Jake Shimabukuro plays "Bohemian Rhapsody"

Blah.

A quick preview

Today I've been working on some concept sketches for the character redesigns, and one of the sketches I've been working on is an action scene with three of the main characters, Stanto, Adam, and Chimbly running from a troll.
Just a quick preview of the image so you know I'm still alive!

 
In other news, drawing with the tablet:

The art of Stanto Pigwalter: blog 1

So, my normal style is very cartoon-y, with very little regard for anatomy, perspective, or realism.  It's fast, fun, and it communicates the message I want to get across.

For The Adventures of Stanto Pigwalter, I had decided to fuse my normal style with a slightly more realistic take, since a lot of the story is quite serious and action-packed. (Though it certainly has its fair share of slapstick and humor to balance that out.)

One of the invaluable resources I've been using for a long time is Edweard Muybridge's Human Figure in Motion, (published in 1955 by Dover Publications, it has since slipped into public domain and is available for free download in PDF form here.)  For the artist who loves thousands of different facial expressions, I recommend Mark Simon's Facial Expressions: A Visual Reference for Artists.  This book is not available online (at least not legally,) but if you can order it through Amazon, it's very much worth it.

Muybridge's famous photographs have helped aspiring artists for years to be able to grasp the nuances of the human figure in motion (aspiring: too poor to pay for life drawing classes) and has been an invaluable addition to my own collection, as my style (as stated before,) is not necessarily the most realistic of things.

Anyway, since I'm gearing up to start re-drawing The Adventures of Stanto Pigwalter, I figured I'd share a little concept art I was fiddling around with this afternoon.  Now, the art itself isn't any of the characters from my story, but rather a self-portrait.

First of all, I take the photographic image (here blurred and censored in case there are younger readers in the audience.)

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Next, I take the image into Photoshop (this can also be done on paper, but I feel that I've grasped the Wacom tablet enough now that I can begin to do this digitally,) and draw an armature over the original photo in non-reproducible blue (again, I picked this habit up from my time doing this by hand, where actual non-repro blue pencils are as good as gold when sketching.)

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Here, we can begin to see the way that the musculature works, and we can begin penciling in some of the finer detail, to be reproduced in our final linework.  At this stage, I add in the face and begin the process of shading the image.

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Finally, when the sketching is done, I turn off the armature reference and do some light correcting to get the proportions correct and the shading process along.

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Finally, when the shading is through and matched up to the original photograph, I can turn the photo layer off and finish up any detail work that still needs to be done.

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Et Voilà!  The finished piece.  As you can see, it has a sense of realism while retaining some of the cartoon-y quality of my normal artwork... and that's really the point, at the end of the day.  An artist should never attempt to ape someone else's style entirely, not even if said style is the realism of a photograph.  In doing that, the art loses any quality of life it may have had in it.  An artist can take a photographic reference (or really, any reference,) and apply his or her own style to that reference, to make the piece his or her own.  The Adventures of Stanto Pigwalter is the largest project I've ever worked on, and I hope to bring a whole new artistic edge to the piece.

Penciling, Inking, and Adventuring.

So, those of you that have known me for a while have inevitably heard me mention the project I've been working on since 2003, The Adventures of Stanto Pigwalter.

The idea for the story came to me in Iraq, when a friend introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons, showing me how character creation, adventuring, and character development is done.  Stanto was born that night, when I wrote down his name for the first time; I plucked it out of the air, a gibberish mishmash of syllables that would grow in my mind steadily over the course of the next eight years.

Concept Art - Click to Embiggen

Originally, Stanto's tale was not going to be drawn; originally I was planning on writing his travels down in novel format, but after I realized that I had absolutely no gift for writing believable prose, I scrapped it in favor of a graphic novel, or novel in comic book form.
Stanto started out as the generic Luke Skywalker-type character, a simple farmboy that had adventure thrust upon him.  I realized of course that the Luke Skywalkers of the literary world have been done to death, so I instead took the premise of a simple farmboy and turned it on its head, changing him from a farmboy to a morally bankrupt thief who used "innocent farmboy" as a cover story.
I've always been a doodler, an amateur cartoonist, but working on this comic for the last eight years has taught me a lot about anatomy, visual dynamics and how to make things POP on paper.
I'm still very much an amateur, but Stanto and his merry band (who in the intervening years have swelled from three people to over ten,) refuse to give me a moment's peace until I get it down.
I'm very honored that such a cool story idea chose me to bring it to life, and I can't wait to start bringing Stanto and his adventures to you.

Watch this space for further developments and news.

Adventures in Teaching 01-22-2011

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This message brought to you by the Dean of Academics, reminding you to GET BACK TO WORK.

Adventures in Teaching 01-21-2011

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Presented without comment.

Adventures in Teaching 01-20-2011

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Disclaimer: No, I do not have a totally rad Helvetica tattoo, nor is this nonexistent tattoo written in the wrong typeface, but I've actually been thinking about doing this for a long time.

In a parallel universe, this conversation actually happened.

Adventures in Teaching 01-19-2011

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I swear, you mess around with HTML code and it messes with you back; you start seeing everything how it would be coded in a computer and even your conversations sound different after about ten or twelve hours of poking around in the stuff.
Anyone out there have a similar experience?  Is there anything else that gets in your head like this and refuses to get the heck out?

Adventures in Teaching 01-18-2011

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Yeah, don't be the jackass that ends up doing this.  Always keep in mind whether you're writing on your board or projecting on your screen; if you mix the two up, they tend to take it out of your paycheck.

...Not that I'd know anything about that personally, of course.

If you could master one skill what would it be?

Kung Fu. I'd love to be able to knock a rhino through a brick wall with my pinky.

Ask me anything

formspring.me

Ask me anything http://formspring.me/smeagol92055

Adventures in Teaching 01-17-2011

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Hi, and welcome to Adventures in Teaching, my new comic blog!
Here I'll share comics, stories, and occasionally graphic design advice.  Also available will be a Formspring link, found here, for anyone who wants to ask me any questions.  Graphic design, life, cooking, whatever's on your mind, ask away!

-S