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.)

Click to Embiggen

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.)

Click to Embiggen

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.

Click to Embiggen

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.

Click to Embiggen

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.

Click to Embiggen

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.