Project 2 :: WIP 05

Start here if you’re new to my recurring monthly project series (this is only #2 so I know it’s technically not a series yet) you can find a quick recap and links to project 1. You can also keep reading that article if you’re coming into this project now and are wondering what the hell I’m talking about.

Another busy weekend, and day one of being a full fledged bus riding tech-y. Truth be told, it’s not that bad. The bus is actually an awesome place to have an hour (or two ಠ_ಠ) of uninterrupted work time. There’s just enough wifi signal for me to dig up reference materials as needed but it’s so slow I have to be really selective with what I choose to waste time digging up. Not a lot of distractions as a result.

I think the fact that I’m drawing with a laptop track pad actually helped out with the scruff. I’m chalking that one up to a happy accident brought on by a constraint. as such I’m gonna limit my work time on this project to only during my commute for this week and see how that goes.

On Saturday I spent a little time looking up calligraphy tutorials. It’s not necessarily a mandatory part of this project but I’m using the time as an excuse to play with something I’ve always been a little curious about. A little perusing on youtube and I found that there are 3 basic categories of people who like doing hand drawn letters to post videos about it. There’s car guys, scrapbookers, and the occasional professional designer/illustrator. All of this excites me because the one common theme amongst all of them is that “you’re just drawing shapes, not writing words” and that drawing skill is an advantage. I went out and picked up a chip ended calligraphy pen and a couple flat ended brushes and started playing around.

None of these are good but I’m learning a lot about how letters are built by taking them apart into their individual shapes and becoming intimately acquainted with how they’re put together. I’m heading in the right direction but there’ll be many more wasted lines and pages before I’m happy with where I’m at. The part of my brain that believes in luck is hoping that in researching educational materials I’ll stumble across a font that looks like what I’m not able to produce.

I spent the morning and part of the ride back on my commute making another humanoid character and starting in on a bear. I’m going to be breaking the art boards up into the various asset types (characters, animals, landscape, meta). I’m going to see how far I can get on characters and animals this week.