Was going to use this as the first post of March Blog Madness then completely forgot.

Drawn from life at one of JP’s Miyazaki Fridays.

Oh, and while I’m updating, here are some more bits and bobs of various old art:

And lastly, you may have seen my Ducky Love design, but what about pink ducks?

Oops, been a bit quiet again. Here’s a quick-sketch I lined up a while ago to appear here…

Reference from a fashion magazine, I think.

I think I was lazy with the shape of the face and traced the outlines so that I could move onto practising the shading. I wanted to spend some more time on rendering noses and lips – and it shows, because other areas feel a bit flat. But as a quick drawing exercise I think this turned out okay.

Last week’s homework was to create two images that were hybrids of two objects that were randomly assigned to us. Each image needed to have one of the objects stand out as more dominant than the other.

Here are my attempts. Can you tell what the objects are, and which is supposed to be the dominant one in each image?

Does this one give things away too much?

In the famous Monkey story, the Monk spends most of his time travelling on a white (okay, grey for you horse enthusiasts) horse. This horse was actually a dragon – Yu Long, the third son of the Dragon King of the West. He was sentenced to death for burning his father’s pearl and saved by the Goddess of Mercy in order to fulfil the role of the Monk’s steed. (Which was actually quite unnecessary until he accidentally ate the Monk’s horse on their first encounter).

Anyhow, Yu Long then earns a bit of a beating from Monkey and joins the group, after which he spends most of his time stuck as a horse and devoid of personality. I’ve always held an interest in the White Dragon Horse. There’s such potential there that I’d love to see explored. I think in the original story he only gets a couple of opportunities to shed the horse disguise during crises and although he gets to pull some neat tricks I don’t think he actually has much success with his contributions.

Now that you know all about him, maybe you’ve got an idea of why I wanted to draw him.

The latter stages of thumbnailing:

Post it notes were kind of handy for seeing through to the previous sketch layer

And a more developed sketch. I wanted to add more things to hint at his involvement in the story (however limited that involvement was). The orb in the sky with his tail wrapped around it is supposed to represent the great pearl. I was thinking of putting in some birds to represent where he was found (Eagle Sorrow River), and his brief stint disguised as a princess during which he sang and sword danced for the amusement of a demon lord (and as an attempt to assassinate him). However I think the top left where I’d planned to put them is better left open.

Water manipulation is easy for a dragon.

Y’know I think I’ve attempted something like this a few times before but this time I was a bit more persistent and I’m pleased with the result so far.

Here’s the “thumbnail”.

I had fun with the scratchy shading.

Next: to work out the background! While I’m in a persistent mood I’ll tackle that important element I always avoid…

Maybe this will become a fully fledged picture?

The goal here was to have some interesting action with the character but to not lead the viewer’s eye ‘out’ of the image, rather, have their eye land back in the focal points of the image.

Ready to inflict some inJURIes. Hurr Hurr.

To be honest, I like the way that outstretched leg looks… even though it leads the eye out of the picture frame. I had experimented with tipping her toes to bring the flow of the image back towards the middle but that made the foot look a little odd. So, forcing the viewer’s eye back onto the image might not be the right approach. What do you think?

Character development and design:

EDIT: Very first draft added.

The first draft - all I had in mind was the pose

"Huh?"

Basic colour decisions - lots of pink!

I wanted to make her a blonde bimbo but apparently being cliche is dull.

Lots of charm, not so much going on upstairs...

Missing one image here actually, I’ll edit it in later if I can find it.

A quickish sketch done on my very speccy new toy.

Whee!

Drawing faces from low angles is tricky – in some ways the cartoon style amplifies the trickiness because direct photo reference isn’t as useful. Also I did kind of change gears halfway through so the face styles are different.

I really like her foot on the right… but I ruined it when I connected it to her leg. A few hits and misses throughout this picture – all part of a learning experience.

Started drawing a few of these last year, have continued at a slower pace this year. As you can see, I’ve started with the obvious: Eeveelutions, a bunch of starters (Cyndaquil and Totodile to come), Pikachu and Meowth, and uh, a duck. I like ducks, okay?

I’m hoping to print these off as fridge magnets. As soon as I can fill a page of them. (For reference, these are currently filling about a third to a half of an A4 page). They’re going to be totally rad and will stick to your fridge.

The four in the top right were done much less recently than the rest.

Each critter is inked digitally, then the lineart is enlarged by running it through a bitmap-to-vector converter. Some simple colours are thrown on, and voila! It’s done.

Since I’m planning to do more, I’d love to hear suggestions of which other Pokémon I should try. Let me know in the comments!