More thumbnails/ odds & ends

This semester myself and a couple other students started a concept art club with the goal of making a yearly publication for visual development students to showcase their work on a united project. Our first theme was chosen by one of my co-founders, and the theme is The Old Man and the Sea.

What is fun about our project is that we are each allowed to interpret the story however we like, as long as the key themes are honored. I'm resetting The Old Man and the Sea in a technological fantasy setting - my old man is part of a desert nomadic community. Instead of fishing for marlin, each day he goes out into the desert and hunts for M.A.R.L.I.N class robots, leftover technology from a bygone age which his people scavenge parts from to maintain their life in the harsh desert.

I've been doing a lot of thumbnails thinking about what elements are most inspirational. I've taken things from Kazakh costumes, cowboys, Nepalese herders, and a lot from my own imagination. The sharks that eat the old man's marlin in my story will be portrayed by a predatory class of robot, so when I designed him I thought it would be neat if he'd lost his legs to one of these robots previously and fashioned new ones from robot parts. (Maybe he hunted the machine that took his legs and took its parts as revenge!)

basic thumbs, hair style options

I've been watching Feng Zhu tutorials from time to time as I work. I like having noise in the background, but sometimes I find tv shows to be too distracting. I guess I figure if I'm going to distract myself, it might as well be with drawing tutorials. He has a neat thumbnailing process where he goes back into his silhouette shapes with greys to flesh things out. This seems extremely useful, both as a conceptual process and as help to a modeler so I thought I'd try it out.

I think they came out all right. I want to practice this style more. After that I picked some elements I liked and started messing around with clothing, but I didn't care for the results much:

keeping the silhouette uniform, but changing the costuming

So, I went back to thumbnailing a little more...

When in doubt, more thumbnails?

I'm liking some of these better. I'm not sure if I'm totally committed to any one idea yet, but I figured I'd take the plunge and start a color version of some of the ideas I like best.

I think the legs are coming out a little stiffer in this version than I like, and my friend said they look a little too much like golf clubs, ha! So... still room for improvement. But I think I'm starting to get somewhere with the concept now. I haven really finalized the coloring or the concept at this point. I spend a lot of time on environments, so I feel like I'm weaker when it comes to painting the figure and I should work at that too.

And, a a couple speed paints from the week. Working on improving organic things, plants etc.

Spooky jungle ruins, 2 hours

Is it wrong to admit I did this during a class lecture? The shouldn't hold a lecture class in a cintiq lab. I CAN'T STOP MYSELF.

Horses are hard, 3 hours

I drew horses a lot as a kid, you'd think I'd be better at them.