fragments (design iterations 2)
Apr. 19th, 2006 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashMore sketchbook stuff. If you're seeing this in your friends list, you should read the commentary in the previous post to make sense of some of this.
The shadows on the lower figure are me playing with something Kieth Giffen did all through the eighties in what I recently discovered was his Jose Muñoz phase - face swallowed completely in shadow, maybe with eyes showing, and the shadow going down to a diagonal slash over the body.
I was into Giffen's stuff despite it being deep, deep comics wankery - Ambush Bug was humor by and for utter comics nerds - because of his use of heavy blacks. it turns out I've been a fan of deep, swallowing shadows in comics since before I really knew how to analyze the art. I just love characters who vanish into the blackness...
Me down at the bottom, yeah. In a dark coat and a B/W striped scarf. Which happens to be the Iconic Costume for Mary - though she wears many other things, too. When you're a half-human monster, dressing like the Shadow makes sense...
I don't fucking know. But it makes me laugh.
And then there's the other comic about a girl-become-monster. "The Drowning City". I suspect the time in my life to tell this story has passed. But this stretched-out, asymmetrically-monstery girl is still fun to draw.
Costume idea.
Lots more "Godshatter" stuff, playing with the head shapes and proportions. Sometimes she has human-proportion legs, sometimes big clawy toe animal legs. I feel like I should settle on one or the other, and I think it's going to be humany ones - though I have narrative reasons for her design to vary a lot, too.
Everything from here to the end of this post is stuff I did in ballpoint pen while waiting at the Social Security office to get a card with the new name, by the way.
Complete and utter redesign of another major character in "Godshatter". The half-remembered old design had her very tall and square. This is based on a kinda chunky girl I saw on the subway.
In fact, influenced by some cute and rather zaftig art![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dustmeat posted recently, I've decided to make her be fairly round. Variety of shapes is always good. Mary has the 'skinny/pointy/slinky' design note all tied up for this! Note that her head's a lot flatter here; I plan to vary and exaggerate the shapes some...
Back detail, random experimentation.
Gun detail. Costume fragments. Expression experimentation. I said one of the inspirations is the Shadow, and what's more iconically Shadow than two pistols blazing away? Except hers are Mystickally Charged, because all of her adventures involve demons, monsters, and stuff like that. I used to have some better-referenced explorations of her guns, but like so much other stuff, that was lost to Katrina.
People at the Social Security office. I used to have a lot of unflattering caricatures like this. People have the weirdest damn shapes, and it's so easy to forget that and fall back on idealized abstractions...
Yes, that's Scooby-Doo's logo-collar.
Tortured, dark heroes like to pose on decaying roofscapes. And more exploration of her girlfriend. I need to study how someone who doesn't have the skinny proportions I have can dress to show herself off...
You know how you occasionally see people doing cute girl versions of computers and OSs and battleships and stuff? The iMac girl picture and the like? Well, I've never seen anyone do that to the Powerbooks. I was toying with doing an anthro spider-girl styled after Powerbooks, since my machine is named 'Cobweb' and often acquires a female pronoun.
The problem with this idea is that Powerbooks are really just a rounded slab of aluminum casing. There's a few screws on the bottom, the speaker grille, and the light-up keyboard and Apple logo. That's it. I just realized I forgot the color-coded light on the power plug; maybe I should try and incorporate that.
The shadows on the lower figure are me playing with something Kieth Giffen did all through the eighties in what I recently discovered was his Jose Muñoz phase - face swallowed completely in shadow, maybe with eyes showing, and the shadow going down to a diagonal slash over the body.
I was into Giffen's stuff despite it being deep, deep comics wankery - Ambush Bug was humor by and for utter comics nerds - because of his use of heavy blacks. it turns out I've been a fan of deep, swallowing shadows in comics since before I really knew how to analyze the art. I just love characters who vanish into the blackness...
Me down at the bottom, yeah. In a dark coat and a B/W striped scarf. Which happens to be the Iconic Costume for Mary - though she wears many other things, too. When you're a half-human monster, dressing like the Shadow makes sense...
I don't fucking know. But it makes me laugh.
And then there's the other comic about a girl-become-monster. "The Drowning City". I suspect the time in my life to tell this story has passed. But this stretched-out, asymmetrically-monstery girl is still fun to draw.
Costume idea.
Lots more "Godshatter" stuff, playing with the head shapes and proportions. Sometimes she has human-proportion legs, sometimes big clawy toe animal legs. I feel like I should settle on one or the other, and I think it's going to be humany ones - though I have narrative reasons for her design to vary a lot, too.
Everything from here to the end of this post is stuff I did in ballpoint pen while waiting at the Social Security office to get a card with the new name, by the way.
Complete and utter redesign of another major character in "Godshatter". The half-remembered old design had her very tall and square. This is based on a kinda chunky girl I saw on the subway.
In fact, influenced by some cute and rather zaftig art
dustmeat posted recently, I've decided to make her be fairly round. Variety of shapes is always good. Mary has the 'skinny/pointy/slinky' design note all tied up for this! Note that her head's a lot flatter here; I plan to vary and exaggerate the shapes some...Back detail, random experimentation.
Gun detail. Costume fragments. Expression experimentation. I said one of the inspirations is the Shadow, and what's more iconically Shadow than two pistols blazing away? Except hers are Mystickally Charged, because all of her adventures involve demons, monsters, and stuff like that. I used to have some better-referenced explorations of her guns, but like so much other stuff, that was lost to Katrina.
People at the Social Security office. I used to have a lot of unflattering caricatures like this. People have the weirdest damn shapes, and it's so easy to forget that and fall back on idealized abstractions...
Yes, that's Scooby-Doo's logo-collar.
Tortured, dark heroes like to pose on decaying roofscapes. And more exploration of her girlfriend. I need to study how someone who doesn't have the skinny proportions I have can dress to show herself off...
You know how you occasionally see people doing cute girl versions of computers and OSs and battleships and stuff? The iMac girl picture and the like? Well, I've never seen anyone do that to the Powerbooks. I was toying with doing an anthro spider-girl styled after Powerbooks, since my machine is named 'Cobweb' and often acquires a female pronoun.
The problem with this idea is that Powerbooks are really just a rounded slab of aluminum casing. There's a few screws on the bottom, the speaker grille, and the light-up keyboard and Apple logo. That's it. I just realized I forgot the color-coded light on the power plug; maybe I should try and incorporate that.