New Over Old

Oh man, this is going to be one of those blog posts where I'm going all over the place in terms of what I am working on.  I do so many things that are considered art each week that sometimes it's hard deciding on what is worth sharing and what is not.

Before I start sharing some new pictures, I'd like to direct your attention to the blog for the new video game project I've recently joined. I mentioned it in the last post, and I've yet to determine where I should be posting the work I'm doing for it so for now I'll be refraining from putting anything here on my personal blog.

Ok, so I have some new things and some old things. Let's start with the old.

Remember this?

I did a little more work on her face. Fixed the nose which was off to one side too much. Added more detail to the hair and to the face as well. Fixed up the overall shape and made some other adjustments to the placement of things.

I've realized over the past few years that my general style for drawing people and in particular faces has become more and more set in stone. By that I mean, it's not evolving as much as it used to in the past. Possibly because I've become more comfortable and confident in how to draw faces and I'm not erasing and rearranging things as much as I used to. Either way, there's definitely a consistent and noticeable similarity now in how I draw faces (except of course when I am purposefully trying to stylize things), and I have yet to decide if this is a good or a bad thing.

And now for the new!

Well kind of, actually everything I have to show this week is work on old/previous projects that I'm improving. But, it's new to this blog, so I'm counting it as new.

I originally drew this in pencil and ink over the summer. This week I have started trying to color it digitally. I am constantly starting new digital drawings mostly because I'm trying to develop the skills and techniques for doing them. It's something I've always wanted to learn but have never really had the time to devote enough energy towards to become consistently efficient at it. I decided to try a different approach for making the base skin tones in this one and so far I am very happy with it. I quickly realized that same method would not work as well for the cloth unfortunately and ended up with the not-so-successful pink sash around her waist. I'll have to redo or at least change up the cloth so that it looks better, but for now I have to focus on my 3D.

Which brings me to my shading final. I'm repurposing a character model I made earlier this year in my high poly class and will be shading it using mostly procedural and some image based textures.

She's not my favorite model, in fact I actually kind of hate the model. I just don't think I did as good a job in making her as I could have. I fixed her up some for this project before UVing her. I am still not happy with her fingers or her feet (although her feet used to be much, much worse) but I am hoping that if I do a good enough job on her textures then I'll be more inclined to salvage the model.

This is my first time using sub surface scattering, and in my opinion I have not been very successful so far. I've gotten it to a much better point than it used to be, but she looks more like she is made out plastic than actual flesh. I am not trying to make her 100% realistic, but even so I really just don't like how her skin looks.

I still have a lot of work to do on her, and every time I work on it it looks better which is always encouraging. I'm still not in love with it yet, but it's getting there. Hopefully by the time I have to turn her in two weeks I'll be at a point where I am happy with it.