Posts Tagged ‘TV’

TV Ladies of 2017 – process

Friday, January 5th, 2018

It was fantastic to see so many female characters on television this year, and an ever-growing number of female-led shows – really good ones, too! I think most of my current top favourite TV shows feature women leads. Drawing real-life people isn’t usually my thing, but all these awesome ladies made me want to push myself and give it a go.

First thing to do was compile a list of everyone I wanted to include. Some honourable mentions that didn’t make the cut include Rachel Brosnahan from the surprisingly entertaining The Marvelour Mrs. Maisel (who I sketched separately a few days earlier), Sansa from Game of Thrones, and Tulip from Preacher. I bet I missed a ton of others, because even though I watch a LOT of TV, I haven’t watched ALL of it. Yet.

The next step was creating a rough composition, where the placement, size, direction, and in some cases pose of each character will be determined. As you can see, at this point it’s rough enough that I have to write down names even for myself.

TV Ladies 2017 - layout

Then comes the part where I remind myself that drawing real-life people isn’t usually my thing and wonder what have I gotten myself into. But Queen Lilibet inspired me to go on; one must power through! The sketching phase is where I flesh out the character and define their expression – based on what I feel works for them, but also influenced by the reference images available.

TV Ladies 2017 - sketch

The next phase is refining the sketches with cleaner lines and working more closely with the visual reference, mostly for the likeness, but also for clothing and accessories. It looks a little like this while I work, except usually the photos are on the right side. It took me a good long while to work out it’ll be better if they were on the right because I kept hiding them with my left hand. Lefties can be very silly like that.

TV Ladies 2017 - references

Here they all are, crisp and clean. Each one is on a separate layer so I can easily move them around if needed.

TV Ladies 2017 - pencil

Moving on to colour, I create a base for each character (again, all separate layers) and make sure the different skin tones look right, on their own and in relation to one another. The reference photos had a huge range of tones due to lighting, so it was kind of a guessing-and-adjusting game.

TV Ladies 2017 - base colour

Stephanie Beatriz (Rosa from Brooklyn 99) was super duper awesome and shared my artwork on Twitter with some really lovely words, so I’ll spotlight her to show the process zoomed-in. The top row is the process so far. Then I add specific colours, using the same method shown here, of adding colour layers as clipping masks, so I don’t have to worry about “painting outside the lines” of the base colour layer I created earlier. Next I add some soft shading (basically just a purple layer set to Multiply, masked as needed). And the last bit is adding some details – small highlights, clothes/hair patterns etc.

TV Ladies 2017 - colour process

They all underwent the same process and came out the other side, looking colourful. Mmmm, too colourful.

TV Ladies 2017 - colour

Now comes the part I usually struggle with most when it comes to colour: taking all these individually painted or coloured elements – that work just fine on their own but kinda clash with one another – and combining them into a single cohesive piece. Thank goodness again for digital tools, I have no idea how I would even approach something like that in traditional media. But in Photoshop I try out various adjustment layers set to all kinds of layer modes until things look better. This time I also tried some actual filters, an area of Photoshop which I usually steer clear of, and they gave some interesting subtle effects (which might not even be visible in the end result, to be honest). Here’s the piece after some adjustments.

TV Ladies 2017 - adjustments

Add some flair to the background and some more graphic treatment to the border, and here’s the final piece, and what turned out to be my most shared artwork of 2017.

TV Ladies 2017 - final

Share

Community-X: The End!

Sunday, January 15th, 2012

The saga has reached its end…with a nifty background!

Community-X: Final

For those of you who missed the single posts:

Community-X: Cyclops Community-X: Jean Community-X: Wolverine Community-X: Shadowcat Community-X: Magneto Community-X: Nightcrawler Community-X: Storm Community-X: Abed Community-X: White Queen

And as promised: A Surprise!

Allow several seconds for loading, and thanks to Evyatar Amitay for the code help!

Aviv

Share

Dean Frost – The White Queen

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

Mystique, suggested by some, was a good idea, but isn’t Dean Pelton the very definition of “White Queen”? The costume isn’t 100% accurate…he made a few adjustment. That is, his sister did.

“I have always dreamt of playing charades with you, Jeffrey. Just not like this. And not on dry land.”

Dean - White Queen

The final group shot will be up in a couple of days, when I’ve found the time and energy to finish it up with a nice background. And there will also be a surprise! Surprise!

Share

Professor Xabed

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

“Annie will always be driven, Shirley will always be giving, Pierce will never apologize, Britta’s sort of a wildcard from my perspective and Jeff will forever remain a conniving son of a bitch.”

Abed - Professor X

Community-X group photo - 7

Just one left!

Share

Stormley

Tuesday, December 27th, 2011

“I believe that fusing brownies with the Internet is going to create the next Napster for brownies.”

Shirley - Storm

Community-X group photo - 6

7 down, 2 to go.

Share

Changcrawler

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

Ch-Chang!

“I never told you this, but Changs are usually born with tails. You sort of dodged a bullet there.”

Chang - Nightcrawler

Community-X group photo - 5

Share