Spike

So, the last of the characters, and my favourite of the men! Spike needed to look confident, strong but agile, and above all, threatening and a little bit dead. He is a vampire after all. I had a few problems at first, but eventually found a design I liked. Here are the initial sketches:






I then took this final design and did the base colours in photoshop (adding a background texture relatively quickly):



I again experimented with lots of textures, which was good because I was initially was going to use a leather texture on his coat, but found one much more suitable:











I had trouble choosing certain areas, so narrowed it down to a choice of four:






I then shaded with the colour burn too, adjusted the contrast a little, and ended up with my final Spike :)



So, now on to all the rest of the stuff. This week has been so stressful I can barely keep focused on what to do next, but we're all feeling it, but we'll all manage somehow :)

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 :/