More experimenting!

Eyyy, looks like it's the second part of my posting batch eyyyyyy. 

I also forgot to mention in the previous post on why I'm practicing coloring techniques. In general, I tend to find the coloring stage of any drawing I'm working on the hardest and most tedious compared to any other drawing stage. While I do very much love how the work comes together when its colored, I frequently think I should not be so slow or so annoyed at coloring in the first place. Thus this sudden influx of coloring techniques I'm trying to figure out to see which style I might enjoy more or at least learn some skills that might make my own coloring techniques easier to work with. 

Basically, I'm trying to find a coloring style I can work quickly and happily with. If I don't find one, then I'll have a whole bunch of techniques in my repertoire that I can use anytime. Win-win, I think. 

Sooo, this time around the guinea pig is Alistair in this post. He's in the same world as Alice.

This was another coloring technique I wanted to try out, though, again, I didn't quite manage to succeed with what I wanted to do. I was actually trying to draw a half-body (which I succeeded) with a some pattern decor integrated into the BG and the line-less character (which I doubly didn't succeed at) adapted from this drawing here. Somehow I lost track of what I was trying to achieve and ended up experimenting the opposite of line-less art which was hard cell-shading reminiscent to Tetsuya Nomura's works. I also gave up on the pattern design BG once I realized I was going in the complete direction I was supposed to go.

I very much like how the black cell-shading turned out since I don't do that often, but, haha, I was trying to figure out my goal here. Welp, at least I realized how much I enjoyed working with hard blacks and it took a huge chunk of time out of the coloring process so I'll be no doubt returning to fiddle with this style again.

This is a descendent of Alistair (Alex) and I have to admit that this drawing is...weird. This was my first attempt in a while to draw a human face without reference and I think the anatomy of this dude's features suffered because of that. No matter how much I look at this, it just looks really...off.

Bluh, that wasn't the point of what I was trying to achieve regardless. For this one, I was trying to emulate this illustration, but I got very overcomplicated in the end rather than the simple color scheme and blocking you can see in the original drawing. I think I did manage to work out the color contrast that I wanted to try out from the illustration, but, haha, I went my own way again in this experiment. 

Good news is that this didn't come out so bad, I think. I do like how I dealt with the shading, the color scheme, and some parts of the dude's features was pretty fun to detail. I'm absurdly proud of how his mouth and the collarbone area of his shirt turned out. Bad news is that I didn't do what I was supposed to do. Aggggggh. Welp. Gotta try again.

Compared to the others, this one was just for fun. I always draw Alistair as this depressing, solemn dude when he's actually just a mellow nerd, haha. So I challenged myself to draw him smiling. I also wanted to draw out some hair and a rabbit, sooo there you go. Fun stuff!