Post Mortem?

I'm a little tired of gaming ideas that I flesh out but don't have the technology, patience or time to make them happen. Here's a model sketch I did of Garilon to try and get his run/walk cycle animation.



And here is an uncolored 8-frame walk cycle of Garilon. I love how it turned out, personally. I hope to use it someday!

The standoff

Here's a thing. I may color it. When I run out of other things I want to do.

Midnight Mansion Fan Art

It's been a long time since I've drawn a character from Midnight Mansion, and I'm working on a website revamp for Action Soft.



This is what I drew as a top-bar graphic for the new MM site. Here it is.

Super Hyper Robot Boy Extreme Special: DX Ultra

While going to sleep last night, I flashed on yet another game character and concept. I banged out a character sketch. Ultraman meets Iron Man meets Mega Man meets Astro Boy meets Super Deformed proportions.

Garilon Squared

I've been working on the Character model for Garilon. Trying to fully realize a model that can be animated and drawn from multiple angles easily.



I'm pretty content with the model, despite some of the perspective problems in these sketches), but of course these two show massive inconsistencies, something that would have to be ironed out before attempting any real animation with the character.

Garilon vs. Ice Raven

Been re-imagining Nightmare Castle from the ground up, starting with the main character, Garilon. I talked about my first Garilon design in a previous post.

Here, I tried to draw a scene of Garilon fighting the Level 3 boss from Nightmare Castle, the Ice Raven.



I'm seeing some severe perspective and anatomy problems, but I like the overall composition and will probably try and fix it up and finish it sooner or later.

For reference, here is a screenshot from Nightmare Castle:

Poorly executed

One of my biggest problems as an artist is my complete lack of consistency. This stems from me not drawing NEARLY enough. I'm lucky if I get a good sketch in per week, when really I should be doing 5-10 a DAY. I'm hoping to carve out more of my time in the future.

Here's an example of a drawing that I think is okay, it's just very inconsistent (and has anatomical problems among others).

This is Spy Jupiter. This is just digital inking over digital sketching. The tentacles aren't filled in, so the outlines may get confusing... I think it's a neat pose and a neat situation for him to be in (entagled in some tentacles that seem to organically grow out of the walls). One thing I notice is his right arm's foreshortening. And his neck may be too long.

And, this version of Spy Jupiter goes "off model", even though technical there is no model for the character, it's all in my head.

Part of growing is adapting, and not copping to a particular "style" until all the fundamentals are there, but it's hard for me to do any kind of art for games if I can't distill my character designs into something you can refer to quickly. Consistent proportions, angles, outlines, etc.

I think a good exercise for anyone (and I'll try and do this) is to first, draw a simple character model (front, back, side and 3/4 pose). Then, for about 10 days, draw that same character in one new pose per day, staying as close to on model as possible, warming up with 20-30 quick gesture, skeletal sketches of the character to get a feel for how that character carries his weight, how he walks, and generally what makes him stand out from other characters.

If I get past some of this drawer's block I've been having, I'll definitely give it a shot.