Quick Character Studies

I'm always drawing some sort of character. I can't do music at the moment, so i'm expressing myself with the pencil. These are all just quick drawing, nothing real special. I usually practice positions and anatomy.

It's kinda faint, but you can see how I go about building the frame for my characters on the bottom right of the page. To start, I scribble a little bit to plot out some type of silhouette. Then, I go in to building shapes. That's just one of the ways, It's all depends on if i know what I want to draw or if I have nothing in mind. I might use cylinders and spheres, sometimes. Like I said, how I start depends on the ideas in my head. If I do some sort of environment design, I start out with pen and pad with small thumbnails, then I got to photoshop to work on a bigger pic.  I'll upload some at a later date.

More Quick Sketches

Everyone's favorite bat. Just a quick simple version. Really, it was just a gesture of a man with it's arms folded, that i was doing for practice, and I turned it into Batman (because I was bored with the sketch).

Again, another quick sketch in between working two jobs. I try to keep my drawing skills going. Doing music and art, my creative mind is usually split. I figure, 10 to 15 minutes, at the least, should be done a day to keep my art skills up. I'd love to have an hour, or two, or more, if I could. Music is my soul, like art, but it's different when it comes to writing music.

When I sit down at my desk and start writing music, like art, I try to clear my mind of what I've seen and heard, to truly come up with something unique. With music, rhythmically and melodically speaking(when it comes to notes, rhythms, and cord structures) i try to pull from my feelings at the time, rather than a thought. Really, that is what music is, a feeling, one that is embellished on over and over again through out a piece, one feeling leads to another. A rhythm  inspires a melody, vice verse, inspires a feeling (in any order). Words, or lyrics, are where many get confused, i think. I think its impossible to come up with any lyrics before you come up with a beat or melody. You can come up with lyrics, but for it to totally jive with a beat or melody, you have to come up with the lyrics to a particular beat or melody. Rhyming patterns and words might not mesh with whats going on rhythmically with the beat. Then, like always, a beat starts to play, and heads start to nod, and the feeling and words you had before the beat played, seem to leave your head and a new feeling arises, which leads you to different lyrics (Well, atleast it does for me). You're truly not riding the beat, if you are going from a predetermined structure that had nothing to do with the feeling the beat brings.

Back to main topic,  I get so bored with pen and paper, but you got be able to throw lines digitally and traditionally, these days. I started drawing and the new Star Wars movie popped into my head and I tried to visualize a character. They recently had a casting call, in my home city of STL, calling for people ages 18 to 23-25(i think that's right), to play some street tuff characters in the movie, so I came up with one on my own, using that for inspiration. The part I got bored with, is when I got to the light saber. I started thinking of my cpu and photoshop and how i could make this a glowing light saber in it and stopped, due to visualizing a bigger picture. This is definitely one I am going to develop further in photoshop.

Past work

Some other past work

 Just a character i did to get some practice in on sculping in 3D

One of my first 3D modeling attempts. This one was for a class assignment in maya.

Wip Sketch

Yeah it's Halo inspired, I'm a big fan. Been working two jobs and don't have my equipment set up, due to moving locations, so i decided to do some hand drawn work. I definitely miss my photoshop and pen tab. There are endless possibilities when you use photoshop that you just can't do with hand drawn, like zooming in to a pixel, and the infinite color pallet. Prismacolor markers are just too expensive when it comes to having a true unlimited color pallet. I use .3mm led and .1mm pen, but nothing like zooming in and doing fine detail. Sorry for the delay, slowly getting media together to show, thanks.

Portfolio WIP's

This is a character I was working on in my art binge. I started the sculpt in Autodesk Mudbox and moved it into Pixologics Zbrush. At this point, in Mudbox, I had about a million and a half polys going and really couldn't get any more details into the sculpt unless I retopolgized the mesh. So I took it into zbrush, used one it's new features "QRemesher" and started back in on the sculpt. There's a couple of different ways to handle retopology, but while I'm in the middle of a sculpt, QRemesher is the way to go. Can you say, "saving time and energy, for real." 

When it comes to character design, I tend to start with the head when I have no clue what I want to make. It's usually a bad idea though, sometimes. I say that because, sometimes I lose the theme or the feel of the head. I think it's better to do what a lot the industry designers are doing, and that's working with thumbnail silhouettes first. Hey, but sometimes I'm feeling the mojo and jump right into sculpting, instead of pre-planning in 2D first. I'll post a shot of what i did in Zbrush sooner, than later.