The Solo Gig

Last week or so I've been finishing up at my last full-time paying work, and now I embark on the solo gig.

Today was my first day where my time was not dictated by a clock and a timesheet.

I want to do some drawing every day, doesn't matter how much of it is teh sux - it just gots ta be done.  Here's some rushes.

Its the only way to free up the hands, and get the mind & eye really looking and seeing.  So as painful as it is getting back into it - has to be done.

Between doing some grocery shopping and checking the mail I stopped in at a local cafe for a coffee and BLT.  I sketched a couple of things around the coffee shop.

Now back at home, I had this old shot of me (from just outside the coffee shop a few evenings ago) shot at a funny angle with my cell-phone, and I thought I'd try doing a freehand sketch loosely based off it.

Drawing faces and heads usually follows a formula but for games and comics often the characters are in a strange perspective with the camera or eye positioned underneath (as in this picture) or above - with the character jumping or flying toward it.

When this happens instead of the eyes being positioned exactly half-way down the oval of the face as is usual for a front-on depiction, you get the eyes right up around a 1/3 or so from the top of the head.  That's where you have to use extra care to make sure the perspective and proportions are right.

I didn't like my real hair in this photo so I have gone for a more manga sort of thing, and the result is that the line-work for the hair doesn't look right.  Even though I wanted a "hair falling in my eyes" look, its too heavy over the forehead.  I think from this angle you'd kind of see up under the fringe: and that's quite hard to do.

Also in the under shot like this the tendons and muscles of the neck are more prominent and occupy much more real-estate in the panel.  The jaw & mouth is also more prominent, while the eyes - usually a focus - are smaller and further away.  Here I've made the eyes a bit too small and close together tho' that may be because the hair is framing the top of the head as being too wide.  For the from down-under perspective the head winds up being more egg-shaped: getting narrower at the top, and I haven't really done that here again because of the hair.

I'm using Manga Studio here so I could easily do some work to improve the proportions by grabbing chunks of the line work and moving it round, but as its just a drawing exercise for throwaway purposes there is no point in putting that time in.

I'm hoping this will be a baseline and future posts will show some improvement in my drawing.

Oh, and welcome to 2013.  :-)