Tuesday, June 13, 2006

of things relating to bugs...

New stuff progress drawings for the bug comic! Check out Doug and Ben:

I'm starting to move away from just head/outfit studies and beginning to pose the characters. Here's Doug fighting his way up a rocky stream bed with an injury in his side.

I still need to keep a tight check on their proportions, especially once they start moving away from static poses. No real model sheets yet, but I'm building reference for them. I'm close!

Here's an ink test I did of Araxia on some nearly ok paper.

Again with the planning! I just started playing around mostly with a #2 brush and a liner brush. I was surprised at how much fine line detail you can get out of those long bristles (mostly on Araxia's facial features). I had a couple of overly thick spots and I didn't really plan out the pattern on her back at all (notice the stripes versus spots). I need to get some pictures of real wolf spiders...

Here's a side by side of one old drawing of Walter (1) and the two newer ones on the right (2 and 3). Look at the progression!

I didn't realize how far Walter had developed from when I had my first positive results. You can see he started out looking pretty young and beamish (what I'm going for with Doug and Ben). I'm slowly pressing him into becoming older and more wizened. His character is kind of a streetwise advisor and guide to the two young bugs, so I want him to look (dare I say it?) wizardish! You can see by my note that he's sort of dressed like a Jedi. I'll be fixing that! I just noticed that his shell has gotten bigger too...

And, probably the best bit of development lately, I've settled on a look for Graves.

I may make some small adjustments to his face but I've established some pretty simple intervals that make his look easy to replicate. This helps! It usually seems that if I can create a small series of alignments or rules on a characters face it's alot easier to make it more consistent over different expressions, stay on model, whatever you please.

I think I'm headed in a good direction. We'll see how it goes. Time to eat!

2 comments:

Bob said...

it's looking great! the final ink on the spider looks fantastic. are you about nearing production?

Peter said...

close! the story is about 3/4 written (been going about it linearly, so I'll need to revisit some things toward the beginning). I still need to settle on a wife/mother character and May's "dog". Aside from that most of the characters are on their way... I should start drawing macro-bug world scenery...