Sketches 12/28/15: Mecha Fun Time

Soldier mech.

Casual sketches for possible Mercenary Mechs.  10% "serious consideration of role of mech in world" and 90% "this looks cool, let's try it".  It is by far the most enjoyable of any sketching.

Samurai mech with lightning/EMP super-sword-weapon.

Gunslinger mech, with extra targeting radar in the "hat" and shoulder fins.

Knight lancer mech with rockets.  Lots of rockets.

Stealth mech with its only (albeit extremely powerful) weapon stuck in its torso.

Super Acrylic Nebula, Part 2

Made some more progress on the acrylic rendition of the "tracer bullet" nebula, I darkened the interior gases of the nebula and the open space beyond it.

Mercenary Mechs: Challenger Jax

This is Challenger Jax, main mech of the Mercenary Mechs story I'm currently working on.  Piloted by a crew of two, it's built for assault operations and for taking on and repelling enemy mechs.  It is armed with reinforced fists and frontal armor, two laser apertures (one in each forearm), and twelve missiles, set in packs on either side of the head.

The original design for Challenger Jax was a little more ridiculous in size, as in 14 stories tall.  Like this:

Mercenary Mechs started out as "giant robots vs giant robots".  I developed it and thought things out for a while, and scaled the mechs down to 3-4 stories/15-20 meters high (capping one story at 5 meters tall).  It works better, and fits the setting better...but if I had the chance, I would paint the original pose again in a heartbeat.

Reaper's Moon

Going for that atmospheric, bleak feeling only black and white ink can provide.  Not a whole lot else to this one.  Death is my go-to subject when I'm bummed...maybe not the best idea, but it's what I do.  You've got to grab the emotion while you have it, and get its form down on paper.

Dragun Knight

Credit for this idea goes to my friend Zach.  He had an idea for knights who were awarded or armed with pistols or rifles which had been spelled with the powers of dragons.  The resulting creation he termed "Draguns".

I like the idea, as you can see by my sketch of it.  It could fit a variety of scenarios.  The knights use the power of hostile dragons against them; the dragons have lent the knights a portion of their power; the mages stole the dragons' power and gave it to the knights, and the dragons are greatly aggravated because of it and declare war, and on and on.  Silly, but fun enough that it's worth the silliness.

I mean, it's a knight with a magic pistol.  What's not to like?

Infantry Mech, Finished

So here is the finished Type 21 infantry mech drawing.  I've got more of an idea what I want for this mech now, and the characters associated with it (pragmatic, blunt, mercenary, survivalist, suspicious).  It's not the final design, but a step in that direction.

I started it with a ballpoint sketch, and colored it with Prismacolor colored pencils.  The lightest tones, from the primary light, feet, and reflected light were Cream, Beige, and Cloud Blue.  The midtones were mostly in Warm Grey 30% and Cool Grey 50%, with Cool Grey 70% helping out in the areas to be shadowed.  The dirt splotches and dusty tone around the legs was with Light and Dark Umber.  The secondary light was done with Blue Slate.  For the darkest parts, I used additional Cool Grey 70% and Black, and used Ultramarine to hint at the secondary light on the dark parts.

Infantry Mech WIP

This is the "Type 21" (working designation) mech from Mercenary Mechs.  While not literally an infantry mech, it is much less flashy, cheaper, and easier to produce than the other big (i.e. main character) mechs.  It is meant to be fielded in numbers, and to take losses in place of more valuable forces.  In this way, it is an "infantry mech" of a sort.

Medium is colored pencil over a pen outline on Strathmore smooth Bristol.  It's more of an experiment than anything else, I wanted to see how the two went together.

Sketches 11/9/15: Sniper-Mech

Not much to tell this week, testing out a new sketchbook that can fit the scanner.  This is the sniper-mech from the Mercenary Mechs story currently under way.  I hope to have something to present in a month or so, story-wise, stay tuned.

Super Acrylic Nebula, Part 1

Yep, I'm taking one more shot at the Orion Nebula and its "tracer bullet" nebula bits.  This time it's acrylic on canvas, and much larger than the previous two paintings.

It's going to take a while to finish, with work and other projects taking up my time, but it's good to paint in large scale again.

Synthashredder

Crashed this out in about an hour.  I call him Sythashredder.  He's a deadly combination of keyboard musician and cyberpunk warrior, and travels the undercity searching for dive bars with the proper auras to play his groovy tunes.

That's all for now, folks.

Heroes of A Thousand-plus Faces

You know what happens when you let old, dear characters you made up years ago stay around for years?  You get too many ideas for them, too many to fit in one story, maybe (probably) too many to fit in all of the stories you could ever write.  Too many sides to their personalities, too many possibilities, too many storylines, too many character developments, too many endings...you get the idea.

These four are some of my most dear, and most troublesome characters, with all of the issues mentioned above.  From top to bottom: Victor, who has been a jet/starfighter pilot, villain, military-pal-in-reserve-or-on-leave, and general amusing chinstrap-wearin'-party-animal.  Xavier, who has been a trucker, an adventurer, also a starfighter pilot, a bush pilot, and nominated Most Likely to be Main Character Someday.  Reyna, the leading lady, close friend/sidekick/romantic interest for Xavier, sometimes a waitress, sometimes an adventurer, and sometimes a starfighter and mech-suit pilot.  And Jasmine, Reyna's younger sister, who was the jack-of-all-trades support character, cute freckled redhead, and once was an evil overlord (overqueen?) commanding a space dreadnought.  And now I'm considering merging her with another character (a vaguely defined commando or cop) to make a totally new Jasmine.

Long story short, I have my beloved, dorky-teenage-years characters still hanging around, and if they want a story I've got to decide what to keep and what to prune.  On the bright side, whatever gets taken off can potentially be used for other characters...and the cycle will begin once again...

Super Gouache Nebula

Take 2 on the orange-blue nebula idea, and I am pleased with the results.  Instead of towers that look like Dr. Seuss-themed gummy snacks, the pinpoint glow effects and stars are sharper, the streams of gas and dust are more defined, and the contrast is much greater.

Gouache is a step in the right direction.  For a truly proper rendering of a nebula, I believe acrylic on a large canvas would be the most appropriate method I have on hand.  Oils would be the best method, except I don't have any oils and have zero experience with them.  I appreciate the masterpieces done by other painters, but I myself am sadly impatient, and so use faster-drying mediums.

For comparison, here's the watercolor nebula painting.  I discovered that my reference photo was of the Orion Nebula, and that the blue "tracer bullets" are globs of nebula material shooting through space.  They are described in detail here.

(The gouache painting was scanned with my new scanner, the Canon P-208II.  It's a tiny portable scanner, it got the colors almost exactly right, it can scan up to 600dpi, and the only downside so far is it can't scan anything wider than 8.5 inches.)

Scythe Aesthetics

So this guy happened to my old scanner, which is now dead and gone.  The new one should be arriving any day now.

Death, as "the Reaper", gets a lot of variation in treatment in artwork.  The angle I find most compelling I would describe as realistic, solemn, and with careful elements of high fantasy added here and there.  Realistic and solemn I choose because Death is kind of a Big Deal.  He's the end of the road, the gatekeeper to the next world, the law no one escapes.  He should have an air of gravitas, solemn and grave (pun not intended, I swear), because of his position and responsibility.

Elements of high fantasy I choose because that's me, I enjoy coming up with fantastical things.  I specify "elements" because one of my pet peeves is a cartoony Death with a cartoony, overly ornamented scythe.  It's not the ornamentation I take issue with, though, it is the degree to which is it applied.  I would depict Death's scythe with a degree of decoration similar to a sword, or a wine goblet: it's polished enough or has just enough gems to show you're a person of importance, a knight, a noble, whomever, yet that polish or those gems won't get in the way of the sword or the goblet fulfilling its intended function.

Death I imagine as someone who wears the uniform (or robe) and tools and accessories of his position, and leaves it at that.  He wears them.  They are just ostentatious enough to show he is Death, the Reaper, and that is all.  He doesn't flaunt them or show them off, he goes about his duty and that is that.

A last note...if you take Death's scythe literally, as a farmer's scythe, it would be curved out to one side to fit around the farmer's body, an element which I incorporated it into the picture here.

Climate Control/Telescope Dish

The scanner died this week, so it will be digital art until I can get it replaced.  I busted this out in about forty-five minutes, just goofing around with an idea.  The big dish there is a kilometers-wide climate-control device, the world's most ambitions radio telescope, or some combination of both.  And something's gone wrong with it, otherwise there wouldn't be a fleet rushing to take control of it.

Soldier Sketches

Free time was pretty thin this week, but I was able to get in some sci-fi related studies.  You might be drawing imaginary stuff all day, but if you want it to look good, keep drawing from real life.  Life drawings are good.  Photo reference is good.  You have the Internet, you can dig up almost any photo reference for anything.

Developing Ideas: Sky-Ships

How does one develop an idea for an imaginary/fantastic/sci-fi picture or story?  I ask myself a few questions in one form or another when I want to take an idea beyond idea/sketch level:

1. What kind of story am I telling?

2. What is the theme (visual and narrative) of the story?  How is the idea connected to this?

3. Where does this idea fit in the story?  Whose side is it on?

4. Additional concerns? (Tech level, geographical location, materials...you know what, I'll link you this handy article by James Gurney, creator of Dinotopia, on "visual backstory" for sci-fi and fantastic art.  He explains it way better than I can.)

Whether these questions are asked and answered consciously (like a list) or intuitively (like arranging shapes and seeing what meanings or images or additional ideas they bring to mind), the point is they are answered somehow.  And this brings me to the point of today's post: how I developed these "sky-ships" and how I might develop them further.

So, the sky-ships.  Let's put this idea through the list above and see what we get.

1. The sky-ships in question are part of an action/adventure-military-sci-fi story that is currently itself mostly ideas and a few written fragments.  These ships are primarily intended for combat in the atmosphere of their planet.  Whether they can go into outer space I haven't decided yet.

2. The theme of the story with the sky-ships is partially complete; it would focus around naval combat (in the sky, of course) and typical air combat (fighter planes and such).  The tone is heavily slanted towards the "military" in military sci-fi.

3. The sky-ships in question–the shark-shaped ships and WW2-era ships with wings–are the good guys.

4. With these particular ships, I want them to have the clean, sleek, fiercely predatory lines of sharks (less obvious in the WW2 ships, way more obvious in the shark-ships).  I want them to look aggressive and threatening, no soft goody-two-shoes vibes here.  They're military ships, after all.  They kill to defend their nation.  It's their job.

Another concern is the tech level of the story; I haven't yet decided whether I want it to be "retro-future" with historically-inspired ships, or just out-and-out-distant-crazy-future-shark-ships.  This is just an exercise, however, we don't need to chase all the rabbits down their rabbit holes...not yet.

With this in mind, I can condense all this information into a few key points to describe the ships to myself:

- Sky-ships: need to look sleek enough to fly, powerful enough to force their way through the air, or both.

- Military sci-fi: matte colors, camouflage patterns, few frills or ostentatious decorations, use real-world naval vessels and vehicles for weapons and technical greebles, make obvious differences between different classes of ships.

- Good guys: ships in good/clean condition (with appropriate weathering), sense of order and discipline on ships, flags flying clean and proud and well-kept, use shapes that are appealing and are not unnatural and strange.

- Aggressive: sleek lines coming to sharp points, take inspiration from sharks and real-world ships, use basic shapes to create impression ship is lunging forward, mount weapons nearer to bow of ship, use basic and secondary shapes to evoke aspects of predatory animals or weapons, repeated use of triangular shapes (sharp and aggressive).

The result of these considerations, conscious and unconscious, were multiple pages of idea-dumping sketches, where I simply drew out any concept that seemed related to the project.  The two pictures above are examples of that.  After that, I had the chance to look over the various sketches, pick the ones that really fit my idea, and refine them.  And that's how I got two particular pages of sketches, one of the retro-future WW2 ships, one of the shark-ships.

The retro-future WW2 ships give the impression of being heavier, less advanced designs, vessels that have some streamlining, but mostly rely on sheer engine power to take flight.  They would be suitable for a retro-future setting, something I very much want to write.  

The shark-ships, with their sleek, modern lines and streamlined mass, have a more futuristic feel to them.  These are the ones I would more likely write up as being capable of spaceflight.

Most of the time, this process takes place semi-consciously or unconsciously, right when I'm drawing in my sketchbook.  I'll build up ideas I like, and if I can connect them to a story, or see a potential story in them, I'll take the next step and start consciously developing them to fit into a narrative.

I hope this helps you with creating and developing your ideas.  See you next week.

Super Cheez Nebula

This was meant to be a deep-space nebula, to look at least something like a prismatic, ethereal nebula.  What it ended up as is anybody's guess.  When I stepped back and took a look at it, the phrase my brain came up with was "malevolent Swiss cheese".

In hindsight, painting a deep-space scene with watercolor was my biggest mistake.  Space is a black background, you can't glaze anything over it.  You need something opaque, like gouache, acrylic, or digital media.

All that said, I'm not too disappointed with this painting.  At least I know what not to do.  I'm going to give this another whack, with gouache, and see how it turns out.

System Split

We have liftoff!  Here I go with my fine art and sci-fi art becoming independent blogs on their own, on different missions, yet still on good terms.  Just like sister ships.  Whether you've followed me for a while or are new, welcome aboard!  I'm glad to have you here.