AfricanVoodoo's Sketchbook

[AfricanVoodoo]

Oh! *winks unsuccessfully* Hello there. 










(Art): Yay i did it!




I went from this...

To the images you see above and it honestly shouldn't of taken me so long to do it but here I am, y 'know? I was a little more structural at the beginning (I low-key like the first drawing I did) but then I said fuck it and started practicing the art of storytelling in a figure. I pretty much had Hampton's thought process in mind while doing this. 

As I went along with this project, I shifted my goal flag from "draw women more" to a "think more about proportions and placement" which is what I really suck at right now.

I mean, I still want to draw more ladies, I didn't abandon that goal because I really don't draw girls a lot. People actually like girls and girls are cool so fuck I need to start getting comfortable drawing them y'know? I'm inching closer and closer to just getting girls to look right, so... progress is nice. 

 I hated that my heads looked too small or too really small big on their bodies (and that was always an avoidable mistake) yet I didn't think about how to fix that. I thought I could just wing it and see if I can get it on the next figure. Obviously not bitch. In the future set of 50, I gotta do some quick measurements during the rough sketch phase so the head wouldn't look so dumb. 

Obviously, there are takeaways from doing this. I actually got more comfortable drawing women for my character designs. That elf girl a post ago? I was surprised to see myself finally incorporate a woman in my fantasy and medieval type shit because I always wanted to do that. I just didn't want to fuck it up. 

Also, my idea on human proportions were heavily adjusted because of this project. I looked at my older sketches that I did during my junior year and I IMMEDIATELY noticed that the bodies look fucking squashed. What I mean is, their ribcage and pelvic region is incredibly close to each other. To make it worse, I put long legs on them so now they just look dumb (which I seem to do on every... single... character that I draw. Even dwarves. I draw tall dwarves yes indeed...)

In retrospect, the fact that I noticed something like this without actually looking at reference at the time makes me happy.





(Art): A bunch of doodles and the beginning of some exploration on Garius's face (more on this later). I kind of let loose on the shapes this time, which is pretty therapeutic. I like the blob face exercises that you see on Youtube, I used to do those. I should get back to it.




So, my writer friend is into DnD (god help me) and he literally drags me and his other friends into doing a session whenever he can which is very funny because the majority of his friends get really fucking bored of the game. I'm pretty neutral about it, but it does make me wonder why he conveniently have so many friends who doesn't even enjoy the game. 

He dragged me into playing this last year.

(Art): So the first (and only) character I have is a Dwarf Cleric named Baern who is Neutral Good (? i dunno remember). My character's abilities consist of missing a fucking lot, always rolling 1s at the beginning of fights, never talks and only there to heal, and spamming Sacred Flame cause it never misses.

So this is my interpretation of him. None of this stuff is final, but it was a fun exercise to do.
(Oh shit, this was the "tall dwarf" i was talking about gasp)





(Art): Oh that demon looks cool.



(Art): Another wierd line-less illustration on Manga Studio. I have no idea why I like doing these but I lost interest in this one unlike the red dude. So that is why her hair is kind of... not on her head. I would like to do a blue dude sometime.



(Art): Bunch of sketches of the same character in the same position. I did these because it genuinely bothers me when I draw a character, then I try to draw them again and it looks slightly different. This was just an exercise to see if I can analyze and draw this boy's face right every time. My favorite face is the second face on the top row from the left, so I used that as reference. 

I never believed the whole "as long as it looks like the character, it's on-model". Yes, all of these sketches do look like Garius, but it's going to bother me if I can't make him look nearly identical every time y'know?






Watching that Sinix video on how to present your sketches was a blessing and a curse. A blessing because he introduced me to just scanning black pieces of paper so you add texture to the sketches in Photoshop so nobody has to just see a blank page with drawings on it.

And it's a curse because now I am going to spend hours just editing and arranging stupid sketches just for Instagram. You could say that I don't have to do all of that but here is the thing...

no

(Art): One thing that I am doing now is actually coloring the sketches, and then using pure white lines for highlights (well... not in these since the Multiply layer fucked up the white lines and all it did was erase the color) so the sketches will pop out more and it will give the image a more traditional look (kind of). This way of doing lighting reminds me of actually good drawings on Toned Tan sketchbooks.

ok im done bye