OotS Style Art/Fanart Showcase IV

[Ashen Lilies]

You get to resize and retweak objects on a whim though, so I think it evens out in the end.

[Savannah]

The duplicate command is your friend, just select what you want to duplicate and press ctrl+d. I think that you can link duplicates to each other so if you change the original you change the duplicate.

*fires up Inkscape*
*duplicates at will*

Right, do you take payments for your knowledge in souls or firstborn children? Seriously, the inability to do that has been bugging me for ages! Thanks!

[Elder Tsofu]

You get to resize and retweak objects on a whim though, so I think it evens out in the end.

Omf, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

*fires up Inkscape*
*duplicates at will*

Right, do you take payments for your knowledge in souls or firstborn children? Seriously, the inability to do that has been bugging me for ages! Thanks!

Well, you can find quite a few things if you take a look in the menu's.

[thepsyker]

I have been trying to play around with the composition in the group portraits I have been working on, one thing I have learned that really makes that easier is to remember to group the items making up each individual in the picture so they are easier to move. I have also found that layering the individuals in the line up instead of just having them all stand in a straight line really helps.

Here is the redo of the Keep on the Borderland group.

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We have also picked up a new player for the Against the Giants game so I had to make up a new image for him to add to that portrait. I also decided to create a group portrait of our various NPC followers and henchmen in that campaign.

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I have also been trying to go through some of my older pictures and tidy them up based on a few of the tips I have picked up in this thread. Here are a couple of old action shots I've re-worked a little.

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With all this work i have been doing creating characters for the campaigns I am in my girlfriend was getting a little jealous and insisted I make one for her too. I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out.

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I have also used this art in another side project inspired by the Giants kickstarter promise to provide 400 OotS style monster minis. So I turned the character portraits into minis for our games.

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Edit: Since I just put this post up today I figured I would just add to it instead of doing a new post. This is an initial image of a scene from the Against the Giants campaign I am in, featuring my bard and our party's vampire magic user. Still working on how I want to handle the background.

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[AsteriskAmp]

I've gone and done a little proof of theory by doing an (authorized) overview of Teutonic Knight's avatar. Each of the four categories is gone over when deemed appropriate and the logic behind each edit is explained. This is all made possible by the original image, creating is a lot harder than editing since one has to start without any elements and the general direction isn’t clear until well into the work; essentially it’s a self-improvement process.

Short Version

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Flow: Varies in each area, but it’s generally continuous and favours straight lines with the exception of the break between shirt and pants.
Dynamism: The hand near the glasses suggests the central action of the glasses being adjusted.
Technique: Tends toward a human proportion of head to body. Vector editing was used. Lines are softened.
Colouring: Desaturated palette centred on navy blue with black and white as secondary colours.

The original image suggests a certain look, most elements points towards a concept of confidence. I’ve emphasised that idea by using the facial area to match the glasses adjusting hand gesture. Made the hand gesture more obvious to contribute to action and made the other hand contribute to body pose.
The shirt has been given more vibrant variations of the original colour to give an air of casualness. It’s been given additional flowing motion. The pants bagginess has been made more obvious with minor edits.

Complete Over view

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Step 1 - Head Analysis

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The first step is evaluating pose and body structure, red lines are body structure, this is merely going over what Teutonic Knight did just for the sake of completeness.

Afterwards we isolate section 1, the head.

The head is one of the most notorious parts of any OoTS avatar, so this will be rather lengthy.

It's possible to convey context through facial expressions easily, this in turn allow the posture to fit in a bigger context and also hint toward a personality. The main three ways to convey expression are eyes, brows and mouth. Since conventional OoTS forgo eye restructuring, we'll focus in mouth and brows.

We now get to the first step in the head, making the face look where we want and the mouth give the expression we want. After using the guiding lines (green lines) we place the eyes an the mouth.

The second step is delimiting the brow area to prevent the hair from covering it too much and overclouding them.

Third step is doing a hair mock-up and seeing how it clashes with the brow area, I've also added a glasses area to limit their extent on the face.

We go over the brow area, since the hand is already hinting toward the accommodation of the glasses, I wanted to add some expression to justify it. Anime dictates its either clumsiness or confidence; I've gone for the second, one with more exaggerated brows and a more subtle one.

Fourth step is getting the hair painted. Only noteworthy detail is the adding of a rebel hair on the back base of the head to break the flow and give a sense of size.

Step Five is doing the glasses; I've copied the eyes as guidelines. To prevent the eye size disparity from being obvious on the glasses, I've worked the upper frame to raise itself and cut both eyes on the same height in relation to the top and to match the eyebrows height. I've also cut the frames short because doing so adds no new elements. It flows along the brow and the eyes height change due to style and perspective.


To Note: We've given the avatar expression through eye brows and mouth and using the glasses as part of the flow and to add to the original expression and to make the original gesture seem more intentioned than accidental. [Dynamism; Flow]

Step 2 - Hands analysis

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This step will be brief.

We isolate the hands, in other mediums the hands are turning points for expression and flow, even texture and colouring is implied due to its importance in almost all actions and body language, in OoTS art, the lack of fingers mean we have to express more with less and work with unnatural anatomy.

First we do the physiology of the hand; three fingers: two uncategorized ones and a thumb. The right hand is accommodating the glasses, which is the base we work from. The left hand is used for attitude purposes.

For those with glasses, the confident hand locating motion is rather obvious, one finger over the frame, the thumb under and one finger folded. The left hand is auxiliary to the body posture, as such, since I'll be slanting it somewhat forward to add to the general air of confidence, the right hand will be auxiliary by going with the push of the hip to his right.

The remaining steps are merely giving it thickness and modifying it from a stroke to a fill for sharpness.

To Note: We've made the hands match the mood and complement the flow. [Dynamism; Flow]

Step 3 - Feet analysis

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Shoes' importance varies; I've merely added some details over the original image and made the left foot be raised to add to the posture flow which will be analyzing next. Also, made each colour separated by a black clear line for the perspective to be more noticeable.

To Note: Footwear is not really that important, and depends on style, what I've done could be stripped down without much loss. [Dynamism; Colouring]

Step 4 - Torso and Legs

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Finally we reach the main body, which I've split into two parts for convenience. I've made a minor edit, while the torso-wear hints towards a sweater the triangle ending to it and the fact that it seems shirt shaped I've decided to transition it to a clearer form.

Now I get to more flow analysis. Usually you first consider outyacent factors to flow before getting into a cloth piece’s flow, elements like wind and explosions as well as implied movement factor in, and clothing is consistent with them first, but that isn't the case here;so we are going over the cloth's inherent flow first.

As it's visible, the shirt suggests a given flow and pathing order. The sleeves will have their top drawn first since they have a minimum height due to gravity and arm height. The neck will want to go with the spine centre. The split at the base should be noticeable since it’s a shirt, and for going with the curvature of the hip we’ll have the shirt edges at the base split to give a clear flow change in relation to the pants.

We do a rough sketch without much regard to line thickness and identify our essential elements in relation to the shape, the bare minimum for it to match the proposed flow.

Finally we do minor adaptations, go over with desired technique (Mr.Saturn's method of Tsofu's style has been applied) and colour. I've used to base colours, navy blue and white, I use a darker hue of blue to contrast with the white from the t-shirt and make the neckline standout. We also use it in the cuffs to make them somewhat more noticeable and to draw attention to the arms positioning.
I'm using vibrant colours to accentuate a casual accent already suggested by the pose and the original clothing.

On to the second half.

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Pants are baggy, so from the start there will be heavy curving, to give it some order and symmetry I've done a continuous flow to lines on his left and heavy bumping on the lines at the right. Finally, the curved line in his knee indicates that there will be a raise there that will distort its surroundings when sketching. The knee's raising is done to compliment the confident pose and was already planned from the foot analysis.

The sketching is fairly straightforward, bumping on the left with the reshape area tool (freeform also would have been a valid option) and smooth curves on the right but we consider the distortion from a raised knee on his left leg. The hem of the pants is left vague since it isn't essential.

Finally we colour it. We use solid fills (dead lines in fabric look weird) to simulate fabric bending and the hem. Finally we use the white lines to suggest the pant’s bagginess and flow and to accentuate the raising of the left knee and hem's place, it will follow the right hand line bumpy flow but its proximity to the left line will create an imperfection effect as that seen on clothing, which bends and moves over the body within certain margin. The colour contrast between black and white will help accentuate what the flow suggests.

To Note: Taking notice of clothes flow and using it to make statements (this piece is not fixed on the torso, this pants are baggy). Using flow to simulate the imperfections on clothes without having to go to too much detailing. Using colouring to pull attention to certain areas is done through heavy contrast but also sticking to certain palette to not overflow information (in this case dark grey, white and blue). Different techniques will use the same base, but will have different end results, it should express the same regardless of technique, the difference will be in the amount of work and the way that elements are suggested and how strongly. Giving life by giving flow and marking flow style change by breaking it. The body denotes action, but from previous steps it should already be going somewhere, if you take away the body, the action should be guessable, the body makes it concrete and adds an anatomical frame. [Flow, Technique, Colouring, Dynamism]

Step 5 - Final Result

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End result of putting everything together. Body proportions and relation of it to the head will give different results, the bigger the head, the more cartoony it tends to look. [Technique]

[super dark33]

thepsyker

The vampiric magic user....
that is one handsome chap.

[Elder Tsofu]

Nice group thepsyker! Maybe the next step would involve more differing expressions, as it is now they look quite alike (and bland). I think that small modification could raise them quite a bit!

And since I like to bang my own drum I'll link my drawing of the vocalist Kirari:
http://youtu.be/DvXNa5iSkGQ

See! I can draw "fast" too when I don't have complicated guitars or a bass with perspectives!

[Tiffanie Lirle]

@^ Adorable. The one thing I've always been terrible at is making avatars that work in 120x120 without cutting them in half. So I'm kind of jealous of your style.

Watched your video in an attempt to steal your secrets, but it was useless to me, since I draw in Flash and not Inkscape. xd

A request thread request I just finished for Singingnoodle.

[memnarch]

Oooo.... That's got nice atmosphere.

[Elder Tsofu]

@^ Adorable. The one thing I've always been terrible at is making avatars that work in 120x120 without cutting them in half. So I'm kind of jealous of your style.

Watched your video in an attempt to steal your secrets, but it was useless to me, since I draw in Flash and not Inkscape. xd

A request thread request I just finished for Singingnoodle.
*Image*

I'm also terrible at drawing avatar-sized, although I suppose I might be slightly less so than you.

Really nice scene, although it is a bit sad that the value of the stand alone avatar sort of diminished after seeing the full thing.

Oooo.... That's got nice atmosphere.

I fully agree. ^^

And now for the fourth and last member of the band, Chie the drummer. Was a quite smooth job without any particular hurdles in the way since I thoroughly sketched her out before attempting to draw her. (In contrast to the guitar/bass players Sarina and Shikako)
I'm quite happy about how I managed to fill up the empty spaces with the drums without taking to much space with them.


Part 1: http://youtu.be/ysNBTGf62nM
Part 2: http://youtu.be/fWSKTjeREnE

Edit:

[Teutonic Knight]

@^ This why we love you Tsofu.

I tried your sketch and 'Scape method for Aria and came up with the below. Also included for those who read my comic, a closer look at a more detailed Aria. For the avatar size version, look at my avatar.

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I enjoyed this process, drawing freely, and thanks to this, I can now draw in a more freeform cartoon style. I improved somewhere, and for that I am extremely pleased with myself.

However, the original stroke size for the largest stroke was 1.6, so when shrunk to avatar size you get those poor excuses thin lines for strokes. Any advice on making them thicker, thereby improving the "shrunken look", or something like that? Just increasing the stroke size won't be good enough since the stroke sizes are varied, and some objects are strokeless with only fill. etc etc etc

[Elder Tsofu]

It certainly feels more fluid than your more regular depictions of her.

How high is a regular head for you in px measured in the inkscape? As a reference I can mention that I use 46,369px with a line thickness of 1,859. (1,6 for clothes and accessories)

If you want to increase the line-width without going over every line in her body you could try resizing the whole figure like I did with Sarinas body. Just make sure the left-most button in the "affect:" panel right above where the fill and stroke menu appears is un-clicked since clicking it will scale the lines when you resize. That way they will stay the same thickness as you set while the figure shrinks.

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And finally a video that is slightly different from the first one I posted. In it you'll watch behind the scenes of the scene you see two posts above; I used the avatars I made earlier to make a group-picture fitting to the theme and got, just slightly, carried away.

Part 1: http://youtu.be/c8IIOca-ElE
Part 2: http://youtu.be/g_oRfEFoH6Q

[thepsyker]

Nice group thepsyker! Maybe the next step would involve more differing expressions, as it is now they look quite alike (and bland). I think that small modification could raise them quite a bit!

And since I like to bang my own drum I'll link my drawing of the vocalist Kirari:
http://youtu.be/DvXNa5iSkGQ

See! I can draw "fast" too when I don't have complicated guitars or a bass with perspectives!

How's this

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I'm personally really happy with what the smile has done for the dwarf.

edit: here's another thing I threw together quick tonight while bored.

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[Elder Tsofu]

Much better, they certainly (as a group) lost their staring into the distance with a goofy grin look with that change.

But now I can't shake the feeling that that dwarf has got a hairy pair of butt-cheeks on his head. (is it somehow an open skull?)

[thepsyker]

Much better, they certainly (as a group) lost their staring into the distance with a goofy grin look with that change.

But now I can't shake the feeling that that dwarf has got a hairy pair of butt-cheeks on his head. (is it somehow an open skull?)

We ran into a nuclear fuel rod that some how made it's way over from Gama World, I missed that session so I'm not sure of the details, and he end up with the duel brain mutation from Gamma World, so those are each one of his brains. Him and the barbarian were the only two to fail their saves verse radiation so while he now has one brain that is a fighter and another that is a cleric, the barbarian has a con that is so high that if you kill him without using fire or acid, he'll come back to life in a couple hours and kick your head in.

Anyway, I wanted something other than just a wider head to represent that hence the split in the head representing two bulbous areas containing his brains. Then I had to add the squiggly brain folds because without them his head looked like the tip of a particular part of male anatomy that would require me to pixilate his head.

[Elder Tsofu]

We ran into a nuclear fuel rod that some how made it's way over from Gama World, I missed that session so I'm not sure of the details, and he end up with the duel brain mutation from Gamma World, so those are each one of his brains.Him and the barbarian were the only to to fail their saves verse radiation so while he know has one brain that is a fighter and another that is a cleric, the barbarian has a con that is so high that if you kill him without using fire or acid, he'll come back to life in a couple hours and kick your head in.

Anyway, I wanted something other than just a wider head to represent that hence the split in the head representing two bulbous areas containing his brains. Than I had to add the squiggly brain folds because without them his head looked like the tip of a particular part of male anatomy that would require me to pixilate his head.

I see where it comes from now, but I've got to say that the pixelated top of the head would have been fun. ^^

[thepsyker]

I'm starting to feel a little guilty posting this much, like I'm monopolizing the thread or something, but here is another action shot I put together tonight.

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And a self portrait and picture of my girlfriend and me, since I can't seem to ever post just a single picture.

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[Tiffanie Lirle]

although it is a bit sad that the value of the stand alone avatar sort of diminished after seeing the full thing.

That's pretty much always the case.

I'm starting to feel a little guilty posting this much, like I'm monopolizing the thread or something

You get used to it with time.

The only thing I can say to your work is that I'd suggest trying a few thicker lines here and there. Especially the arms and the legs. But in general it's pretty good.

Anyways, another pm avatar request. This time from Daftendirekt, It took me about 3 days to even get started on it because I'm lazy. I guess.

I kind of recycled a lot of old parts with this one. But I stopped caring after around an hour in.

[Dark Elf Bard]

Erm, hi, I'm DEB. I made these.

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[Akrim.elf]

little thematic comics

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[smuchmuch]

(It's nice to see you trying some definitively more dynamic pose and viewpoints, Pinky. But even taking in count the perspective, this really looks strange, the head is really too big compared to the body here.
I know big round head (even by OOTs standart) are part of you're style but you may want to moderate that a bit sometime. I've noticed a few of your avatar goive a strange look of imbalance, because of the strange contract between a small but very detailled body and the big circly head.)

@DBE:
it looks kinda weird, tbh. I'm afraid more 'normal' proportions and pure stick limbs don't go so well together, (particulary with all the jewelery wich emphasize the thiness of thez arm and legs.)
You may consider either trying some more vanilla OOts prortions (smlaller torso, smaller legs) or thicker limbs.

Alos it's pretty square. for better pose and movement, you want to curve more, i'd say.

[AsteriskAmp]

(It's nice to see you trying some definitively more dynamic pose and viewpoints, Pinky. But even taking in count the perspective, this really looks strange, the head is really too big compared to the body here.
I know big round head (even by OOTs standart) are part of you're style but you may want to moderate that a bit sometime. I've noticed a few of your avatar goive a strange look of imbalance, because of the strange contract between a small but very detailled body and the big circly head.)

Mea Culpa, I rushed it in 20 minutes, I took it in the zeit of things and then remembered I actually can't take requests and do them over time anymore now that I have uni. It started off trying to be it running toward the camera, pointing the guns to the viewer, but 3 minutes into it, I noticed it would take me at least 4 hours to do so properly, so I rehashed, and couldn't manage to fix proportions properly.

After some intents on fixing it. And because I felt horrible after writing the previous bit.

[Crimmy]

So, I like Brink.

[Dr. Bath]

Dang Crimmy, that's boss as hell. I don't think the face is quite long enough though :P

[thepsyker]

Another action shot this time from the Keep on the Boarderland campaign. I'm just not sure about this picture so I have two versions

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Boom Nat 20

version 2

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Crit!

[Crimmy]

Yeah. Maybe Saturn's oval head avatars could cut it.

But, yeah... the face is too normal. Heh.
I updated it, since it was missing a few things.

[Riverdance]

Another action shot this time from the Keep on the Boarderland campaign. I'm just not sure about this picture so I have two versions

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Boom Nat 20

version 2

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Crit!

I love the Dragon's teeth. Nicely done.

[AsteriskAmp]

In the interest of leaving behind my critically panned Ribonis Avatars and joining nude week (since no way in hell I'll ever draw her anywhere near that state) I've decided to take a shot at everyone's favourite computer.

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Comments and suggestions are much appreciated.

[Elder Tsofu]

Shouldn't the hair point downwards?

*runs*

(nice!)

[AsteriskAmp]

Shouldn't the hair point downwards?

*runs*

(nice!)

The probes hold it upwards. Except the rebel hair which is sort of falling backwards from the scalp.

Also, found time to make derivative versions on an old style.

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The recovered image that got me to restart:

and because it kinda spurred from making the previous ones...

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