Cosmonaut Sketches 01

 

 

Couple of pages of work up sketches for a larger piece of cosmonauts battling it out on a lonely planet with the natives, which I'll post later.

Not especially happy with the latter one, but when you showcase your underwear drawer, you show all of it, worn out bands and all. The latter sketches I'll post ended up better than these.

Random Character Design Sketch Page

 

Not much to say here, just a random sketchpage I did a few months back while listening to comic book industry talk on Youtube. It's probably what got me to drawing the characters doing typical super hero crap in the background. I know it's what definitely got me to add the Google Streetview images: The person talking mentioned his old comic book hunting grounds as a kid, in... I think it was somewhere in Ohio, some little town. I like the storm cloud atmosphere in the pics near whatever freeway, so I thought: Why not have some superhero / UFO shenanigans going on there?

 

I have no idea what I was thinking with the Bond / Get Carter-style character with the gun arm though. The foreshortening is probably correct, but it doesn't totally "feel" correct. Meaning that it isn't jammed in your face Terry-Gilliam-style enough.

Beta Euthynus 5, plus sketches

Tone studies are killing me. Should have probably picked an easier environment to render other than the bridge of a spaceship. Part of the reason I'm doing these is to get the mind geared towards thinking about the lighting and environment when coming up with a composition; that and to try to vary from shot to shot the amount of space and distance being used. In short, to get away from close- and medium- and to feel comfortable with long-angle shots to convey the mood and acting. The challenge of having a somewhat detailed environment (which includes lighting) is to not shortchange it and to see it through to the end. Tends to make the work bottom heavy, since rendering the background's probably the last thing I get to before the tone work.

...Some sketches of our character during Happy Hour:

Beta Euthynus 4

Bit more comic panel approach to sell the idea of passage of time.

Beta Euthynus 2

Second page. Plenty of layers that were toyed with and thrown away in the making of these illustrations.

Beta Euthynus 1

Part of a series of cleaned and toned vignettes during the Halloween season. More to come. (The backlog of illustrations needing color is adding up.)