Zack The Icon!

Hey everyone! Welcome back!

So...very very annoyed with my tablet. It seems to constantly be getting stuck, even after I try to reset the pressure. If anyone has any advice on it, I'd love to hear. Or do you all think I should just give it up and go for new? please let me know as it's really causing me a lot of difficulties.

Still, I've been persevering as best I could recently while trying to work on the line art to one of the sketches I mentioned last time. Though it is very difficult when it get stuck and a small line ends up a scribble across the whole page.

Anyway, the image I was working on was the icon/avatar image of Zack (Isaac Foster) from the game 'Angels of Death'. For those who didn't read my last post, Angels of Death is a Horror RPG maker game that has a manga and an anime that recently came out based on it. Zack is one of the two main leads of the game. Its certainly interesting, if a bit on the goofy, over the top side when not touching on some fairly dark subjects. The image of Zack I did was based more on the in game design of Zack, rather than the more anime/manga version, mostly because I got so used to seeing Zack in this way rather than the anime interpretation.

In my last post, I posted a sketch that I did of Zack for the image, though I've now done line art for it in two ways. The first very simplistic, which could be used better with colour and shading, while the other is still a bit unfinished, but is to go with something more black and white, also following the simplistic designs of the in game icons.

The simple line art is this:

This line art pretty much allows me to play around with the colour and effects while showing where everything is. I am still trying to see what works for the basic flat colours - though I may have to check the anime colours if I can't find the in game ones. The colours I checked out first (if only to see if things worked) were only a starting guestimate.

Skin colour wise is a bit difficult to figure out. As a character, he is mostly bandaged due to burns, and the in game spite and icon only shows black where the skin around the eyes are. The anime had a darker skin representing the burns, but I'm not entirely sure what to go for in the colour version, so the shown skin is mostly a placeholder.  The mouth was always in the game and anime shown over the bandages. I'm not sure if it was a simplistic way of showing it without having to mess with how the wrappings work, or if its just to show the mouth under the bindings, but I'm sticking with the theme. 

Admittedly, the hair is a bit on the light side too. But it does seem to work fine in colour, assuming I can get the light and dark tones right. It'd likely look better with shading and lighting to help pick out the colours rather than them all blending together.

As mentioned, I did try another version of the line art, though its incomplete at the moment thanks to my iffy tablet. This one would work more for monochrome colouring, with the shadows being a stark black. With this one I also leaned towards the game design where the exposed skin around the eyes are concerned, making it black. This is what I have so far:

As you can see, it does make the character itself stand out more and give some depth to it, and that was with only partly done. It does need my tablet to not stick though, as I need to focus on which areas are blacked out. Small details are awkward to do with a sticking pen, so to speak.

Still, I really do want this to come out well! I may even try it with a very simple colour pallet, or in monochrome, to see if it stands out even more. Either way, tablet aside, I have been enjoying working on this version of it :)

Hopefully my tablet will be working properly again soon, but I'd still love to hear if anyone has suggestions on that front. Please let me know!

Until next time!

Tara