Look Up at the Sky - quick sketch and application of colors

9:08 PM EST

While playing a game, my character happened to look up at another NPC. Instant inspiration!
It took a while for me to figure out what sort of scenery the character should be in. A waterfall? A large floating rock in the sky or something similar? Then I got the sudden idea of stars. 
From how the sketch turned out, this might turn more of a comical digital art style rather than realistic.

11:18 pm EST

I decided to quickly finish up this rough drawing before finishing work I started on (such as the Sun Staff concept...) If anything, I'll go back to this one and build on it when I take a break from the other works. 

colored, blue "tint" (opaque layer over colored layer)

Color balanced, saturation adjusted

Leap, Jump Forward - brainstorm, sketch and testing colors

5:15 pm EST

Working on another concept. I couldn't find good references for what I wanted to portray originally so it's a little altered. Originally the concept was a person jumping, from a far back point of reference, forward. 

You can see my brainstorming on the sides. 

6:15 pm EST

Fixed up the sketch before making dinner.

Thank goodness for the flip image option in Photoshop! I was able to fix the image right arm and the face, for the most part. 

The background is kind of simple at the moment; I don't know if I want to add more detail or keep it simple. At the moment, I'm thinking of keeping it simple, most likely a water pond.

11:18 pm EST

I've added a little more detail to the background and tried out some colors.

Originally I was going to revert back to a 'values first, color overlay and multiply over those values' method but the colors didn't quite look right. It could be that I didn't smooth out the values very well so that could have played a part in it. 
For now, I've decided to paint on base mixes of color on one layer, at 70 % opacity and then make more layers of overlays and multiply when I need shadows.


But right now... I need to sleep, I keep yawning to the point of tears.

Spirit - character concept WIP

1:26 AM EST

I'd say more of a re-character concept. The original "Spirit" was created months ago and displayed a blonde girl using her control over water, to create a water spirit version of her. 

Somehow, it didn't seem quite right in how I portrayed her, so this version is a new Spirit and shows her more cheerful side, before her darker side comes out when dealing with enemies, such as her "evil" siblings.Her darker side comes from her worry over the many bad possibilities her powers allow her to do, which come into light when her brother took control over her body and powers. 

I might as well explain what I mean, for character back story...

Spirit's back story - in progress
Her sister and her barely survived a fire breakout in their home. (I haven't figured out if the parents survived or not.) Their much older brother was away, let's say.... work?
Somehow (haven't figured out how yet), Kathy McClain (temp. name for identity of "Spirit") and her younger sister, Sasha McClain survived but how they survived caused a break in their relations. Kathy, used her control over water to escape the fire but left her sister behind. As a result, her sister breathed in too much smoke and thought to have died. However, something happened genetically for Sasha and she was able to alter her physical body into a smoke/gas form, which allowed her survival. But because of this betrayal, Sasha has vowed to bring Kathy down. 
Her brother on the other hand, was unaware of Sasha's survival and accidentally found out Kathy's control over water and its similar chemical states (gas/air, liquid/water, solid/ice). Unfortunately, the brother wasn't really a "good guy" and developed weapons and tech for people who used them for the wrong cause. Kathy found this out the hard way when the large group (good guys) she worked with mentioned her brother's name. Developing tech to take control over Kathy and her powers was easy for the brother, so he used her powers to put the whole world at ransom. He found out Kathy had a very large amount of control over her powers and the strength and deeds she could perform such as causing tsunamis and causing people to suffer through intense heat and humidity or worse, droughts. Devin, the brother, started to wonder why she didn't tap into this sooner or even bothered working with the good guys when she could use her powers to get whatever she wanted. Fighting his control, Kathy found out where her brother was hiding and the organization and her arrested Devin and removed the control chip he had implanted in her during her first visit to his "office". 

Sun Staff concept - up next is the character!

12: 21 AM EST

At the moment, I'm more or less satisfied with the background, though that'll change when I come back to detailing the background. 
Additionally, I adjusted the hue/saturation of the background so far. 
When I come back to this, I'll start working on the character and then when that's done, I'll go back and go over the background and fix up any details (as well as zoom in  a lot ). 

The image below shows the color balanced version, with hue/sat. adjustments. The image on the right shows the hue/saturated version.

Sun Staff Concept - more progress made to background!

10:01 pm EST

Roughly 1.5 - 2 hrs spent on background from my most recent update on the artwork (June 5th blog entry).

I started fixing the water of the background, then the bridge, sky and finally the city. I'm so glad I can finally merge all those layers together; my poor laptop was slowly saving due to the number of layers. 
Up next will be touch ups and fixes in the background before I can move onto another layer (I need to merge more layers together!!)

Character Design request - the Husband, remade

2:38 pm EST

The Wife got the OK but the Husband needed a remake since the husband and wife character designs didn't seem to compliment each other. For example, the Husband's face was at least twice as wide as wife's and a lot more...unrealistic compared to the wife. 
I took my friend's advice (same friend who requested the character designs) and overlayed the wife over him as reference. 

Character Design request - Husband & Wife updates

6:29 pm EST

I met with my friend about the character designs and after going through the different version, Version 1 of Wife and Version 1 of Husband were selected, but still needed adjustments.
The wife's outfit lost the jacket, for modeling's sake.
The husband needed to match with the wife a little more and he got a wider neck and double chin. 

Update

5:24 pm est

Sadly I have an exam and a paper I need to work on over the next few days so I might not have any work posted during that time.

Character Design request - the Husband #2

11: 13 am EST

I wasn't satisfied with myself with only having 1 version of the husband, so I brainstormed some new appearances of the husband yesterday and quickly drew and colored a second version today.

Again, coloring was rushed; I'm not usually like this with coloring.

Brainstorming the Husband's hair

Character Design request- the Wife #3; the Husband

I figured with a sharp face shape and hair style, wearing pants might make some sense...?
Then again, it's 3 am when I'm having this thought process.

Coloring wasn't my focus here , so again, it's not much usual style.

And here's the husband's character design. My friend 's character details only said a short fat husband, but from the story details, I came up with this instead.

I'm trying to think of another version of the husband but end up coming back to designs similar to this one.

Coloring wasn't focused here, so it's sloppy compared to my usual work.

---

I got a Character Design request!; character designs on wife

I was asked by a friend to design two characters he had in mind for his short: a short fat husband and tall skinny wife.

I'm writing this down on the blog mostly for my own memory's sake as I doubt I'll remember all of this when I wake up.

So far there's the short's details he told me ( I wont say in case he doesn't want to reveal yet, and I probably can't do it justice if I tried to explain it),

From listening to the short story details and doing a quick couple of sketches, I've decided upon:

Wife;

- tall,skinny

- " oh, what is my husband doing now?" Sort of reaction

- shoulder length hair, light brown? Blonde? Sharp on ends , goes with face ; maybe a slight bob style

- sharp face shape ,

- long enough neck ( nothing too crazy!)

- necklace,pearl

- short scarf , yellow?green?

- turtle neck shirt , elbow length

- short heels ( she's already tall. I believe these types of shoes would be called "pumps"? Even though I'm a girl, I'm behind with fashion terminology )

- lengthy skirt, "pinstripe" (Again, I don't know the right fashion term, but the outside if the shirt looks like it has lines on it but not striped pattern or plaid)



Husband:

- fat , short - knees should show a bit of this

- " the idiotic husband"? ; comical w/o trying to be comical

- short hair, parted in middle; brown

- mustache

- rounded face , almost oval?

- slight chin

- barely any visible neck

- leather flat shoes , black

- vest, green?red?

- tie, black ........ Actually, No tie. ( too troublesome for the husband to wear given his size)

- white dress shirt, no cuffs,loose collars

- dress pants (since they're usually look loose enough I think? I wouldn't know.), black

Notes as well as variations of initial ideas

I felt that having my blog as the first thing people see wasn't quite what I wanted so to combat this, I moved my artwork page to the first to be seen rather than my blog page. Hopefully it looks better?

 /edit 
As I mentioned in my previous blog posts, I was asked by a friend to draw/create the two characters for his short. Here's the wife, version 1.

The coloring is a lot rougher from my usual methods. I also tried setting the tablet pen's sensitivity lower than usual, to force myself to "paint" lightly. Hopefully this prevents my hand from getting too tense and cramping. 

Here's version 2 of the wife, for my friend's short. As with the first one, I didn't focus on the coloring as much as I would typically with my other work since I was more focused with getting the idea through rather than the coloring. 

Sun Staff concept - coloring rocks

Started working on the rocks/cliffs/mountains. They're not done at all but this is part of what I did today (from WIP 1). Because of the new decision on the lighting direction, the river and water's lighting are totally wrong, so I'll have to fix that when I get to the day I work on the water.

City in sky and new character outfit design

I'm still playing around with the idea of a city in the city but I haven't found the rift city yet.

To take a break from that, I started to loosely sketch a character but ended up focusing more on her clothes and hair.

Eastern and western metropolitan mix of a city..?

Loose sketch

Finer lines of initial sketch, focused on cap

Focused on hair and face

Sun Staff concept - base colors!

Hooray there's color! 

Though it's really more splashes of the colors I've thought about using... but it's still color !!

My plan is to work on this in small bits rather than all at once, mainly because that hasn't worked out as well for many of my previous drawings. I'm hoping with this plan, I can really bring out the details.