Welcome to a new feature on the site, Work in Progress Wednesday, where I’m going to be showing stuff I’m currently working on. I tend to have a couple projects going at a time and I think sharing my progress is going to be a good motivator on getting them done. It’s a good way to take stock of where things stand at the moment. I’ve done art posts before but I’d like to make this ongoing. Just remember all this stuff is in development and may change completely next time you see it. So lets get this party started.
Billy Badass
This is a webcomic idea I’ve been working on about an internet reviewer and his obsessive nostalgia for the 80s/90s of his childhood. I’ve been trying to design the main cast at various ages and make family members look related. Also trying to add more detail to the style than I normally do.
Playing with the logo for the main character’s review show. I really like the Magic 3D Photoshop Action, I just need to get better at placing things in perspective. Also debating adding some explosions or something to this.
7 Deadly Sins
I’ve been wanting to do a collection of scary stories for Halloween so I came up with some ideas based on the 7 deadly sins. I’ve been playing with some of Ray Frenden’s Manga Studio brushes and a few others here trying to step out of my comfort zone a little with digital painting.
Crafting Mines
I’ve wanted to start a Minecraft Lets Play series for awhile. You might recognize the name from a previous podcast/audio drama I tried doing awhile back. Right now I’m tinkering with animating the pre and post-roll bits to match up with this logo.
Blues Man
Here’s my first real attempt at animating one of my cutout rigs. I’m going to do a couple videos showing how they’re set up. I built this guy about 4 times or so as I switched tools and figured out better ways to set him up. The last was when I decided to get rid of the outlines except when colors overlap. I set them to appear dynamically which got complicated but should be useful down the road.
Here’s my second rig from this short I’m working on. I got really ambitious with the deformers on this one. Each finger on his hands have curves on them and the outlines also appear dynamically as well. It’s best practice to just swap the hand drawings out, and I probably will at points with this guy, but I want him to have really weird movements.
Here’s a couple frames of a shot so far. (The banding’s a result of the gif compression.) Debating if I should have the clouds wave any as they drift. Also not sure how I want the stars to twinkle in the background yet. That’s the fun of doing big projects yourself. All these little nuances you could spend an entire day tweaking that will just look organic in the end.
When I decided to make the characters line-free I had to reconsider how I was going to render backgrounds. There’s a lot of artists doing inspiring work with texture and brush strokes I’d like to learn from. This scrolling background is sort of in between styles right now. Background painting is it’s own special skill and I intend on developing it more.