saetoart

Long post is loooooooooong

2009-05-30T13:41:23Z

Very loooooooong compilation of sketches behind the cut.

I have nothing to say, except OOH DEATHCLAW! <3

Humans galore

2009-03-29T12:49:49Z

I've been drawing people lately. Fear!

A friend asked what my chimera characters would look like as humans, so I drewed them. :D

And again.

The faces are Dublin, Janice, and Ed's human form, and a friend's character (Talathia) to the side. I really need to start working on expressions now, because everyone just looks pissed all the time. :D And they're getting more and more cartoony. Gotta stop that.

These are a bit older. The designs (and the style) has changed somewhat.

Pic for Tala again. She jumped on the bandwagon and decided on a human form for her wolf character.

Playing with Painter 7. I like the sky, but that's about it. :D

Another pic for Talathia. I don't draw anime so Ed looks weird, but whatevs.

saetoart @ 2009-02-25T14:06:00

2009-02-25T19:12:28Z

Yaaaay shark.

Oooold. Never scanned it for some reason.

I dunno.

Lineup of the main characters from my comic. I still have to ink Janice still (she has no hand! OMG) and add two more characters.

We did this comic at Concept Group on Sunday. I did the first panel, Meghann did the second, then Jamie, Jessie, and Alex. We did others, but this is the only one I kept. :(

I'm alliiiiiveeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

2009-01-26T09:32:43Z

I've just been....busy.... *eyes brand-new Xbox360* ...:D

This was drawn in 2006. I just found it while searching through some bins for my tax info.

So I decided to do a more dynamic sketch of him. Whee. This character is also in a WIP .psd I've had sitting on my harddrive for an age and a half. Dunno if it'll ever get finished.

...This has to be the scariest thing I've EVER drawn. GUH *claws eyes out*

...NOW FALLOUT TIME IS GO!

My character, Adam, with Dogmeat, the dog companion you can get in the game. Unfortunately, my doggie didn't last too long. Something about a Yau Guai, I think...

I loves me some Charon, but he dies too damned easily. I had to give him up in favor of Fawkes, the walking tank.

Some ghoul wastelanders. Ghouls are people who have been exposed to so much radiation they look like walking corpses (Charon's a ghoul, too, obvs). They're so fun to draw.

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Man, I seem to have a thing against drawing people's arms and legs. TORSOS FTW.

Sketches

2008-10-13T23:32:16Z

Blargh.

Boredness. The guy up in the corner with the glasses is my painting teacher, Jon. :D

Characters sketches for my sequential art project.

In-progress piece for Digital Imaging, using Illustrator.

Sketches

2008-09-28T13:35:48Z

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee *dead*

Sketches for my comic book class. We have to take a published script that we haven't seen before and do three pages. I'm doing Fell issue 1, by Warren Ellis.

These things gave me so much trouble. Ugh.

Random sketches:

The last two are for commissions. Blargh.

Sketch dump

2008-09-11T00:40:21Z

There's no excuse for this drawing. >.>

Unfinishedness, yey.

RAWR.

BEWBIES.

Tyrannosaurus painting

2008-09-02T01:57:43Z

Took a trip to the Field Museum in Chicago recently, and got some good sketches to work from.

I haven't scanned any of the sketches, but I did use one to start the drawing. I forgot about taking screenshots until I'd started painting the skin, though.

I'm focusing on the face at this point. The light's coming from the right side, so I was able to show shadows cast in the mouth by the teeth, something I happily swiped from James Gurney. :D

Started blocking in colours for the background. I got rid of the purple by creating a new layer beneath and erasing it.

Painting more of the background, whee. At this point I realized the purple was a bit too purply, so I did some colour adjustment on the dino.

Adding smaller details, like the pterosaurs in the sky.

Finally done. Added some more details, tightened up a few things, and called it quits. Total work time was somewhere around three-four hours.

Designing lizard characters

2008-08-30T03:07:33Z

After doing a couple of commissions for people with lizard characters, I've discovered a couple of things that help to make your character a bit more believable.

This was the first lizard character I'd ever drawn- he later became one of the main characters in my comic. At the time, I hadn't drawn many lizards before, and I hadn't used reference for this one, so the face is off.

Next time I drew him, I used more references for the face.

I don't usually draw breasts on lizards, for obvious reasons, but this was a commission. Since this character was more full-figured than usual, I didn't bother with the loose skin and such you usually see.

I think that's all the major points, but let me know if I missed something.

saetoart @ 2008-08-25T08:19:00

2008-08-25T13:02:52Z

I have a few different methods of painting, but for this post I'll focus on the style I like to use for anthro/fantasy character designs.

Most of the time I'll start drawing directly into Photoshop, since I tend to draw better with my tablet anyway, and I don't have a very good workspace in my apartment for drawing (it's tiny). The first sketch is always very messy, and for this example I didn't save a .jpg of it, so we'll go straight to the lineart:

These are my friend Talathia's characters, done for a recent trade. The cat is Aubrey and the dog is Yepa.

Luckily for this image I had some pretty good guidelines to go on- Tala had done a very loose sketch of her own, and told me specifically what she wanted. In this case, the two were running through a forest at night, so Aubrey had to be in the foreground and Yepa slightly behind and off balance, as though she were being dragged along.

If you ever need references for poses, Posemaniacs.com is a great resource.

I used a slightly different technique than I usually do by using the paint bucket to fill in the linework. After that I went back and did highlights with the hard paintbrush, then smoothed it out with the soft airbrush. I like this style because it's almost cell-shaded, but not quite; like an animated movie or something.

The boots were referenced from various pictures on Google image search. The rest of his clothes were pretty generic, so no refs were needed.

Next came Yepa, using the same techniques. Her shoes I referenced from my own, and I designed the rest of the clothes.

About the background: I generally create a new layer below the lineart, fill it with an appropriate colour, then merge the two. It wasn't absolutely necessary for this picture, other than to save my eyes from the white glare. In others, the fill is used as an underpainting, and to help me choose a colour scheme for the overall picture.

I finally started in on the background by creating a new layer beneath the characters, using the magic wand on the purple fill and getting rid of it.

As you can see, at this stage the characters are far too bright for the background. Well, that's easily remedied.

Creating yet another (multiply) layer above the characters, I changed the opacity to something like 20% and chose a medium blue for shadows. I hid the character layer to show the shadow layer.

Finally, I added a black border to make it resemble a still from an animated movie. Dunno if that worked well, but I like the final result.

I haven't done much more of this colouring style yet, though I've started a few pieces:

A better example of the base layer fill before I start building up shadows and highlights.

Well, I hope that was enlightening and/or useful. Next time I'll talk about designing anthropomorphic characters- specifically, lizards and rodents.

First post.

2008-08-24T22:04:30Z

My other Livejournal is private, and I've come to realize that there might be a wider audience for all the little sketches and artjunk I post on there regularly. So, I'll try to post more often to this blog instead of spamming my friends and DeviantART page with my sketches and whatnot. YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT, BABY.

This post includes a lot of older art from my harddrive that I either never showed anyone or completely forgot I had.

These were character designs for my children's book class. No matter how hard I tried, they always came out looking like rats.

Random character design. I had a dream about this woman for whatever reason. She was a magician/shapeshifter who turned into an owl.

I don't like to draw traditional females. People get hung up on how pretty or sexy a female character is, and character development goes out the window. I like a girl who can kick ass, and doesn't give a shit about how she looks.

Random creatures.

Character development sketches for a commission that got canceled. Apparently, it wasn't cartoony enough. GO FIGURE.

Scary sphinx is scary.

Early sketch of my comic book character, Dublin (not his real name). He always looks far too young, for whatever reason.

Liz and Saul, looking extremely stiff (and unfinished). They're two main characters from my in-progress comic. I was mostly practicing my inking skills, which apparently atrophy when you don't use them. Nuts.

OMG so cliche. This was originally going to be gift art for my friend, Talathia, but I don't think I even got around to showing her (SORRY BB!).

Sketches of Gwydd, done to prepare for a trade we did last year.

Failed Hexadragon designs.

These two were approved.

Random landscape.

SEPHI-ROS!

Alex, from Runaways.

I don't generally post my pictures of humans, mostly because I'm not all that confident when it comes to drawing them.

Man, this one is really really really old. You can see why I gave up on it. I just couldn't figure out the angle of the leg at the time, and though I could probably fix it now I just don't really feel like it. MEH.

AND THAT CONCLUDES THE FIRST POST. YOU MAY ALL REJOICE NOW.

Next time I'll show examples of how I colour, from sketch to finished piece.