Some samples of my older work, since someone requested it...

Highlander_77

I decided to make a new post for this, because I don't think anyone is reading the old thread anymore... ( http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=28025 )


Ok, Creambun asked for it, so here's some of my vintage stuff (be careful what you wish for ;-)


These are basically all character design sketches and such that I did for the comic book ideas that I was working on with my friends many years ago (the drawings I'm posting go back about 10-12 years....one or two may be 13 years old...anything older than that isn't even worth showing).

One thing to keep in mind is that one of the major ideas we were working on was a comic featuring a lot of characters who had been genetically altered using animal DNA, so you'll see a lot of half-animal/half-human type characters in these sketches.


One of my personal favorite characters that I designed...though for reasons that I can't really explain in a reasonable amount of space here...



Same character, later drawing



Same character again, this time engaged in combat with another one of my character designs (big black tiger-man type creature...)




Yes...this character has a man's body and a shark's head. I feel I should point out that this character was not my design (though I suppose I had a hand in it, since I interpreted it from the very crude sketches and descriptions provided to me by the creator of this character). Still...there are some things I like about this drawing.



Your basic wolfman type character....the actual character is more interesting than his design might indicate (again...not my design), in terms of the story and personality we had come up with for him.



Lion-type dude. This one was my design, for what it's worth.



Dragon-man! My design, I like this one.



That's it for the animal type characters...

Kind of generic barbarian type...I was working on a medeival fantasy story. I don't remember if this sketch was supposed to be a specific character (if it was, the character evolved a LONG way from this), or just some guy with a loincloth and sword...



A villain I had come up with for the fantasy story. Kind of rough drawing, but there's some things in it I like.



An elf-girl for the same story. This was one of many rought sketches I did of this character...never really came up with a real stable design (in other words, she changed every time I drew her...I had a few other characters like that too).



Not really a specific character, but a basic design for a dragon-riding knight (of which there was going to be a small army of).



A female vigilante type character from a different story.



And finally, this one was one of my favorites. This was someone else's basic character design, but again, I had some influence in it since they couldn't really draw at all.




So...that's a good sized sample of what I did many moon ago. I suppose you can critique them if you like (both the drawings and the character designs...there are many issues with both, I'm sure), but I don't know how relevant the critiques would be given how long ago I drew these. Still, looking at them I can see that there are still some things that I did back then that I do more or less the same way now...so I may still learn something here.

jazzman1302

i like em. They have have a little bit of a realistic touch. i wish i could draw. do you have a base for each drawing or do you sketch free hand

Highlander_77

jazzman1302 wrote: »

i like em. They have have a little bit of a realistic touch. i wish i could draw. do you have a base for each drawing or do you sketch free hand

I'm pretty sure I did all these free hand. I don't think I used any sort of reference for any of these as far as I can remember (this is going back quite a few years). At one time I would occasionally look at a drawing or picture and "swipe" part of it to use in one of my character design sketches. But that was early on, when my drawing pretty much sucked and I couldn't get a character to look decent any other way. By the time I did the drawings I posted here, I had pretty much outgrown that sort of thing.

Creambun 007

These are great! It's always fun to look back on your old stuff and see how far you've come. Your most recent stuff is better executed than this old stuff, but other than some minor made up anatomy (very minor) and smallish hands/feet here and there, I really dig them.

Highlander_77

Creambun 007 wrote: »

These are great! It's always fun to look back on your old stuff and see how far you've come. Your most recent stuff is better executed than this old stuff, but other than some minor made up anatomy (very minor) and smallish hands/feet here and there, I really dig them.

You really think my newer drawings are better? That actually surprises me...I feel like the linework was a lot cleaner in many of these older drawings than in the stuff I did recently...I'm hoping that will just return with practice as I gain more confidence in my drawing again (everything I'm doing right now tends to look a little loose and "sketchy"...like I'm drawing everything with very small pencil strokes, instead of longer, continuous lines).

I do think that I'm better at doing hands and feet than I was back then, which actually goes a surprisingly long way to making a drawing look more professional. On the other hand, I feel like I'm having a harder time drawing heads and faces than I used to. I need to go back and study some of my old technical notes (I have a whole folder full of anatomical and structural studies that I did back in the day). I also recently picked up Burne Hogarth's "Drawing the Human Head", and I definitely think I need to study that as well.

Doctor Pain

thats a lot of furries. i liked the first wolf chick, but then it just gets kinda repeptitive, i just dont like the whole furry thing, the drawings are good though, your lines could do with some work, like line weight, just make the lines darker, for closer things, and lighter for things further away, stuff like that.

Highlander_77

Doctor Pain wrote: »

thats a lot of furries. i liked the first wolf chick, but then it just gets kinda repeptitive, i just dont like the whole furry thing, the drawings are good though, your lines could do with some work, like line weight, just make the lines darker, for closer things, and lighter for things further away, stuff like that.

Ok, a few things. First of all, and most importantly...they're NOT "furries". I personally find the whole "furry" thing strange and somewhat disturbing. These were characters for a comic book we were working on. They're humans who have been genetically altered to give them super-human abilities by merging their DNA with various animal DNA...which had the side-effect of causing them to take on certain animalistic physical characterstics (to varying degrees). And she's not a wolf-chick...her story was basically that she had been altered with a particularyl advanced DNA "cocktail" designed to give her the best traits of several different types of animals.

As for the actual drawings...keep in mind I did all of these anywhere from 10-13 years ago. I'm definitely aware of some of the flaws in these drawings...I'm hoping that with a little more practice, I can do much better than these now.

Creambun 007

You're already doing better.

Your new work might be looser than these old drawings, but apparently your ability to observe proportions and the like has passively improved during your drawing hiatus. The line control will return in time, so no worries there.