Giles

Giles was also very difficult to do - I didn't want him looking too cartoonish, but he is the most caricatured of the five characters, so his design needed to show this. These were the couple of sketches I came up with.





I liked the last one so decided to colour it up - here are the base colours in Photoshop.



I then did my usual texture experimentation, and came up with the following:












I then pick my favourite of those and came up with this:



Which I then coloured, using the burn tool which is not ideal but has worked well so far, and ended up with this final design, which I am happy with - he is tall and thin, bookish looking to reflect his wisdom and intelligence, with long thin fingers to turn the pages of dusty books, yet his large chest allows for his deep voice and authority.



Spike to follow, my favourite so far ;P

Xander

So, I've found he's the most difficult character to sort out, and it took my a while to work with him, but I think I'm pretty happy with him now. Here are the sketches and inked up designs I worked with.







I forgot to save the base colour image, so let's just skip to textures: here are the 10 different versions I chose between.












I then chose my favourite textures out of those designs and put them together in a final texture lay up, which I then shaded under. So this is my final Xander design (though it will be redrawn slightly)



Giles and Spike to follow :)

Finalised Buffy?!

So this is where I sort of was with the Buffy design - very slowly getting there but really not happy with how it was all sitting together, so I decided to give it another go.


So I tried a slightly different approach, but neither of these really fit the character. But I did like the bottoms of the trainers and the lower waistband of the jeans.


Then I drew this one, and really liked it, except for the face. I decided to scan it in and see if I could fix the face on photoshop - pretty unusual for me as I'm usually too scared to draw anything straight into the computer XD


So this is the base colours of the character, with the cleaned up lines and face - looks pretty cool, sort of graphic novel-y :)


I gave her a quick background that contrasted nicely with the basic colours :) pretty fun.


Next step was experimenting with textures - the next four are some of the combinations I tried.








This was the final texture combination I chose - different from Willows and pertaining to Buffy's character and idea.


Then I did some burning for shading, seems to work for me :) though I'm not 100% about the jeans.


So yeah, I'm quite happy with this - I'm hoping the tutors will be too, but even if not, I kinda need to get on with the other characters lol

In other areas, I'm making good progress on my (now traditional) backgrounds for the animatic, have laid out all the 133 slides for my visual journal and looking forward to colouring in Sian's film :D Unfortunately, I also have A LOT of stuff to do before I'm anywhere near finished with anything, so it's going to be touch and go as to whether or not I'll finish in time :/

Character Overhaul

So, you may have seen in a previous post how my character work wasn't going too smoothly. Well, I am still struggling, BUT all is not lost as I've had some nice progress and am quite happy with the direction I'm heading in now. The best thing is, so are the tutors :D Having them support my designs and able to see the potential in them is very encouraging, so hopefully I'll have a lot more work done soon. In hand with that I figured I should put up the work I've done so far, so that you can all see how it's working, and hopefully give me some advice on how to go further with Buffy herself, and (when I get some sketches up) how to do the men.

Anyway, yes, here are my recent sketches of Willow, now finalised, and WIP sketches of Buffy, still designing.

This is what I did when I was still working on the old designs. I liked the colours so stuck with this palette, but as you'll see, the character is completely different.


I did a number of sketches to get to this point, but I didn't really want to put them up on here lol basically I started elongating the figure and making her more humanesque while still trying to keep the flowing proportions on her hands and legs, and the teardrop shape of her torso. She changed quite a bit, obviously, and it took a number of sketches to get her to this form. But I really liked it, and decided to fine tune it until it was ok for finalising.


I tried a coloured one to see if it would work in pencil but it was too rough and the colours weren't quite right, so I felt I'd just do it on photoshop.


This was the pencil sketch I did of her that I really liked - I'd done one or two costume versions and this is the one I preferred. I then did a very quick colour on photoshop to get the colour palette right, and then tried simple burn shading. A texture improved it too, but I decided I really wanted to go all out on textures and really explore how 'stop-mo' I could get it.


This is my first version of the final Willow. It's only from the same quick sketch, so I'm going to redraw and ink it properly, probably in a number of poses too - the reason I put a black pen link on is because some of the outlines were spoiled by me not selecting things properly. I liked the black line in the end though, and will ink one in for the final, though probably not as thick. I like this colour palette, and the textures were really enjoyable to do - this is encouraging for me as I really want to follow that type of career path *colourist and sequential artist* ^_^ but yeah, I like this, but lots of improvement to be done.


Buffy I am struggling on. This is what I drew when I first knew my old character designs weren't going to work - I went entirely the opposite and made her completely human with an odd head, which just didn't sit right. So I tried to meet the designs in the middle from then on.


This is the collective sheet - as you can see I'm very unsure as to exactly how I want the character to turn out. I know I want her to have chunky upper arms and legs, to represent her strength and speed as a fighter. I'm happy with her hair and mostly her face, though things keep moving around.


This is just one that I accidentally left off the collective sheet. I quite like her shape though, and it is a rough idea of what I'm leaning towards.


This is a horrible quick colour in to see if the shapes would look ok fleshed out a bit. Of course, the shading is horrific, the outline is grey for some reason and the perspective kills me lol so I'll do a new one asap that's done nicely like the Willow on :)


So yeah, that's around where I am now, and I'll try and keep you updated on the rest of it.

Quick Tests Dump :P

Here are a few more experiments for Beth. I'm going to be redrawing this anyway, along with doing the three or four that Mat's drawn up, but I just wanted to do some quick tryouts for different things. I'm just starting the scraperboard title shot, so in a few hours that should be done :) hopefully anyway lol. But yeah, onwards and upwards :P