The Major Project - Tiny Adjustments

Based on some feedback at the last tutorial I had, I have tweaked the face of the monk from the side view to better show the form of the face.



The eyes are slightly further back and the brow is now more pronounced, the cheeks are now present and the mouth is shaded better, with the chin curving into the mouth area. Definitely an improvement on the original if I say so myself!

I want to make sure I've got enough details of my character sorted before modelling. One of the things I want to get right are the hands. I've actually photographed my own hands and then roughly painted these.



It is my intension to then make the hands chunky, since he is a pretty chunky character.

So far I've created a silhouette of the hand from above.


I will then be properly painting the details from top and bottom, and maybe even the sides, but in all honesty the thinner hands above are probably going to be good enough reference.

And now we come to the kittens. I can safely say that kittens are more difficult to draw than hands!

I've been trying desperately to draw the kitten from the front and side. Because this is a CG kitten, I don't really want it to be too styalised in terms of proportion, which is why I've looked at a lot of images of cats and kittens, both real and cartoon; Studying diagrams of the bone structure, only to keep finding ways of how to not draw kittens.

Its all to do with the shape. Here are the first wave of drawings.



I never should have put the ears forward. They look more like puppies!
The legs slowly improved as I compared the shapes of kittens to the diagrams of the skeleton, although at this stage there is still something not quite right with them. I did do a front view, but I have a feeling that by the time I've got the side view right, the front view wont line up.



So here is the second wave of kittens. I pretty much started from scratch, and you can see that the pose of the kitten has changed a bit.



After I painted the kitten that is blue I thought that was the nearest shape I had ever got to a kitten, so as you will see, I cleaned up the lines to get a better silhouette. Two problems. The head is posed looking up and isn't really a good default pose. The second is that when I tried to draw the details of the face, it just looked wrong. I slowly shifted the head to looking forward, but I'm still not happy with the final shape as it stands.
In case anyone is wondering, the first kitten in the second row down is what I think has the best shape.

Hopefully it will all come together If I look at this again another day.

A Flock of Pixels.