Defenders of Gondolin: Ecthelion, Glorfindel and Tuor. The scale armor variant for Glorfindel has been done for "Aiglos" #25, but the plate cuirass is my fav. What is yours?
Work in progress steps . T.b.c. in color. More images and armor description quotations in the Defenders of Gondolin gallery on my homepage. Yes, I know, Tolkien mentions only chainmail, but IMO they had a lot of time to perfect what they wore to battle against orcs, werewolves, dragons and who knows what. They had time and fantasy to put those iron wings on Tuor's helmet, not mentioning the crystals on Ecthelion's shield, so why not something more practical for a change? Or just something to put even more ornaments and crystals, why not ;)
2/8/2018. Experimenting with a different kind of inking style...
2/8/2018 @ 6:42pm, Instagram.
Thinking of trying a different kind of inking style. Let's hope I don't mess up too much. #workinprogess#pencildrawing #underdrawing #sketch of #Madokami #UltimateMadoka Figma.
2/8/2018 @ 9:15pm, Instagram.
Added #Gasenfudeoutline to the overall perimeter.#workinprogess #inking #copic#MadokaKaname #madokami#UltimateMadoka #puellamagimadokamagica#fanart
Made a little mistake on the right wing though. Gotta be careful when my wrist rest slips.
2/8/2018 @ 11:32pm, Instagram.
I shaded everything, but it's not really showing up. Maybe I should redo it with higher contrast? #workinprogess#UltimateMadoka
2/9/2018 @ 1am, Instagram.
I added the #stars to hide mistakes.?? Done.?? I think this new inking style works for me.?????? #madokami#MadokaKaname #Godoka #UltimateMadoka#fanart #puellamagimadokamagica#copicsketch #Gasenfude #copic #whiteout#gellyroll #marvy #LePen #stabilo
1:52 PM 2/9/2018
Yesterday (2/8/2018), I woke up with another idea to work with my irrevocably flat drawing style: thin linework in the interior; thick outline on the exterior.
After continually coming up against a wall in improving my skills of portraying 3D, I've just had to concede that my art style is instinctually flat. "Graphic", as my art college called it. So I've been looking for ways to take advantage of my flat style, lean into it, and really embrace it. But nothing has really worked so far. Because even though thick lines usually work for making flat things look cute (like in Powerpuff Girls, or many chibi art), my drawings just look flat and blah. If you see my Persona 5 Inktober2017 drawings, whatever little and interesting 3-dimensionality volume I managed to get in those, were flattened out by thick inking lines---not flattened into interesting stylization, but flattened into boredom. I know my design teacher said to push things a little to the extreme to make an aspect become an intentional style. But making my flat drawings flatter just wasn't working. Just using thick lines, even with their interesting varying widths, wasn't working for me. But at the same time, I was always afraid of my long record of using thin technical pens, resulting in boring, overly-consistent line widths. I still craved those calligraphic, sumi-e, varying line thicknesses. So why not use both in the same drawing? Intentionally. It worked for Alphonse Mucha.
As I experimented with this new inking style for me, I realized I could solve another problem: my pencil sketches always look better than my inked drawings. Even though the pencil lines I didn't ink, were more like framework guidelines for my drawing, and didn't realistically belong in the final subject, they always looked interesting. Somehow, all those squigley, sketchy lines had a lot of life to them. But I've tried inking all of my sketchy lines before, and it just looked messy...in black ink. So yesterday, I tried to ink them with a light gray ink. Then I thought to ink the more solid, rigid objects in black ink, then use the gray ink only for the more fluid objects. Then even better, I would mix black ink and gray ink on the same objects. The thin black ink lines would go on the usual final lines that I'd normally chose for a final drawing; the gray lines would capture ALL the sketchy pencil lines that I'd usually erase---even when it didn't make sense! Even when the sketchy lines weren't depicting a shape or line that could really exist with the subject I was trying to draw, I'd ink it last night, but in gray. And it worked sooooo well! *o*!!!
Then I thought that gray shouldn't only ink the "superposition" sketchy pencil lines, but that other colored inks could ink ENTIRE objects, as long as they were more fluid or fluffy elements. It worked too. ^-^ <3
So now, I think I've got an inking formula that works for me. And maybe now I've even got an art style that works for me. ...Well, maybe just closer to an art style that works for me. I shouldn't get too complacent.
