I feared this would be a slow Monday but honestly, it’s alright!
While I think I’m behind one week in schedule, it still felt like a crazy productive month!
After the low of February with my sickness and all that, I got back with energy and tackled my to-do’s right away. First up working on the commission for Eventide, a design Project that dwells in the excitement for Monster Hunter Wilds.
Designing a character is always a tricky thing for me, especially with commissions, though I really enjoy the process of finding the ideal concept of a design and getting inspired by the client’s ideas. Such as with this, as I was given the idea to create a fish-hunting seikret with larger wings and a beak leaning into features of water-hunting birds. I think if we weren’t so stone focused on making a Seikret sub-species, the design would’ve become even crazier, but I can see the limitations helping a lot with simplicity here. As usual, I struggle with feathers, especially rendering them and – for an odd reason – I really enjoyed drawing the saddle and additional items on the seikret’s back. It was fun to add them because it brought some structure and perspective into the shape of the figure… and the colours helped with contrast in the image. I just don’t know if adding the rider would have been what’s missing in the picture or just would be too much in terms of detail and framing.
Oddly enough, I had the same thing happen to me when I did the Souvie Seikret marker drawing, where I originally planned to add my character from the game on the back but decided against it for simplicity sake… and because these marker drawings already take up so much time.
I gotta say, in retrospect, I have spent like half this month with Seikret-featuring projects actually. First the commission, the marker Drawing and also what would have been my starting point into Moho Animation Software.
Ah yes, I planned to use Moho for a couple of months now as our uni has one licence currently available to use. As I’ve always wanted to try out 2D Vector-Based Animation, I got an older version of it during a sale for home use and started to get in touch with the software. My first model, however, wasn’t very suited to be worked with. First, I tried to use a brush-heavy rendering approach like with my other drawings but that for one messed up the model segments as I couldn’t properly dissect them and the software started lagging very badly.
So, figuring I was not quite prepared to continue working on the model, I decided to take a simpler approach, following inhouse step by step tutorials and using an old character design tailored for animation. And it was a much better experience that way and I even have something to show now:
With that, my interest for Moho Peaked, I only finished it last week but I’m planning to do yet another model in preparation to what I’ll be finishing for uni and I wanna also look into animating still images without vectors involved.
I briefly mentioned it before but I wanna go more in detail about my progress with Marker Drawings. This month, I followed through with making one every weekend, while one only being a monochrome one due to travelling by train. And it’s gotten a little out of hand because I see myself spending up to 6 hours for concepts + sketches + lines and then another 3-4 hours for color concepts + coloring, which is quite hard given, I also wanna have the weekends for free activities. Now, I was rather good with projects this time but April and the months after will be much more time intensive with work and application stress. I’d have to make simpler and more time-effective drawings… but I don’t wanna >:3 I’m still getting a lot of fun out of them and I wanna be more crazy, fill more space of the paper with colours, draw more characters, I wanna get into drawing scenes! Though I also feel the fatigue and have to be careful not to burn myself out over these. Maybe I gotta turn it down to prepping for badge commissions. Headshots should be simpler to concept than full body poses and I still get to practice with different colour variations, rendering and expressions.
In the beginning of the year, I struggled pretty hard to land a good composition on the relatively narrow canvas paper I use for marking. By now, I still have to do pre-concept drawings and try to copy them over to the big paper but I’ve gotten more free.
I do – however – have to remind myself that I can let loose a bit and trust my instincts to work out a pose over the line of action rightaway. My latest drawing; the Chimera started out as different poses on my sketch paper to then find the right angle but I constructed the pose straight on paper as opposed to on sketch. I still had to rubber my way into certain poses but (I just noticed I competely forgot to add shadows, damn) eventually, it flows naturally and fits on the whole canvas instead of having too much empty space on either side.
I also wanna ditch my white acrylic pens… almost every time now, when I use them, they start leaking, so I have to fix sploched lines (with lucky) easily with a black fineliner, or if I’m less lucky, try to cover them up with intentional errors around the side. It’s only been frustrating and I’m really looking for thinner pens without a brush tip.
Okay, so what’s up next…
Every now and then, I’ve been working on a personal project of mine that I’m hoping to continue and finish this month. I’ll got plenty things on the side though, depending whether payment goes through soon, I’ll be having another commission, then I got a new phone, which I’ll thoroughly have to prepare my music and applications for. I’ll be working for ITFS and my Uni, have to work out more animation stuff in Moho and whether or not I’ll be accepted at EF’s dealer’s den, I’ll have to think of brainstorming more merch to produce for it. It is a full month and it has no intention of being boring :3
What I’m hoping for, though is to be able to go outside some and relax in the sun!
That’s what I wish for you all too! Good weather and good time!
Have a nice one!
~Souvillaine