#acr101

Here is the breakdown on context: the game, her as a character and her place in the narrative.

The silhouette design tells you quite a lot about where my thinking was at the start and how it changed as I sketched.

Figuring out the head took a fair amount of doing, I started by visiting my sources and sketching them to understand how one heads this sort of undertaking.

I finally settled on this lovely, gummy granny head with her lil' ol' hair bun.

I plucked the colours directly out of photos of Eze, the lovely small town in the south of france which acts as something of a setting inspiration.

Here is the turnaround of the character. This one was done in photoshop from the start and with much too thick a brush, on reflection. She came out like she's meant to be in a children's cartoon: low detail, relying totally on appeal.

By contrast, I drew this version of her on paper, digitised it and painted it and got a COMPLETELY different style again. Something I'll have to figure out, that.

Here's what I'm happy with:

I didn't think I was even vaguely capable of drawing, let alone being able to layer draw on paper, digitise and create a whole-ass, posed character. I'm REALLY impressed with myself,

There's a lot of thoughtfulness in the design, I went to a lot of trouble to think of her accessories, how she would look because of her place in the world...

This was heaps of fun. I tore through paper just getting concepts down and iterating on the character. Once I get started I have such a blast and I've gotten SO much better in such a short span of time? That's awesome

And now some room for improvement:

my colouring is all very basic and flat, she could use highlights and shadows, as well as colour-blending,

I need to decide whether she has thick, visible lines or not and try colouring her one more time from that vantage,

As a character she is supposed to be old and bumped to hecc, so I need to give her more visible wear; scratches, dents, missing bits, ad-hoc fixes (tape, glue gun, cable ties),

Referencing kicked my ass and almost cost a 10% penalty, I need to develop a system to reference more effectively,

Focused on doing more circles and strokes since I'm totally re-learning how to draw >.<

It's seriously going to be the majority of my time the next few months, afaict, but it'll be worth it. And I can pepper exercises to help contextualise and focus those sessions, so... It's good, I'm happy about it.

And without further ado... CIRCLES!

Okay, those aren't great, but I found something REALLY neat as I went. This is at 50% zoom on the doc, but the next few are between 270% and 310% zoom and the difference in quality is HUGE.

This makes me think that my general hand movements have improved, but it's the finer movements that I'm struggling with. What a cool find!

Back to 50% zoom and... I didn't need to tell ya, huh?

On to strokes!

Weirdly, the zoom thing didn't help with the strokes... Just gonna have to muscle through that one.

It's funny how strokes going top-right to bottom-left are so much better than strokes going in the opposite direction.

I've decided I'm going to have to practice my shading and thatching with actual exercises, because I'm not sure I can see improvements in this as much as I should like.

So I gave myself this extra bit of stroke practice!

I figure if I'm learning at the level of a toddler, I'm going to style it that way. BUT WITH RULES!

This was done using 25px brush on a 1080p canvas. No eraser allowed, just brush. This was actually fun and forced me to practice my strokes more than you might expect at first blush. Lots of tracing colours back and forth over each other, colouring inside the lines, etc...

I did my next two based off of this amazing work by X_XASM

This top one was 25px brush

The second used an 18pt brush. Was just curious what differences that gives me

I definitely like the 25pt more because it has the right kind of affect for the style of the cartoon, but it may be slightly too thick. I'll keep messing around.

Last week a cop killed two queer men a few kilometres from where I live and go to school, in the fanciest, richiest part of Sydney, and today in class I was asked to draw a cartoon cop.

So fuck that, I went with a woman of the Queer Communist future instead.

The idea was sound, as was the pose (I actually the casual holding the flag pose is really badass and really jives with Socialist Realism), but it didn't come together. So much so that I abandoned even giving her a face in favour of just practicing my lines and hatching.

Lastly, I thought I should try another drawing of Steven (of Steven Universe fame), but this time from memory to see what I'd retained from the last time. The result was actually pretty good! A stark improvement on last time in term of proportions and features. A lot of the appeal was restored.

The eyes in particular are much improved, as he's looking passed you, but I did use the wrong nose entirely, as well as some other small mistakes.

I got my hands on one of those Wacoms that's also a screen and it's a gorgeous bit of kit. I haven't drawn in years, but it was so nice and pleasant to on that little device.

I'm pretty pleased with the results considering how little drawing I do regularly and how I'm training myself to write and draw with my left hand, instead of my dominant right hand. It's all a great and fun experiment!

Anyway, here's my drawing practice, with notes, proudly poisoned by Nightshade:

The ACR101 SIMicro (CCID) is a combination of a smart card reader and a Micro-SD card slot in a compact USB token which provides you with complete support for highly secure mobile applications.It has an embedded MiFare chip that turns it into a MiFare token for contactless applications.

Typical Applications: e-Government e-Banking and e-Payment Public Key Infrastructure Network Security GSM Management VoIP Data Storage Access Control Loyalty Program