I remember reading in a book of animation (I can’t remember the title right now) that a character’s silhouette should be distinguishable from other characters, and the gesture in the silhouette should be easy to read. I decided to test this theory by illustrating my characters above. Clow is the confident one with the expressive hand, Odinons is the dragon, and Bobby is the boy slightly slouched over.
I may do more silhouette tests, just to see.
Lately I’ve been wanting to try things in my sketchbook that I haven’t done, either for a long time or not at all. One of those things is a play of shadows in making atmosphere. And another was playing with materials besides my pencils.
So here is a sketch in charcoal.
Personally, I’m a big fan, and I want to do more.
But these sketches were, admittedly, from a couple of days ago. These past few days I’ve been making myself sick preparing for Animarathon. That’s been a nightmare and a half, but I don’t want to bitch about that too much. I WILL say:
Support your local printers. They are GROSSLY underrated, and often have better services and products than national chains *coughkinkossuckscough*.
Despite all the complaints about preparing for it, I am excited for Animarathon. Firstly, Doug Walker, aka Nostalgia Critic, is our special guest, so I’m EXCITED to meet him! I hope I get the chance to. His panel is at the same time as a portion of Artist Alley being open.
OH! I should show you some of the work I’ll have on sale:
This is the big picture. Many of the prints still need to be trimmed.
Here’s the top portion a bit closer:
Yes, I even managed to get a few Drawn Silly strips done. I was hoping to get a zine put together of all the strips, but I was having issues with formatting it for book format (mostly because I’ve never done it before. And I still don’t know how.)
And here is the bottom portion:
Some of the smaller items are buttons, bookmarks, and my mini zine about Dragons. I’ll post a page-by-page of it (most likely) next week.
The silly thing was I was expecting these prints to be about the size of an index card, but NOPE. They were full 8 inch by 10 inches, and I’m still in the process of trimming them down.
Ok, I must end here and say I must get back to work. I feel terrible because preparing for the con has taken time away from working on a short comic project I’m working on with Adam Knave. D: But I hope all this work will be worth it.