Artistic Endeavors

If I want to strive for some of my more ambitious project ideas, it occurs to me that I need to be an artist. Not that I couldn't pull in, say, an artist friend to help, but I don't wish to feel indebted to someone for their help. Besides, I'm a loner when it comes to my own projects, and this tends to be because I don't want someone else's creativity melding with my own. So, I have begun some artistic endeavors.

When most people say they can't draw, they usually mean it by admitting they can't even draw stick figures. My personal version of "I can't draw" is more "I can draw, but I'm worse than both of my siblings." Which is to say that my two sisters have some amazing artistic talent that scared me away from furthering my own, as I wanted to focus on something I wouldn't be 3rd best at in the family.

Something interesting about the artistic style of both my sisters is that they both started with a very cartoony style that developed a much more realistic shift over time. My younger sister's talent still varies, but just to give an idea of a 1-hour pencil sketch she did in 2007:

Perhaps if I had a whole week, I could accomplish what it took her an hour to do, but I'd still be wasting lots of paper to the trash.  In comparison to that, this is something I drew:

Completely different, cartoony style that may have taken a minute or less, but it still required lots of redos beforehand.

I think that sort of style is what I'm going to go for, though. I was originally trying to draw in arms, neck, and legs, but those were the parts that were causing me issues. Different artists have different quirks with their characters, and I think I kinda like the no limbs look. Very Rayman-like (though even he has hands). There's still lots of perfecting needed, but at least the face is really easy for me to recreate without thinking too hard.

Plus, if I go for the hand-drawing and scanning approach, I may have to tweak how I go about that, too. The contrast with the pen I've used is a bit funky. The images will also have to be colored, though that is also dependent on the contrast issue (using the paint bucket tool as-is results in a few off-pixels here and there).

I'll discuss more about the specifics of this project perhaps when a few more sketches are available. Also opening up my bookmarks on DirectX tutorials again. Brushing up on some C++. Ah, and there is this matter of a website I need to revamp. And beating Dead Space to unlock its hardest difficulty so I can start my next video capture on the hardest difficulty project... So much going on, but I gotta love it. Minus the actual job, of course.