Thank you everyone who has stopped by and chipped in! Guess the fear of not being able to set in paper what you have in mind is more common than I thought. Just knowing others are also struggling kinda gives a sense of "alright, others go through the same and are also trying to move ahead, I should keep moving ahead as well!"
A few days passed, things are going good, though life, work and side hustles continue to chip away at the available time.
Still, art is a way of life at this point, so we continue to find ways to steal time and make some progress.
Term 4
Started on the final environment study as part of this exercice. I try to use these as practice for scenes or environments of my personal project, and this is no exception, so went with a priate ship at sea to start getting some practice on that.
Here's the reference.
It's interesting how you can actually tell a piece is from an artist as you start looking into the finer details. Not sure who the artist is for this one, but there are many small details in here that are not evident at first glance, like lady with the sword at the helm, which is more detailed than it seems, or how what at first glance seem like shadows of a rail, are actually shadows of people. How the different pieces, like all the ropes interesect and connect logically and are not just random lines thrown about.
Just getting started with lineart but it's already taking shape
Not planning to pack as much detail as the original one, I kinda learned by now that with environments it's important to focus on forms and suggested detail, similar to how we focus on gestures for characters. Used a brush for the water and the kneeded eraser to give the lines a bit of an effect and a "cloud" brush for the clouds.
And along with this, I got the itch to start sketching out the first designs of Captain Kraken.
Captain Kraken will be the main antagonist for the one of the following arcs in Nozomu, so his visuals are bound to get refined in the following months, but you can already get a feel for his outline and his character.
Smiling, buff pirate swashbuckler. Upper part is almost like leather armor. Intimidating fellow with a few secrets of his own.
The Kraken motif is present mostly in his beard, split in 8 threads, and the bigger shadow, showing 8 swords, also an illusion of wings.
Manga
One more page! 5 out of 10 done for chapter 30!
1) Situation is very quickly deflated by Lydia's intervention. Sorry if anyone was disappointed, but it's not time for such a confrotation just yet xD. It's just a tease of things to come.
2) There's a lot more texture in some of these frames than I intended, but that's not a bad thing. I simply spent more time working on the page that I planned. Kept doing a bit at a time, 30 mins here, 30 mins there, before I knew it I had already spent 10 hours by the end, which is much more than I usually spend per page. Contrasts well with the previous pge which had less work on BGs due to focus on the characters and poses.
3) Still trying to push that bleed to the edge! I can already see how much of a difference it makes on the chapter at a high level. Probably costs more to print, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
That's it for now!
Thaks for stopping by! Though I've been extremely busy, I'm still checking out as many threads as I can to see how everyone is doing and everyone is doing such impressive progress and work! Gets you pumped up to do some more stuff of your own!
Got a lot more grinding to do, so I'll take my leave. Have a great rest of the week!
