This week I’ve decided to focus the Daily Doodle on one project. I’m going to put together a flash shooting gallery game using what I made while working on Fennec Fox: Gunslinger. Each day I’ll post some art and hopefully on the final day I’ll have a prototype to share. Here we see the first bunch of targets. Some are good guys and some are bad guys. The top row are their “alive” states and the bottom are what they should swap to when you shoot them.
Today’s doodle is based on Friday’s where I decided animate the little pin up girl character. I played around a lot with this one and could have kept adding stuff to the point of making it a video clip instead of a gif. I think for this exercise I should keep animations short so I can focus on making longer animations for bigger projects. This was just about the right length to enjoy working on for the afternoon.
A common drawing exercise is to make silhouettes and then try to form objects out of the shapes. Tonight I’ve been delving into abstraction. I’m not too comfortable with it, I think because I feel guilty when my drawings don’t resemble something, like enjoying making marks is self-indulgent. Then again there are plenty of artists who draw and then say, “You tell me what it means!”
Today I was going to try animating a little pin up character and I realized I should probably try designing one first. Here’s the sketch layer.
I experimented with different brushes until I settled on a sable. It’s interesting how a design can evolve as you draw it over and over. The head was going to be round and Betty Boop-ish but turned more heart or almond-shaped.
I really like this little character. I should keep drawing her and see what she turns into.
Awhile back I was going to draw a comic about gremlins. I figured they’d be a good thing to doodle and play with. I made myself a little list of ideas like elemental gremlins, animal gremlins, etc. and this is what I came up with tonight. Kinda got stumped as to how to make the animals into something unique. Should have taken a more abstracted approach of just scribbling shapes into something and then made them fit the theme.
I was going to try painting a closely cropped face using an underpainting so I could focus on values and colors separately. I was still distorting the drawing to fit the digital canvas so I figured it’d be a good idea to practice drawing faces off the internet. Some are more portrait-y and some are more caricature. The thing about doing a likeness is you can focus too much on reproducing something in a face that doesn’t translate into an interesting drawing. Then there’s times you get so into creating something with a drawing it doesn’t look like the subject anymore.
So I decided to try illustrating Betty Brosmer. I think my first mistake was deciding to jump into painting without finishing the drawing. I was eager to push color around and experiment with my Frenden brushes in Manga Studio. It’s only then you realize all the little things you should have fixed in the drawing. Perhaps I’ll do a smaller study to practice my rendering next time. I was also trying to eyeball colors instead of picking them from the photo. All in all it’s a bit too much to do for a daily doodle as it’d still require lots of time correcting/refining to finish and this exercise is supposed to be about sharing faster works.
Today I’d like to roll out something new I’m doing. Art is an activity like anything else. There’s exercises and warm-ups one should do before anything strenuous. I really want to be drawing every day but either life gets in the way or I’m in the middle of a project and it’s not drawing-related. So I’m starting a routine where I doodle something new every day. It can be an animation, a caricature, a portrait, a study, anything I want as long as I share one a day. Here’s the first one.
I drew this from a series of photos (11-26) in Scott Eaton’s Bodies in Motion, part 1. I’m fairly pleased with the result.