Sketch Dump #3

 I (Hannah) have finally got around to a sketch dump.

And this one is cool, cause if I put the original color one on my iPod and zoom it in to a certain point, it'll match up in color. And I can put my finger in the center and drag the iPod around and it's like a magic color X-ray machine. 

You can see I've kind of started to get into photorealistic CG animation fan art. My papa has suggested I do some in colored pencil.


To God be the glory,
Hannah

Linh Cinder

GASP! It's been over a week! I thought I'd gotten over this forget-the-blog-procrastanitus! Well, fear not, I SHALL recover. It is my QUEST! ONWARD, TO DEATH AND GLORY!!! FOR NARNIAAAAAAA!

Oh, hey, it's Hannah, by the way - as per usual. I still have things to put up that have not yet been put up, one of which being the aforementioned other thing besides the last thing, or in other words, the thing I mentioned earlier, being the thing that I have not put up.

Linh Cinder

This was an about-a-week-long project, and also my first experience in wholly painting a piece of artwork on Photoshop, so I understand if it's a bit sketchy. Ha ha, sketchy. A bit not fully worked out.

This is based on a character from Marissa Meyer's Cinder, a futuristic Cinderella story. It's part of an eventually 4 book series, The Lunar Chronicles. In any case, in the beginning words of a Wikipedia summary, "Cinder is a cyborg living in New Beijing after World War 4, with her step-mother, Adri, and her two step sisters, Pearl and Peony. Cinder owns a booth in the market place, where she works as a mechanic with the family's android, Iko."

Yeah, that was a bit of a spoiler right there. Yup, Cinderella's a cyborg. Getting kinda funky, huh? Well, in this world, cyborgs are looked down upon, like a inferior race, even though they're just normal people who got in an accident and had to have cyborg parts implanted to save their life. Cyborgs don't get the same rights as un-cyborg people, and a lot of people hate them. So at the beginning, like in the typical fairytale, Cinder is treated like she's not a real member of the household. She works all day in the market to bring money to her family, but she's not allowed to keep any of it herself.

I'm not going to go on and on about the book, 'cause I've pretty much come to my point right here. This picture is supposed to be Cinder in the marketplace. I tried to follow the book's description of her as much as possible: mousy-brown hair, unfortunately unfeminine figure, the fault of her cyborg surgery when she was younger, thick mechanic's gloves to cover her metal hand, cargo pants with pockets to hold her tools, grease stains on her shirt and face. 

The original picture did not have gloves, as I accidentally forgot them, so I had to resketch and rephotograph it to add the gloves ('cause those are a pretty important part). And also, to get the human-looking attributes to the face and body instead of the more cartoonish drawings I normally do, I had to base it off of a picture of myself. Yes, I went outside and set up a tripod and took some weird pictures of myself, while Sarah, watering the plants, gave me some strange looks. But all in the name of art.

The digital painting took quite longer, since I'd never done it before, and since, of course, painting is not just a jog in the park. It takes some time to get it looking right. About halfway through the process, I began to have some computer problems. As in, there was not enough room left on the hard drive to save my next draft of the file. The Cinder file, once I was finished, took up 4.27 GB, out of my hard drive's 73.2 GB, most of which was already used up. Fortunately, I have a second hard drive, which is a whopping additional 465 GB, so I moved the files over. Disaster averted.

Okay, I think now would be a good time to say that this is an uncomfortable post for me. Because as it turned out, in the middle of working on this project, Sarah, who was reading through the series again, began to feel uneasy reading it, because in our family we are not supposed to read "love stories". It would take a long time to explain, but my mom and dad don't want us to be developing unrealistic views of what love really is. And, it being a fairytale, there is, as expected, romance. Since this was one of the book series that Trinity had previewed instead of Mama and Papa, we took the book, belatedly, to Mama, and asked her if it was okay that we had been reading it. After looking it over, she said she'd rather we didn't, but that we might be able to read it again in a few years. So. Maybe once the last two books come out, in 2015, we'll be able to read the whole series. So I'm not really recommending this series to you - it's a really well-written series, but since we're not allowed to read it... Anyway.

To God be the Glory,
Hannah

Hatter Madigan

Again, it's Hannah. Fear not, I assure you Sarah shall be posting again! But for the moment, my fan art is piling up on the back order. And so it's a coin flip between the two that I did a whole bunch of stuff - hours of computer time - on. 

This is my best rendition of a legendarily epic fellow named Hatter Madigan. Seriously epic. Like, on the same level as Batman, Halt, and Pinkie Pie. You might not think that the last one's that awesome, but you just don't know Pinkie. 

Anyway, Hatter is a character created by Frank Beddor in the Looking Glass Wars series, which I would recommend to you if you like fantasy or sci-fi or period drama or awesome things or chocolate chip cookies. He was, in fact, so cool that he got his own spin-off graphic novel trilogy. Hatter is loosely based off of Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, except with several big differences - Hatter is a very somber, very sane bodyguard; a skilled fighter known as a Milliner.

I based his appearance rather strongly on another character from the Looking Glass Wars, Homburg Molly

(http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/41/81/77/418177ef00288cb24d4a8999671a7e5b.jpg).

Hatter began as a sketch: 

So I put it into Photoshop and quickly realized I'd need to stretch him out considerably to keep him from looking short and plump.

So I took the original and added several virtual pounds of paint. When I was reading a book on writing by Gail Carson Levine, she stressed the importance of making several copies of my documents (she often had several hundred files at the end of a book, I believe) so that if you change your mind about deleting something, you don't have to recreate it by memory, you can just go back to an older draft. Since then I've done the same with my word documents and my Photoshop documents.

This is what my Hatter M file looks like now that I'm finished. Something I like to do is page through all of the files and see how it got from beginning to finished product. However, these files get so large and numerous that I have to move it to my secondary drive to keep it from overloading my computer's memory, which did nearly happen with one of my last projects. See, I still prefer to use Windows XP instead of the more recent versions Vista, 7, 8, and whatever else have you, so my family bemoans my very sluggish computer (that's one of the reasons I keep it - no one else wants to use a computer that takes ten minutes to start up and five to open a browser, even when it's Google Chrome!)

In any case, I worked on the sketch for several days and it came out like this:

As you can see, not the same as the finished product. For example, he looks like a zombie, his overcoat is missing it's fancy-schmancy decor, he's short with a hint of a potbelly.

Okay, so he's taller and thinner...

...And now with the help of the Liquify tool, I've given him a chiropractic adjustment. I called this de-hipping, just 'cause I made it look like he wasn't being all feminine and sassy. But he still looks positively ghastly in the face, and that's because I tried to follow a "painting a photo-realistic face on Photoshop" tutorial on Pinterest. First of all, this picture's not supposed to be photo-realistic, second of all, the person who made the tutorial was working off of a real picture, not a fuzzy idea in their head, and thirdly, I stink at following tutorials without skipping around impatiently. So I just went back to the original sketch, made the drawing's skin a tad rosier than white, tossed on a handful of brass buttons and heart appliques, and voilà!  

So this wasn't exactly a Photoshop tutorial on how to fill in a sketch. I kept a whole lot hush-hush, mostly because it's way too boring to write down step-by-step. When I do it, I just sort of feel my way around, making faces at my computer screen and erasing stuff and covering it up and finding references on what metal actually looks like and stealing the designs from people's boots and consuming large amounts of salty snacks and getting advice from my siblings and playing around with colors and freaking out because I thought I ruined everything and making teeny-tiny recalibrations and adjustments and basically spending a long time acting like I know what I'm doing until it looks okay. If you really want to know something about Photoshop and how to edit stuff, go ahead and ask, but all I can really say is that it helps a ton to have a mother and older sister who have absorbed the program and it's capabilities so much that they can do all sorts of freaky photo adjustments without going "Oooh, I wonder what this button does!"

Lastly, as far as I can tell, Vance Kovacs was the concept artist who made the Homburg Molly picture, so apologies, sir, for filching designs. I only did it because yours were awesome. 

Is that everything? Good, good...

To God be the Glory,

Hannah

Artemis Fowl: Cast Of Characters

Hands up, who's read Artemis Fowl?

If you haven't heard of it, it's a spectacular series. Hilarious, intelligent, with a ridiculous but lovable cast of characters, my favorite of which are shown below. Juvenile genius, bodyguard, and fairy vigilante included.

*SPOILERS* Spoilers are in the eye of the beholder, but you know, the stuff after this warning might could give something away. So if you don't want any spoilers about the Artemis Fowl series, continue at your own risk.

Artemis Fowl: Cast Of Characters



Left to Right: Foaly, Minerva Paradizo, Butler, Mulch Diggums, Juliet Butler, Holly Short, Artemis Fowl, and Julius "Beetroot" Root.





This is just a personal idea of what they'd look like, by the way. I was sort of revolted at the interpretation in the Artemis Fowl graphic novel. Butler's not a neanderthal, and Foaly is supposed to be a centaur, not a horse-man-hybrid-mash-up. Plus, Mulch has 'tombstone teeth', not rabbit teeth.

I also took a bit of artistic license to be able to fit them all together. As you know, if you've read the books, Minerva and Root wouldn't be able to be in the same room together, given the events in The Opal Deception. Said events that wreak havoc on fangirl emotions. And of course, Mulch would have gotten rid of his prison garb as soon as possible once he was on the surface and traded it in for his mining outfit. But he wasn't tall enough for me to show the more notable aspects of that outfit (cough cough), so I settled for a sterotypical prison shirt. Not that the Haven would be likely to use stripes for their prisons anymore.  

Artemis' outfit is based on an Armani suit. Because I pay attention to the little details, if not the big obvious ones. And Foaly's lower body was copied from one of Sarah's centaur drawings, which was copied from another centaur drawing from a library how-to book. But that's just because I'm not very good at drawing animals.

Some of the people in my house argued that Holly wasn't short enough, but I had already "downsized" her once, and once is enough for me. Trinity pointed out that Foaly looked "like someone who would sell insurance to little old ladies". Oh well. One certain person mentioned that I gave Juliet the same haircut I give Trinity whenever I draw her, and also voted for me to erase Minerva entirely (she doesn't like her very much - at all). Ahem, well, excuse me if I actually thought Artemis and Minerva were a good pair.

And no, I didn't add No. 1, or a certain pair of human brothers, or Opal Koboi. Maybe later. I'm sticking to these now.

Please tell me what you think! I'd like to hear what your opinion of the characters are supposed to look like. For those of you who have read the books, this is just my personal idea of what they look like. You have your opinions, I have mine. I try not to enforce popular book character appearances... much. Except for Arya, from the Inheritance Cycle. Have you seen the Eragon movie? "Raven black hair", the book said. "Green eyes", it said. She's an elf, folks! Would pointed ears really break the bank? Red hair, blue eyes... grumble grumble...