Woo! I'm back! Sort of.

Hello, hello again! Life's been unpredictable and busy lately, so I haven't had much time to draw or post as much as I wanted to. Still, it's about time to update this blog so here are some of the drawing experiments I've been working on here and there.

I drew a bunch of old OCs for these experiments, so you'll be seeing this gal, Alice, popping up quite frequently in the next couple of posts. Long story short, I wanted to work with gradient shading and contrasting colors to see how fast/well I could finish a drawing. I also wanted to try out a "glitter" effect from a tutorial by krakenface on tumblr.

The color scheme and gradient effect was a lot of fun to do. I've also always enjoyed working with gold-like/shiny effects so all that glitter and golden lineart on the clouds made me pretty happy. Bad news was that I did not work faster than usual in this coloring style. Perhaps the slowness was lack of practice from working in this way, but I found myself frustrated at times at how much forethought I should have had in coloring certain areas for the gradient work. It's definitely different and more technical than working straight on the canvas for, say, digital painting. All in all, though, I do like the end result and there's no doubt I'll be revisiting this coloring style later on.

Alice again except I wanted to try out drawing clothes on her solely with white lines. I saw the effect on other people's drawings and I thought that was a nifty way of creating form without reinforcing it with darker lineart. So this popped up and I really like how delicate the white lines make the lace on Alice look. This technique also wasn't too hard to do except for a bit of thinking on color management to make the white pop out well enough against everything else.

This is Alice with Alistair, her predecessor (kinda). This was another experiment with gradient coloring except I was mostly aiming for a sort of duality picture showing two characters being part of the same coin. I got the idea from a fantastic illustration by paradise008. Funny story is that initially I tried to do the same kind of design paradise008 had created, but somehow I got off the metaphorical tracks on that idea and apparently decided to just slide down a hill of confusion. I ended up with this instead, which, haha, makes the point of what I was trying to do kind of moot. 

Still, I did enjoy how I managed with this drawing. I especially like how both characters' movements echo each other except in different directions and in different motives as well. I was also trying to show a past/present duality, too, and I think I managed that with the faded colors on Alistair. 

So, all in all, got the meaning across, but not so much on what I was trying to do in the first place. Aaaah, I gotta try again!