Full Bodied!

Hey everyone! Welcome back!

I know that in recent times I've been rather focused on those portraits of characters that it almost seems like I never do actual character pictures, head to toe any longer. Well, I decided to change that up a bit and do a few full body character pictures. I also did another slight experiment too, but more on that later. Firstly, about the two characters I ended up drawing, Nui and Nogitsune.

So first, Nui. With Nui, I started off with a pencil and pen sketch (which is what I normally do, even with my digital pictures. It makes for a steadier hand for me)

So, despite the slightly Japanese name, Nui was actually not based on anything Japanese at all. The name was actually a bit on an in joke that just ended up sticking. Rather, Nui is from a more fantasy based story, and, if you catch the very tiny detail, it might be obvious that Nui is also not quite human.

I thought that the sketch came out quite well. The only thing that really bothered me about it was that foot. I swear it looks broken, but for some reason I couldn't fix it on the sketch (before I added the pen, that is), but since I was going to do the rest digitally, I thought I would have a bit more room to play around with it and deal with the perspective issue, so the poor character wouldn't have to suffer a broken limb. As such, I moved onto the digital stage! 

As you might notice, he no longer has a broken ankle! Huzzah! Though admittedly I did have a bit of a time getting the perfective on it. It is still a bit more flexible than his foot....probably should be, but it at least no longer looks like its being held together by boot leather alone.

If you want to see the full version of him in higher definition, check it out over on my DA here.

I think my favourite bits to draw on him was his hair and his sash. Both I think came out pretty good. The only bit I'm not sure about on the hair is that cowlick. It feels a tad bit too far back. Otherwise, it came out pretty well.

The next pic I did was one that also had something of an experiment in it. But firstly, lets actually talk about Nagisa themselves.

So, Nogitsune Nagisa is, in fact, a character I have drawn before, in.....mostly full body (Mostly cause their feet were hidden due to their clothes. I actually did a blog post about it a while back, in fact). But, as said, some bits were missing, and it was more to showcase their face, which is rarely actually shown in the story. In fact, the fox mask on that picture is more often seen as their 'face'. As such, I decided to do a full body of them with the mask on. As I had drawn Nagisa from the front before, this time I did a slightly different angle to show the character's nature somewhat as being somewhat secretive. So showing them looking over the shoulder from behind seemed a good idea to me. 

That said, this was how my sketch turned out:

There were a few things I wasn't sure about here. The first was their hand that is near their mask. The second was less where it was and more what it was. The hand placement seemed awkward, but as I drew this directly in biro, I didn't have the option to adjust it until it hit digital. The last was actually because it was digital that I worried. I've.....never actually drawn fire digitally before. It might not be too much of a surprise, since that element hasn't come up for me in the last few years since I picked up a tablet.

Of course, there are tutorials online, so I thought it wouldn't be too bad.

....Uh....I thought. It might have just been that I wasn't typing the correct words in a search engine, or I just couldn't find what settings I needed, but I just couldn't find a fire tutorial that worked on Clip Studio Paint. I found some for photoshop, but unless the keys needed were under a different name I couldn't find them for the life of me. As such, I had to experiment to make the blue fire I needed for my pic. So, what did I end up with?

Here:

It's a bit hard to see at lower resolution on a white background, so here is a link to where it is on deviantart, where the fire is a bit easier to make out.

As you can see, I fixed the hand into a different position. As for the fire, essentially what I did was make a blob of colour, use the finger smudge tool, then on another layer, with add glow, do the same, then repeat a third time with a smaller blob. I actually thought it came out pretty well for a first attempt ever at doing fire I an experimental manner at that. Of course, if anyone has any pro tips for it I'd love for the advice!

The fire was pretty fun to do. But one again, my fave part was the hair. I'm really starting to have fun with it now I have a new way of doing it. It doesn't seem as flat as hair used to look on my pics. I'll admit though, that Nogitsune Nagisa is one of my favourate characters to draw. They're just so.....flowy. lol

Anyway, that's all from me for now. I'm going to do a few more full bodies to go with my portraits to give some variation in my pics, so I hope you enjoy them!

Until next time!

Tara

Two For One!

Hey everyone! Welcome back!

Last week I promised two portraits I was working on instead of just one, and I aim to deliver! So, this time I worked on two of my younger characters, Magetsu Shinta and Tatsumaki Shinobu. However, one of these pictures I decided to use as an experiment on a style I've only used twice, both times for non-human characters. I wanted to see how it would look if used on a person instead.

But first, to look at my regular style one.

So the character I decided to use my usual style with was Mangetsu Shinta, the male of the two sketches I showed at the end of last week's post. And this is what I ended up doing with that base sketch:

(Or for a higher resolution one, check out here)

So, Shinta actually came out pretty well. I think the way his hair, especially, came out well. It was pretty simple, but with enough detail that it didn't look awkward as it could have done. I think the bit I wasn't happy about was possibly the shadows around the neck. I just couldn't get this to work properly. But otherwise, Shinta was really interesting to do. I also tried to put more detail into the headband's (well, neckerchief in this case) metal plate to look a tad more metallic. It wasn't.....quite there, but I thought it was probably a good start. I definitely made note to work on that a bit more for the next pic.

Speaking of next pic, the portrait of Shinobu I did end up looking at the metal plate a bit more, but more than that, Shinobu was the one I decided to try the no line art approach to. Well, I say no line art, but rather....minimal, I guess? Only around the eyes had any line art on the end)

Anyway, so this is how my experiment turned out:

(And for Higher Resolution, click here)

So, I have some mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, it came out a lot better than expected for a complete experiment - the metal plate came out pretty well! But some of the parts of it I think needed a little different approaches to them, such as the eyes, which are still a little more 'line art' than the rest. I think though, that for complete guess work, though it did come out well. But I certainly has a lot of work to go to make it a bit more polished.

Tutorials ahoy?

But if I can get it right, that does mean a new art form I can play around with. I'm sure I'll be revisiting this type of art again.

One thing I've noticed lately is a lot of my art has been very.....portrait-y of late. So, I think I'll be having a look at doing some full body pics to test out different poses and possible dynamic looking movements, if only to get into the practice for some action scenes in Dreamwalkers. So, that is what you have to look forwards to, along with my continuing portrait project. Wish me luck!

Until next time!

Tara

Doing a Thing Again!

Hey everyone! Welcome back!

So, yes, more portraits, but while I did post up one earlier on in the week (and will of course be talking about it today, I have also been working on a few other things that I'd like to share as well. First off, I will get the portrait I did of another character out of the way first. This time the character I did was Inyouwagou Kaneai:

If the image is a tad blurry, you can see it in its full glory here

I will admit, I wasn't as happy with this one as I was with the others. The headband somehow seemed to push up the head, or perhaps the poofy hair made it seem like it did, and that was even after adjusting the sketch. I think I was having an off day, as I sometimes do when it comes to art. Still, I'll admit I did, again, enjoy doing the hair. While not as complicated as some hair styles I've done in the past, like for Rodessa or Nagisa, it was still pretty fun.

Now, I have also made two sketches of some portraits that I want to work on next:

That is Mangetsu Shinta and Tatsumaki Shinobu respectively (drawn directly in biro, btw). Now, I've decided to do something a little different. One I'll do in my ordinary style, the other I want to do in a style that doesn't actually use line art. Or at least very little if one doesn't include finer details. I've done something like that before with Hex Doll - a character out of a comic idea I have for the future, and a somewhat unfinished fan art I mentioned before. I want to see if I can actually use it on human characters and, if I can, what it might look like. I'm hoping to experiment a bit, not looking at tutorials to see what I can come up with and see if I can pull it off. If I can, I may look into doing something similar with the help of tutorials to refine it in the future.

If nothing else, it should be interesting to compare the two art styles, don't you think?

So, until next time!

Tara

Character Portrait Continued

Hey everyone! Welcome back!

So, I've been continuing on the portrait project, mainly because the forum has now moved to one hosted entirely by us, and is able to host pictures. As such, I've been asked to help on the art side of things. So, with Arashi done, I moved on to the second of my....uh.....many characters to portrait. This time it is the young blind ninja OC, Tomoe Naoya.

So, like last time, I began with the base sketch:

Originally, the headband ties were not going to be shown, but because it somewhat resembled bats wings, and Naoya actually gets by with his hearing, it seemed a pretty good comparison to me. As such, they were added in. With my sketch done, I moved onto the digital form!

The line art was a bit thicker than I meant it to be - I think I changed the size while working on a different project and only realised once I finished the whole thing. But I think it came out pretty well. My favourite part was doing the hair on this one, or rather, the hair highlights. The 'light ring' sometimes looks a bit weird, but it looked a bit more like the light was hitting some hair strands as well. It was a bit of an experiment, though, so let me know what you think.

I have started working on the sketches for new portraits to come, so will show you what I'm working on as I get to them. I hope you enjoy the little project!

If you're interested in the forum at all, you can check out our old site here or come and check out our new site over here. You can see character profiles and the events of the story as it unfolds as well.

I hope you enjoy my character portraits project, and will continue to check it out :)

Until next time!

Character Portrait Project

Hey everyone! Welcome back!

So, Now that Bendy and the Ink Machine has inspired me to draw many other things as well as those about Dreamwalkers, I decided to look at some of the Original characters I have only ever sketched in the past and decided to do portraits of them for the purpose of showing in the roleplay that they are all part of. As a forum moderator, it makes sense I should probably show what some of the figures look like that are part of the main plot.

As such, I started with, admittedly not my oldest characters, but one of my more interesting ones. Perhaps it is because I have been looking at horror playthroughs, but it certainly inspired me to draw one of my more.....Ah....psychotic OCs.

So, here we go! Say hello to Yume Arashi! I began with a base sketch first, which I like to do freehand in pencil first.....though this one I actually drew in biro for the lack of having any other drawing materials on hand. I'm surprised it came out so well with minimal mistakes!

Sorry if the image is a tad blurry. Still, the real version allowed me to use it as the base for the digital version.

Just in case the image is not too sharp, you can see the fully uploaded version on my Deviant art page here: Yume Arashi

So, yes, I mentioned Arashi being a little on the psychotic side. Well, Arashi here has an ability which, unfortunately, has a side effect that can cause eventual psychosis. Probably doesn't help that he was something of a psychopath to begin with anyway. Arashi is one of the few character's I've written as who enjoys causing pain and suffering, even if he might be a good actor at times to make it seem otherwise. It is somewhat creepy when you can write a torture scene, trying to get information out of an enemy, with the torturer being joking and teasing the entire time, honestly, as you start staring at your hands wondering where the heck something that dark came from. But that aside, he is probably one of the most interesting characters to write as, as you're also writing his decent to further insanity. If nothing else its interesting in terms of narrative.

I'm considering doing more portrait like profile pictures for different characters as well for the role play, if only to help people to see exactly what characters may look like in an otherwise fully text based roleplay.

As usual, comments and constructive criticism is always welcome :) After all, it will all help me improve!

Until next time!

Tara

Something A Little Different

Hey everyone! Welcome back!

Before I get started, I promised last week that I would put a link up to the review of the various places we visited while in Birmingham for the Comic Con there, which we posted on the TanraStudios blog. If you're interested to see what we thought, then click here and enjoy! :)

That done, on to todays post!

So, this week I started looking at the horror genre again to see if I could get a bit more inspiration for any of the nightmares, be it for atmosphere or just for the interesting horrific things that might turn up in nightmares. I mean, really, some nightmares can be pretty messed up after all. And so, in doing so, I tried looking at drawings and games and clips from films (because I admit if I watched the films too long themselves then I wouldn't be able to sleep for over a week). In my research I came across a relatively new, episodic game called 'Bendy and the Ink Machine' - thank Nadia for this since it was through her pointing out a fanart that I first heard about this. For those of you who might not have heard about it, BatIM is based in an old cartoon studio, which was obviously inspired by the old black and white Disney cartoons, such as Steamboat Willy, With one of the artists invited back to 'see something', leading to what appears to be the awakening, or creating of a real life version of the star character, Bendy. There's only two chapters out at the time of this blog, but I'll admit, it did interest me.

I had been thinking in the past that, in Dreamwalkers, the art style of the dreams should also differ, depending on who's dream they enter, be it due to colour (or lack thereof), or more realistic, or maybe even more cartoony etc. It would differentiate the waking world from the dreamscape, while allowing me to explore different ways to portray the dreamer's personality, or even allow me to have more flexibility in what the SOS crew can pull off within the dreams, as I imagine that each dream would have its own 'rules' to follow.

This lead me to doodling a little. Which lead me to doing fanart.

Yes, I have once again started doing some fanart. Still, it has let me explore 'horror' yet in a different kind of art style, so if nothing else, it let me have some practice! The drawings I did were avatar/icon style images that could be used online, so I only had a certain amount of space to work with. If nothing else they could be edited to make badges, perhaps! Let me know what you guys think?

Either way, first was the image I doodled which evolved into a colour piece.

Admittedly, its probably more cartoon that horror here, but it was a first attempt. I think the thing I enjoyed the most was doing the glowing eye here. Still, I wanted to try to get used working with only a few colours and get used to a slightly different art style as well. I think the ink itself could be improved, as I didn't really get around to the lighting on the ink properly, so it's come across a little on the flat side. But it was interesting to get used to drawing Bendy himself. Hopefully I'll do a few improvements on him to make the ink pop a little better.

Still, I'll admit I enjoyed working in almost sepia tone, which was similar to the art style from the game, and so I tried something slightly different in terms of both the shading and texturing in the next part.

Please note this one definitely isn't finished yet, but the majority is, so I thought you guys might be interested in seeing it :) Once again, please excuse my horribly photography skills

This one, I feel, is coming out closer to what I originally imagined. It still looks cartoony, but with hints of more....not exactly realism, but grittiness, I guess? The drips of the ink look a bit less cartoony - sorry, I haven't looked at highlights yet on this one - (it reminded me a bit of when I did the front cover image for Dreamwalkers, honestly!) and you can see the grooves in the wood. I definitely think if I drew a kids nightmare with a cartoony like figure looking similar to something like this, it would certainly be scary to that child. Not to say there isn't more to do here, but it seemed to be a good basis.

Its been nice experimenting, and also allowing myself to get some of my interest in other things on paper.

Characters aside, atmospherically, the game does pretty well, using the cartoony/comic like art style and making it pretty damned creepy, too. Its worth a look at for that, if nothing else, but the gameplay as well in pretty interesting and the unfolding story looks pretty promising, so I'll probably keep looking into it as more episodes of the game come out....and hope I don't end up scared of shadows for months after.

Yes, I am indeed a big wimp. Ah well

Anyway, hoped you enjoyed my doodle detour. Its great to post up some stuff for you all :)

Until next time!

Tara

Birmingham Comic Con!

Hey everyone! Welcome back!

So, this past weekend, I, as part of TanraStudios, was over in Birmingham for the Birmingham Comic Con. On Twitter, I had been doing posts hourly or so on the Tanra Twitter, which I retweeted onto my own twitter too, documenting some of the events. Buuuuut, if you guys don't follow me on twitter, I'll be giving a bit of a summery/review of some of the events and how things went for us at the con.

Nadia and I actually went to Birmingham the day before the con, so we could leisurely set up and get used to the area so we wouldn't be late. We were staying at the Paragon Hotel, which was about half an hour or so walking distance from Edgbaston Cricket Grounds, where the Con would take place. The hotel itself is fairly big. We did have a leak in the original room we were given, but we were quickly given a new room. The leak itself looked like a new thing, since we only noticed about five minute after we got there when we heard the dripping. The room we ended up getting for the rest of our stay was fairly good. The beds were pretty comfortable, there was a kettle with tea and coffee we could have and the necessities were stocked too.

We only really stayed at the hotel to sleep, though, and once we had dropped off our things and we had finished setting up for the con, we had gone about exploring a little. We weren't too far away from the Bull Ring shopping centre either. About a 25-30 minute walk from the hotel, really. So, we ended up heading that way for food. I'm not a big foodie, myself, but Nadia is, so we'll probably cover our food adventures on the Tanra blog. I'll be sure to link it in on my next blog update. Still, I had fun trying something new. I had never been to Yo Sushi before.

Still, Con wise, since we had set up the day before, we got to the con on Saturday pretty relaxed, not needing to really do much other than relax until the con began. The first lot of people came in with early access tickets about 9am, and the rest of the public joined in at 11am. The con went pretty well, despite the fact that it probably wasn't the best suited con for us. The majority of people were there for western comics like Marvel or DC, but it wasn't to say that there wasn't any traffic for us. We sold several comics, the Luck Dip was as popular as usual and we even got a couple of commissions as well.

Speaking of the commissions, Nadia did one, while I did the other. I was asked to draw a full body sketch of my interpretation of a character known as 'Power Girl'.

....I'll admit I....actually hadn't heard of the character before. But admittedly my experience with western comics is pretty much limited to Spider-Man, Batman, and the cartoon versions of X-Men, Justice League, Young Justice, Teen Titans, Batman Beyond and the Marvel films that have come out in recent years. If Power Girl appeared in any of those it might have been something I missed or forgot about. Still, there are plenty of pics online that I could look at to get a vague idea about her. Either way, this was my interpretation:

As usual, sorry for my horribly photography skills. I took the picture from my mobile phone and I'll admit I'm pretty bad at photos. lol

Either way, we did fairly well at the con. We certainly covered the table cost and got a bit of profit too. We also made friends with some of our neighbours too, so that was fun, especially having some cool conversations, and we even got a free magazine at the end of the con, too!

Oh, we also visited a couple of the stalls. There were about three that we especially enjoyed. There was a stall that was selling these cupcakes that had bits of fudge inside which were really nice - I had this chocolate Orange one which was pretty awesome. They did really well too! No surprising, they stuff not only tasted nice but they looked wonderful too. One of the other stalls was selling some snack type items, such as ramune, and even things like 'Zombie Jerky' and Harry Potter style 'Butterbeer'. I didn't get to try the butterbeer, though our neighbour did (Apparently it was like a cream soda?) but I did try the jerky. It was a teriyaki jerky that had some type of food colouring to make it look like zombie skin. It tasted nicer than it might sound, though it wasn't something I could eat a lot of at once. Lastly, we visited a stall that sold bubble tea with little juice balls that burst in your mouth when you ate them. That stall was called Manhua Cha and those were really nice. I can certainly see us keeping an eye out for them again!

Yeah, I guess Nadia and I just really like our Bubble tea! lol As we always say, we'll always have bubble tea :3

The con finished at 6pm, and, honestly, we had a pretty good time! Or at least I did anyway. It would be pretty cool if we could go again. We'll have to see about it again a little closer to the time. I'll let you guys know if we head there again!

Still, while not a big con like the MCM conventions, it was still a pretty good one and I'd certainly recommend going. Apparently the tickets were pretty cheap, too. It was certainly affordable for us to table at, at any rate.

We stayed in Birmingham for another day, leaving late on Sunday. Oddly enough, at this point we didn't even need to use google maps at this point to get us to the Bull Ring. Its always nice to get your bearings. It was cool to get to look around. Being from a smaller town, it was nice to get to see some stores that just aren't available around my idea. I even managed to pick up a birthday present for my dad while I was there. We also got to eat at some interesting places, too, Edd's Diner and Café Soya, the later of which sold really nice bubble tea, too. We ended up with some to take away after we ate while we picked up our luggage and headed off to our respective transport home. I was pretty lucky, actually, I reached the train station and my platform just as a train I could take pulled in. I rarely have such timing!

All in all, I'll admit I had a pretty good weekend, from Con to just hanging out in Birmingham and both of us would love to go to the city again. Maybe even for a week trip instead of a few days. There was loads we didn't get to explore, after all.

I'll be sure to link in my next post the Tanra Blog(s) that will cover the eateries in more detail, if anyone is interested in our reviews of them. Who knows, you might want to visit them yourself!

Until next time!

Tara