Crimson CHOW Challenge #51 - The Bone Weaver

[RottenPocket]

RottenPocket: My first initial reaction to your sketch was being super impressed with the concept alone, and the anatomy and what appears to be either really good traditional drawing on paper, or well done super imposed digital sketch work on paper texture. I really love the over all costume design of your character especially with how you treated the head of the character, the shoulder armor, and the mid-chest jewelry and adornments. Your cleaned up coloring and gray tone flats really have this piece looking fantastic without any shading which is going to make for a very powerful finished image when you do further rendering. I feel this is an important aspect for us all to take note that if the image can look this good at this stage it will only look that much more amazing once the value, and color are added.

Do you add your gray flats in straight away, or proceed directly into doing color flats, duplicating the layer, and then desaturating the original while keeping the duplicate layer as some form of transparent color layer to overlay your base colors over your grayscale work once value entry is complete? I'm just curious as this is something that I have been experimenting with myself and it seems to work rather well. Either way, great work, and sorry about the deadline extension; by the look of your meme you didn't seem to be to happy about it, as my educated guess was that you were probably putting the pedal to the metal to meet the deadline which I understand can be disappointing. Majority seem to have been behind this round so that is what made me pull the trigger in adding the extra weeks time for everyone to sort their druthers and hopefully bring their images to completion.

It is all Digital, using a textured adjustment layer and pencil brushes, I'm getting a good workflow in keeping my sketches looking like sketches. I have tried vectorizing linework but there's not enough life in it for me, and I like leaving evidence of the construction. Being all digital it allows me to manipulate elements more at earlier stages rather than the extensive time and work involved scanning in a finishing sketch then flipping it to see everything wrong with it. 


Some minor references to animal skeletons used, and ignoring their actual sizes. I do feel like I preferred the costume in an earlier stage of the sketch - with fuller shoulder armor and a cape rather than the finished costume. More time and planning next time and I would be able to compare versions instead of steamroll it like I did.

The tones usually go next, and they double as masking for areas, although this time I just applied tone to one layer. Sometimes if you block in general tones of elements, it makes it easier to start to develop the forms without getting muddy. This wasn't the best example, but that's my thinking behind it.

Once there's a good base of tones, I wash in colour, usually a solid base colour than soft brush accent colours. Cooler desaturated shadows, warmer highlights etc. It's a little bit of a cheap and nasty method, but it's kind of offset when there's a big enough sketch foundation. As opposed to people who start with a minimal base, then work predominantly on overpainting.

I had a massive couple of weeks, I though you brought forward the date i.e. made it earlier - which goes to show I would have missed the deadline and had no idea what planet I was on haha - ignore me.

I'm getting big Demon dog energy from ghostbusters on your creature design. Not exact in looks, but can picture it as a big animatronic.





--

I would say I have an okay approximation of anatomy. I observe it fairly well, execute it somewhat convincingly and consult references if I'm stuck, but I know there's room for improvement. I'll still take your flattery. I can recommend Patrick Jones and Sarah Simblet as two anatomy perspectives I tend to fall back on. Honestly you just have to keep creating. Learn from your previous works. No one gets good overnight.

--

@ Damien I use a Galaxy tab for this one all the way through. ClipStudio has a plan for android devices which if you can spare I think it's like $9USD/month for tablet, is really convenient. 

I also have a large wacom intous 4 sitting in storage. I tried selling it but I feel like it's very Apple-iPad-centric in my town's design circles... Plus I refuse to just give things away without knowing someone's going to actually use it. It's up for grabs. 

I can recommend NUC computers are pretty damn good. I bought a Beast Canyon and customized it for less than $2500AUD. It's been sooo much better than my $4k+ custom/franken-tower. 



--

I hope everyone makes the submissions!