’t glow.

Balancing work time with everything else time is something all artists have to hammer out for themselves. Well, other than perhaps the independently wealthy artists with no family obligations and a particular gift for benign self-absorption, but I digress.

My balance is a work in progress. I have two part time jobs that are not art related, and one that is. None of this includes ‘just for fun’ projects, i.e. stuff that is not directly related to making money. Like, say, this blog. There’s also life, of course: Car payments and Thanksgiving dinner with the inlaws and watching the Perseids.

I do alright at leaving the work I do at a remote location where it belongs, but I run into trouble with work I do at home. Chainmail and some drawings are ‘work’, but they are also fun, which complicates matters. Sometimes, I want to make chainmail, as it is genuinely relaxing. And sometimes I have a show coming up, so I feel like I have to make as much chainmail as possible before the deadline, then I work myself into a slightly tarnished and blistered bag of twitch.

My problem is saying no in a rational way that also allows me to get done what I need to get done. If chainmail is fun, I shouldn’t balk at doing it a lot, right? But then I’m ‘working’ in my relaxation time. And if I only ‘work’ when it’s fun, then I’m not treating it like a job, which is the level of dedication that it deserves, and that my taxes sort of imply I should devote.

…

Oh, I’m sorry, did you want a conclusion? As I said, it’s a work in progress.

More painting practice, still working closely from an photograph. I’m okay with that… for a little while longer. Pretty soon I’m going to have to start building the entire picture from the sketch on up, but I have a bit more to learn about creating a palette first.

The original picture is here. I chose to work from that particular picture because of the limited palette and because of the luminosity.  (Hey, just ’cause I’m a little scared of color doesn’t mean I don’t prefer intense color.) Also because it’s a picture of me that I like, which is rare. Using the photo for color reference and layout, I made this:

Not so great, right? I’ve never had much trouble getting to this point in a painting, (photoshop or actual) but then I hit a wall called ‘I dunno what to do next.’ Which is why I never really got into painting until recently.

This time when I started flailing, I called in my guest expert *coughfiancecough* and had him take a look.[*] As usual, he made me face what I already knew:  I wasn’t done yet, and he wasn’t about to let me pretend this was ‘good enough’.

So I did this:

and this:

and this:

And then played with opacity and layer order for a little while. Plus a few tweaks, I now have this:

Much better. Hopefully, I’ll remember how I did it for next time…

[*] A word about letting someone look at your work before it’s finished: Don’t do it lightly. Particularly don’t do it if you don’t have a strong sense of your direction in this particular piece, or if you are at all dependent on praise. Sometimes you need to see something through to its end in order to learn, even if you’re pretty sure it won’t work. That’s doubly hard to do if someone’s sitting on your shoulder saying it won’t work give up now. (Sure, they’ll actually say something like ‘I think I’d like it better if you smoothed the edges a bit’, but that’s never what you actually hear.) An extra eye and a careful word can give you perspective when you need it. But it can also totally derail your process, and your trust in yourself as an artist.

Well the Virginia Rennaissance Faire is over- for me anyway. It’s still going on,  but I’ll be attending two weddings in the next two weeks, so I couldn’t vend for the full run. (Updates may be spotty until July, as sometime in the next month I’m also supposed to be moving!) Since the ‘make chainmail 24-7′ pressure is off for a little while, I’m getting back on the horse with one of my naked ladies.

…

On second thought, it’s probably best to stay away from Ungulate metaphors when discussing nude women.