#imperfect science

[windowsloth]

IMPERFECT SCIENCE, work in progress

[bigtreefest]

Imperfect Science Masterlist

A Various Babes x Messy! Lab Assistant! Reader Series

Machinist! Ari Levinson; Lab Manager! Curtis Everett; IT coder! Jake Jensen x messy! Lab assistant! Reader

Main Masterlist

Drabbles and Extras

Test Tubes

[krtart]

Ithadel & Gerou | 11-2-22

[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.

[grumpyoldsnake]

[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? .

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.) .

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! .

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.)

End image description.]

[grumpyoldsnake]

Adelain & Gerou | Senshistocktober 2020

[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. :)

Fountain pen & watercolor. 9″ x 12″ 140 lb cotton cold press. 

[grumpyoldsnake]

Scene Doodles | 3-10-21

“You’d think that’d make me sick of the stuff, but. Can’t live without it.”

[Image description: A sketchy illustration in which Gerou and Steph sit together on a couch. Steph’s robotic companions, Tesla and Cyber, lean against her. Gerou perches on the armrest and Steph is wrapped in a blanket. End ID.]

A scene from this rp thread with @magicmonstersandmischief !

Procreate, 1.3 hours.

[grumpyoldsnake]

Senshistocktober Day 1 & 2!

[Image descriptions: Two sketchy, traditional drawings. The first is of Adelain giving Gerou a piggyback ride; they are both grinning and look to be teasing one another. The second is of Gerou hugging his family; he resembles his mother much more closely than his father. They are laughing and talking among themselves. End description.]

Day one was finished and cleanly inked on the 1st, but I’m turning it into a full-blown painting, so for now I’ll just post the sketch. xD

Day 1: Gerou and Adelain! They’re probably just playing. Drawing this made me finally realize that Adelain is definitely inspired by a childhood friend of mine who was also a dancer and who would randomly pick me up just because she could. xD

Day 2: Gerou and his parents! I, uh. I don’t have names for his parents yet alsjdjfhf. But they’re fun to draw!

[grumpyoldsnake]

I'm curious about Second Skin, if you don't mind sharing! Tis the first that caught my eye.

(For the WIP question game. Thanks for the ask!)

Ah! Second Skin is a word document where I’ve saved the script and original scribbly thumbnails for a short comic idea that I had back in high school. (About... 6 to 8 years ago now? Goodness.)

[Image description: Two thumbnail panels from the mentioned comic. The drawings are bare suggestions of figures and hard to make out, but the dialogue is clear. Gerou says, “The Kitwavian word for it is riekenvaust; spirit shield. In short, it keeps foreign magic out and your magic — and soul, according to some — in. Simple enough. But what does that actually mean? End image description.]

(Random side note: the blackboard doodles for it inspired the background in the style study exercise I did recently!)

The basic idea was to explain a bit of worldbuilding for the setting (the ‘second skin’ in question) via making a comic of Gerou giving a lecture on the topic during his student teacher days. It would let me work in a bit of characterization, it would let me avoid giving out more details than the people in the world themselves know, and it just seemed like fun!

(I’d ramble about the concept itself here, but that’d make this answer even longer a;lsdkfjh)

Anyway! I put it on the WIP list because I’ve been updating the script a bit. ^_^

I think I’m finally getting to the point where I have a chance to actually carry it through to the end without burning out if I set out to draw it now. Learning to draw faster, better mental health, etc. And it seemed like it might be a low effort, self-contained thing to test my stamina for comic making. Shouldn’t be much longer than 3 pages!