[Image description: Pen sketches of two men, some digitally colored. Ithadel is a middle-aged man with a narrow face, straight nose, light brown skin, and wavy black and gray hair. Gerou is a man with a broad face, hooked nose, pale skin, and slightly wavy brown hair. End ID.]
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Some practice! I’m trying to pin down Ithadel’s human design. He looks less like Weird Al’s gaunt, sleep-deprived brother than my first attempts did, so I’m making at least some progress. xD
Drew Gerou for comparison! They both have very angular jaws and prominent cheek bones, so I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t just drawing the same face with different noses, hah. Threw in an older story-verse Gerou while I was at it.
[Image description: An illustrated response to a prompt from @scxrytxles that reads, “Hi hi why not 4c for whichever muse you think most fits it? :3″ The prompted outfit consists of a brimmed hat, a crop-top long-sleeved shirt, and a skirt with a sash tied in a bow. One illustration shows Gerou in the outfit, and the other shows Phosa in humanoid form. End ID.]
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Thanks for the prompt! This is absolutely an outfit Gerou would wear. :) He’s from over on my sideblog @justassorted.
For the sake of doing a muse from this blog, I also thought Phosa might look neat in (a slightly modified version of) this! Even if it isn’t something she’d typically wear, hah. xD
The Spire was an enigma. A place, but a being, tucked away into the space between universes. It felt like code, a complex program, but she could reach out and touch it in a thousand different ways. We was enthralled by it, taken by the desire to know more. To know everything about such an unknowable thing.
She had dove deep, her mind somewhere within The Spire’s code, for lack of a better word. When she first came here, she barely understood the most surface level of functions, but now she delves into the most complex of blocks, attempting to translate their meaning like a scholar of a long forgotten language, instinct alone acting as hr Rosetta stone.
She would poke and prod at the complexities she found herself in, removing and replacing bits and pieces to seen the resulting change, to find out just what every piece of this strange system did, discovering the hows and whys of what made this magical being function. Every time she thought she made a break through, she came to another wall. The more she found out, the less she understood. It was maddening.
She thought she found something. Her mind reaches out eagerly to grasp it.
Up until now, The Spire had been tolerant of her poking around, but it appears she new hit a nerve. Before, if her time was up, she would she sent back to her body, made whole again. This time, she felt the rushing of her mind’s return. And then something more.
Whatever she had done, it had made her quite unwelcome. She felt the shock of electricity and burning magics as she was thrown through the dimensions and haphazardly dumped out into her own world.
It took a long while to come to. Her body ached from the sudden travel. And from hitting the ground. She was covered in scrapes and minor burns. Nothing serious, but it was enough to make her miserable. She got up, dusting off ruined clothes as she found that she was at the side of a road.
The highway that led out of town. At least it was close, relative to how bad it could have been. She could have been dumped out some European country. Or the ocean. So all in all, 30 or so miles from home wasn’t too bad.
She took a deep breath and started walking, thankful for the cool night air and dreading when the morning comes in just a few hours, knowing that the summer heat just might burn her alive.
She was so distracted by her own woes and that she almost didn’t notice the car that had begun slowly driving next to her. Until the passenger inside called her name.
“I need a hug,” Gerou mutters, making a beeline for the couch and flopping face-first into it. His next words are muffled. “A six hour one. Or a two week nap.”
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magicmonstersandmischief:
“Sounds pretty do-able.” Steph states plainly, a fond smirk pulling at her lips before making her way to the couch and sitting on the edge of the cushion, near Gerou’s head. Despite being close, and him verbally stating that he desired physical contact, her hands stayed in her lap. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to comfort him, but she simply wasn’t sure how. She wasn’t sure what sort of touch he really needed right now, an decided not to take the risk.
“Rough day?”
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Gerou wormed his way forward until he could press the top of his head firmly against the side of Steph’s leg with a quiet sigh. “Yeah. I… mm. I dunno if I’ve ever mentioned Lani’s parents to you, but they’re fucking assholes.”
Gerou turned his head to the side so he could speak more clearly. “She finally reclaimed the last of her stuff from them today. Three years after she moved out. And I’m glad we could help her! It was just… exhausting,” he said. His expression was pensive, far less animated than normal, and his arms stayed folded tightly beneath his chest. “I wasn’t up to much carrying so I tried to at least run interference with her parents. But listening to them needle everyone the whole time was… I don’t know. I just don’t understand some people.”
[Brief image description: A series of illustrations of Gerou teaching in front of a blackboard. The illustrations repeat, each in a different art style; at the end is a collection of doodles mixing the art styles and a few notes reflecting on the exercise. Full description and transcript starting at the heading below the cut. End ID.]
Part one of some recent style studies I’ve been doing, featuring Gerou struggling with student teaching!
I wanted to explore how different artists that I like handle stylization and simplification in comics, and when I asked around several people gave me permission to post the results. I recommend checking them out!
1) Harbourmaster is by @waywardmartian.
2) Never Satisfied is by @ohcorny.
3) Broken is by @yubriamakesart.
4) @doodledrawsthings makes a lot of content that is posted to tumblr, most recently a fair amount of A Hat in Time fanart.
Thank you all for the permission to post! ^_^ I'm having a lot of fun with this.
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Side notes:
I genuinely thought that the Harbourmaster style would be easiest for me, since it contains roughly the same amount of detail as my own style and since I’m like 75% sure that reading it as a younger teen informed a lot of my own style and character designs. Turns out it was actually the hardest! Perhaps because, since there aren’t as many blatantly fundamental differences, I had to pay more careful attention to proportions and specific forms?
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Never Satisfied was interesting! Alongside the work of Doodledrawsthings it’s definitely the furthest from my own style, and choosing Gerou for this honestly doesn’t do that difference full justice. I looked a lot at Fidelia, Sylas’s mom, and Thierry in trying to figure out how Gerou’s facial features would translate. Part two of my plans is to explore different character designs that might make fuller use of the difference in style, heh. (In other news: Colored lineart looks very neat and studying how it’s handled in NS is the first time I’ve been able to carry it off in a reasonable time frame, hah.)
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Broken is just... very pretty, y’all. xD I don’t think it really saved me any time or much ease of drawing over my own style, but it’s very nice to look at. And I think the style differences and specific simplifications do lend themselves very well towards creating more consistency than I ever manage in my own art. Noticing the patterned way of drawing ear details was a fun moment for me, I’d never really thought of codifying anything that way before!
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I did the first drawing in Doodledrawsthings’s style (the 3/4ths view in the turnaround) and thought “Oh goodness this is lovely and quick and feels nice.” It’s very nearly the first time drawing something in a cartoony style has ever come easily for me. But... I struggled much more with every other drawing in that style, ahah. Still, it was comparatively quick and I do love the expressiveness of the stylized eyes. :D This is another style where I think I’ll need to explore a wider range of character designs, though. I think it’s also worth thinking about how character design is fundamentally changed in some ways by the change in style; some of what I would think about designing a character specifically for that style is very different from the details I would normally think about when designing a character.
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[Detailed image description:
A series of images repeating the same content in different art styles, followed up by a page of sketches and a page with text notes.
The repeated content is a turnaround of the character Gerou as well as a short two-panel comic showing Gerou as a student teacher in front of a blackboard. Gerou is a thin white man with sallow freckled skin, a large hooked nose, long wavy brown hair, and glowing orange-yellow eyes. In the comic, in the first panel he gestures animatedly with a wide smile and says, “Oh, that’s easy! If you just--” then breaks off. In the second panel he holds up a hand as if asking for a pause, and says, “...wait,” with visible consternation.
The sketches feature continued style experimentation with Gerou making a number of expressions and gestures, including: absolutely failing to maintain a good pokerface; looking stressed; various smiles, from tired to nervous to wide and happy; sighing tiredly; sticking out his tongue with arms crossed huffily; arguing with someone; drinking tea; and fighting off a dizzy spell.
The text image is headlined Thoughts and reads as follows:
Think less about reducing details and more about streamlining said details into shapes that are easy to repeat consistently?
Experiment with different ways of rendering mouths and eyes; they can change the feel of an expression
There are no rules; vary style as needed with panel size/detail, emotion that needs depicted, etc. Prioritize information conveyed.
Increasing detail on teeth beyond your baseline makes them look gritted/tensed/bared
Sometimes low contrast is nice
Emotion backgrounds are fun!
Gotta learn to loosen up (though I knew that already hhhh)
Simplified hands are lovely. (So, so much easier. Not sure I’m gonna go back anytime soon except for anatomy practice sketching, heh.)
[Image description: Watercolor painting of Adelain giving Gerou a piggy back ride, both grinning widely. They are wearing vaguely lower-class Victorian style clothing. They are walking along a path next to a lake, shaded by trees with bright orange autumn leaves. End description.]
I, uh. I forgot to upload this, didn’t I? Whoops.
Anyway! Here’s the finished painting of the sketch I did for Senshistocktober Day 1, featuring Adelain and Gerou playing around on an autumn walk. :)
