Comics

Watercolour Wednesday: Ushala at World’s End

Posted on 2 Comments

The last painting for Blaugust! (which is spilling into September because my original schedule had the lineart for this teed up for last Friday).

Ushala at World’s End is a fairly new comic which I’ve had the pleasure of reading since not long after its debut. I’ve actually scribbled Ushala a couple of times before, if not drawn inspiration from her design.

This painting dates from around April (and is what you would have gotten as my cop-out post if I was feeling too lazy to do a new painting)

img204

Whilst this marker sketch is a little more recent. It’s not really Ushala, but I’m pretty sure I had her in mind when I was drawing the skull and huge hair.

img203

 

My favourite part of Ushala’s design is her nose! It’s closely followed by her crown.

 

Ushala

 

Watercolour Wednesday: The End

Posted on Leave a Comment

We’re getting closer to the end of Blaugust and my enthusiasm has visibly waned. Truth is I have content for at least a couple of the missing updates, but I can’t quite get things together to my satisfaction. Anyway, let’s have a look at this week’s fanart, which was also almost a no-show. Fortunately my attempts to procrastinate ended up spurring me into this piece – I was doing some watercolour scribbles and decided to turn it into the painting for the week.

Last week we had an alien – Zurida, and this week it’s another alien – Ethma from The End.

Ethma

Because this started out as an unrelated sketch, I had to do some work to coax the composition and colours into the final image. I had a bit of fun with the vivid colours in the shadows, but I think my attempts to introduce darker tones didn’t work across bird-Ethma’s face.

Watercolour Wednesday: The Superfogeys

Posted on 7 Comments

We’re going from green hair to green skin this week, and over the week I’ve learned that I should have drawn Trigona with three fingers. I make up for it today.

Today’s piece features Zurida, alien villain from The Superfogeys, a comic about superheros somewhat past their prime. She’s accompanied by her son, Percy, as they walk past [spoilers spoilers in fact the rest of this post is probably going to be spoilers].

Zurida

This art depicts a scene that I imagined occurring not long ago in the story (although after showing John my pencils, he questioned whether or not this might actually have happened, I simply retorted that I wanted to draw it so there)

I had a good time thinking about what might be running through Zurida’s head here. Is she proud of her handiwork? Is she just getting on with the task at hand with no time to be sentimental? Perhaps she feels a twinge of regret – not because she’s done wrong, but because she’s granted Michelle eternal youth, while she herself has grown old.

Speaking of old, I did put in a token effort to portray Zurida’s age, but it was all quite secondary to getting the perspective and foreshortening right.

Finally, I liked the juxtaposition provided by Percy’s presence. He has an innocence and dumbness about him, in this picture he definitely wants to linger a bit longer and let the cogs in his head move as he makes the connection between Michelle and his mother.

 

[edit] Argument settled. The whole time I thought Zurida had been running things out of the Society of Heroes, but no, duh, it was her palace.

Watercolour Wednesday: Beeserker

Posted on Leave a Comment

Today I reveal the other common thread between the characters I’m featuring this month – their names all end in “a”*. Today’s character is Trigona Ambrose, from the comic Beeserker. She’s featured here with the Beeserker and Scootsie – or better known to some as Imposter Minineko.

beeserker

Where are the Scienceman Twins? I don’t know! Maybe they are too busy with their new game or something.

The artist behind Beeserker is an old buddy from the depths of the internet ages, and an inspiration to all who aspire to maintain regularly updating blogs. Kyatt’s blog, Burn the Internet updated daily for five years until he decided to retire it from daily use on its fifth anniversary. Secretly I’m a little relieved, as I have a habit of checking Burn the Internet once every few months – or more – and forgetting where I’d last checked up until, inevitably leaving me reading the archives until 3am in the mornings.

Moving to this picture after last week’s painting was interesting. There were certainly some common threads – both comics feature robots and restricted colour palettes, though the kinds of colours available are quite different. A lot of what drove the direction of this week’s painting was the fact that I started the art tonight, so I didn’t want to be ambitious. I went for bold colours and lines (I used a sharpie for some of the inking!) and didn’t worry about fancy backgrounds. I’m pretty pleased with the result.

 

*Initially I planned to feature five ladies with three-syllable names ending in “a”. However I wasn’t very excited by two of them so they were cut. Bad luck Rumika and Marina.

Watercolour Wednesday: Rita

Posted on 1 Comment

Some progress on my Decrypting Rita fan-art, which I first previewed on Friday.

naturale edits

On the left – the art as-scanned. On the right, I’ve experimented with digitally deepening some of the shadows. Not quite happy with things yet, but it’s late and time to head to bed.

I was really not sure how I was going to tackle the colours for this one, considering the source material’s approach to colour!

I just had to conquer my fears and dive into it. I got a chance to use some new brown ink (the result of forgetting to empty my wallet before entering an art store), which I’ve used in the shadows across all but Rita1. I was thinking it’d work well to unify the colours across the image but I decided not to use it with the blues.

I reckon I’ll try out some more paintings with the new ink, might be good for some life drawing studies.

Meanwhile I need to work out how to get darker shadows with my watercolours. It’s been a problem in my last few paintings. Might just need to use black ink for it.

Fan-Art Friday: Decrypting Rita

Posted on 2 Comments

This month I’ll be featuring fan art for five different webcomics. The plan was to do inks on Friday and watercolour them on Wednesday, but I might end up using Wednesday for different arts.Anyway, there are a few themes for the characters featured this month. They’re all ladies. Many of them have layered personae or alternate identities.

The most complicated of these is Rita – or Ritas – from Egypt Urnash’s aptly named Decrypting Rita. The story revolves around the reality warping adventures of the various Ritas. Frequently told as multiple stories in one, the comic employs many clever visual tricks to keep the action moving across the four main realities.

I started the thumbnail for this one on Tuesday, when I realised that I wanted to substitute Rita in for one of the five characters I’d be featuring this month. The scribble quickly evolved and suddenly Rita went from being the week 5 post to being the first one of the month.

thumbnail

The thumbnail has been done over a couple of other scribbles – the figures in the middle right and in the top left are part of completely separate ideas. (One of them is a sketch of someone on the bus. The other is just a figure extrapolated from random lines on the page)

Here’s the picture transferred to watercolour paper and inked. I completely winged the fingers because I’d left the hands as mittens in my sketch. Mostly I think I got away with it except for Robot Rita’s right hand.

Inks

 

Ruby Slippers

Posted on Leave a Comment

Here’s some fan art for the marvelously fun and kitschy webcomic I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space! Lots of comics seem to be having planned breaks in the last week or so, and I was hoping to do fanart for other titles. I only got one done – I’m glad it was this one.

This was going to be a fan-comic to fit in with where the story was up to when it ended the last chapter. Then I realised my punchline had already been used in the comic, so I went on to just make that punchline into a nice painting.

Response

Posted on 1 Comment

Pencils for a comic page based on this dialogue.

This initially looked like it could easily be two or three pages but since I was having trouble identifying the best places to split the pages I challenged myself to fit it all in one. The dialogue’s pretty dense as a result. It’s funny how right I was in places about the space the text would take, and how so very wrong I was in others.

Interpreting the text and turning it into something visually interesting was tricky too. I didn’t want it to be talking heads the whole way through the page so I injected some personality, emotion and body language. In fact the driver behind this interpretation was the visual of Cedar’s outstretched arms as he displayed the marks on them to Nirri. Of course I then gave him an outfit that changed his movements doing so, but I’m glad I didn’t stick steadfastly to the original image in my head.