Wednesday 28 October 2009

Black and White






Some bits and bobs. portraits of characters, The Captain and Keisuke. Not based on photographs. I wanted to construct faces from scratch rather than just using photos. Tutorials like these are very handy for stuff like this:
http://cedarseed.deviantart.com/art/Guide-to-Human-Types-part-1-32046017
http://cedarseed.deviantart.com/art/Guide-to-Human-Types-part-2-33220929
http://cedarseed.deviantart.com/art/Guide-to-Human-Types-part-3-34877428
Keisuke was a lot easier to draw for me. I live and grew up in an area with very little ethnic diversity, but I did live in Japan for a year, so I'm more used to the typical details of a Japanese face than an Afro Caribbean one!

And yeah, I just spent a couple of weeks teaching myself how to paint more realistic style faces. My comic line art style just doesn't feel right for this game, plus I don't particularly like digital painting with heavily stylised faces (unless the painting is purely for colour or shade, it kept simple and used in conjunction with line art, like the work of manga artist Nana Li, where it looks awesome). I think it's fortunate in a situation like this, that despite drawing manga style, I tend to spend a lot of time studying real anatomy, and tend to stick to naturalistic proportions. If that weren't the case, it would have been much more difficult to make the transition!

The room isn't as good because...well, I am not naturally very good at things like that. I've given it a go, but really I find inorganic and geometric things very difficult. The more organic elements there are in a room, the easier I find it generally, so a ramshackle cottage would be much easier than a minimalist space ship cabin.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Try giving your rooms more sense of lighting and atmosphere? That would make it alot more interesting to paint and to look at. At the mo it just looks like a model room in some architect's portfolio, so maybe taht kind of clinical correctness is not as interesting to you? :D

Kate Holden said...

Ah, okay, thanks, Faye, I'll try that when I'm doing the other environments.