May 11, 2008

I Need A Hero

Wow, long time no post.
That's down to not-being-used to keeping a blog to be perfectly honest. Once I get into the swing I'm sure I'll finally be able to commit to it daily. I'm finding it hard to just make the time to pop on and upload something.

Been sketching away at the usual stuff, character concept is still taking up alot of my time. It's difficult to design characters for just the sake of designing them. I'm finding it tricky to concentrate my efforts without a 'brief' so as a result I'm having to make up my own briefs for the scenairo, story and situation said character fits into.

On my deviantArt I debuted my superhero character, The Magpie with a parody of a terribly famous Spiderman cover. I've just thrown up the lineart here so you can get a different angle on it than you did at DevArt.


I did the lineart for this on my Cintiq and I have to say- it really proved its worth. Before this point I'd only used my Cintiq for the odd 'Paint' practice or similarly messy things. When I came to ink a scanned sketch I found it beautifully easy to use.
I'm no inker, so I'm not about to say the finished piece is at all good- but it's as good as I could do in reality on actual paper and that's something a tablet has never achieved for me before.

Incidently.
Man oh man, do I need a photoshop that's actually up to date. I had to use Corel Painters pencil tool to ink this, as my photoshop version is so old it doesn't have custom brushes or tapered edges.


The Character herself is based pretty solidly on my City Of Heroes character.

At the time I'd ran alot of concepts along the 'bird' theme, especially regarding the hood design and I simply went to CoH to try and recreate it. What resulted was the theme of a Magpie(a local bird) and the final design I seemed to settle on.

Another aspect I took into consideration were the 'Bug Eyes' similar to Batgirls in The Batman. I used one of the games new costume items to achieve that look, 'goggles'. At the time it was to make it seem like she had those massive eyes but since then- the goggles have become a part of the design.

Lastly, Hayley Williams for the win 8D

-T

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's a pretty awesome character :)

Anonymous said...

*clears throat*
ADAM AND HAYY-LEY SITTIN IN A TREEE!

Zephroth said...

glad to see your cintiq is working out for you. I wont touch another tablet thats not Wacom related. had a recent run in with their customer service. to excellent for words is how their customer service. Dont know if i like the inking more than the coloring. that will be later for me to decide. Yay i got some shading done on your other image XD. enough rambling got to get back to work.