Back From a Long Creative Hiatus:
Welcome, Co-conspirators, the Stratagem’s Archives are now open for perusing. Today, I will be shifting the topics over to creative outlets and will be presenting a remastering of old sketches.
Not only will I be remastering a sketch and presenting them here, but I will also create a new sketch of the same source material that will include: shading, coloring, and perspective, using traditional methods. I will be using printer paper, a mechanical pencil with 0.5mm lead, and Crayola colored pencils.
I had taught myself years prior using references, watching YouTube videos (AKA Mark Crilley), video games, animation, and books. Although, I have always been highly critical of my work, I am willing to share my progress and the steps I’ll be taking to improve my current skills.
The sketches that I will be showcasing here can be considered fan art for a text based reading game called, “The Samurai of Hyuga” from Choice of Games LLC’s second app, “Hosted Games LLC” by Devon Connell.
Text Based Game Inspiration
The characters below are the potential romantic love interest(s), friend, enemy, or ex-lover of the player character. It depends on how you, the player, interact with the story and which kinds of relationships you want to pursue with the characters.
They each have their role in the story and, at the time of this writing, “The Samurai of Hyuga” has 5 books. I’m waiting to see how the story progresses, however, this is how I envisioned the following characters to look like.
Momoko Hayami and Junko Uesugi have confirmed sketches provided by the author and the artist that works on their projects. But my sketches were before those official concept arts were released.
The following project will be using The Ronin, Junko Uesugi, as my reference. The picture above is Junko being introduced in the ending of Book 1 and in the beginning of Book 2. I do have another sketch of her, made three years later, with how I had imagined she’d appear in book 4.
There is a blank space to the left because I was going to include a background years prior. But I gave up on that because I liked how Junko came out here. I didn’t want to ruin this drawing by doing something I believed I was going to mess up on. However, for this coming project, that is going to change.
Several New Artistic Challenge to Undertake!
So, with these new artistic challenges, I’ll be showing my step-by-step process in creating a new “Junko Uesugi” with a dynamic poses, adding a background, including color, and shading. The first thing I will show will be the pose itself and how the baseline will be starting out.
I’ve never used to use a baseline to draw before, but it felt appropriate here. I wanted to challenge myself, and challenged I was when starting this out. In the past, using shapes and lines to map out the body, proportions, and angles was strange and I thought that it wasn’t necessary.
You could probably tell that I didn’t properly learn art, but learned from watching anime, cartoons, and playing video games.
I’ve been searching on YouTube for tips and advice that could help me with improving drawing dynamic poses and came across “YTartschool” that mentions to use asymmetry because symmetry is what will throw everything off.
“JustinArts” mentioned to use myself as a reference by taking pictures, which I’ve done in the past, though I hope I’ll be able to personally capture, not only the pose, the right emotion I want to create.
Hopefully, as I add more details, I’ll be able to figure out how to focus on depth and perspective. I’m so used to using a more forward facing profile that I struggled to get a side front profile. I’ve usually started from the head and neck down, but I started from the hips and shoulders, then worked my way upwards.
So much of this process is new to me: the pose, the body placements, just figuring out the proportions is difficult for me because I’m just used to jumping into things and going from there. If you were to look at my previous above examples, you could see that they’re all static, stiff, and lacks dynamism.
I’m seeing that this draft looks good so far, but I am doing my best to not jinx myself or criticize before I can get the details in.
Okay, this came out better than I thought, but I’m getting nervous the more I work on this project. Besides anatomy, perspective, profiles, and everything else needed to make good to great art, I didn’t teach myself to learn clothing, fabrics, and how they crease or flow.
I could have used my own gauze to see how it would look wrapped around a person live, or used a blanket for the pants, but I went with an easier option. I just drew lines and made sure it follows the curves of the body, so I have another project to pursue next time!
In Conclusion
After not having drawn anything for what felt like years, I have grown pleasantly surprised with how this project came out.
Most likely I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I can’t learn or see my mistakes if I don’t make things and see where needs work.
So, I’ll be making part 2 and post it at a later date. Very likely I’ll make a few copies of this sketch so that, when I work on the backgrounds, shading, and color, I have backups to use in case I can’t undo my mistakes like digital art can.
If you’ve been away from your creative and artistic outlet, then let me know in the comments below; what got you back into the activity, what did you make recently, and what your thoughts were from such a long hiatus?
Thank you for taking the time to look over my progress and reading my process. The archives will now be closing and I’ll see you in part 2!
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I write about creativity, coding, art, and personal growth.
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