A Certain Romance

Where is the love?? I seem to have been gone for a minute and I've been awfully cold towards my dear blog, but now I'm back.  Evidently.  And I'll have you know that my time hasn't been spent idly. (Is that correct English? I'm not sure! Good thing I'm not getting graded  on this, I suppose!) No, sir.

I have recently committed muhself (finally!) to drawing at least 4 characters a day. I know that doesn't seem like much but lemme tell you: 3 weeks and (84 drawings) later, the demands for consistency (the magic word here) and variations that come with this task start to seem more absurd by the minute!  And these are just pencils I'm talkin'bout! I'v only recently began to factor in Photoshop time! Now I'm not complaining. (who would I even complain to? I brought this on myself!) I'm just painting the whole picture so the irregularity of my posts seem a lot more reasonable... I'd like to think that's a perfectly acceptable thing to do.

So what do I have to present this time (other than mouthful of whining)?  Just these:

     

Well, not just these.  I've still got more! But I'd like to say a few words first. Firstly, I didn't post the same picture twice. If you look closely you'll notice the second one has a distinct white... shadow-line... thing. I couldn't decide if the picture looked better with or without it so... I know it's a very subtle difference. But I guess I'm just indecisive like that. Secondly, I should say that I've started Photoshopping (seriously, WTF?) straight from my pencils, as opposed to to tracing them on Illustrator first.  I'm still planning on using Illustrator for some of my more simplistic stuff but I feel like a lot of the personality and life of the image is lost when you vectorise drawings like these...and it takes way too F*%KING LONG!

Then we have these:

Once again, I have slight variations of the same thing.  This time though I happened to stumble into (onto?) the variation when I accidentally deleted my pencil lines. I thought it looked cool anyway so, why not show both?

Aaaand:

Yeah. the white-line-shadow thing again. And no. This wasn't even remotely inspired by Rihanna's new do!  Now. I should probably mention that none of these characters have anything  to do with anything. They're not for a story and they're not somehow related. Other than through the fact that they were all drawn by me. All this character design merely serves the purpose of honing them grossly underdeveloped skills of mine.

Not to get all sentimental (which is exactly what people who say that sort of thing end up doing! ), but recently, I've come to realise that I've been treating this art thing like far too much of a burden.  It's weird that  these 3 weeks of drawing have let me appreciate the concept of working hard at something and getting better at it because it's something you want to do and not just because some f*king curriculum requires it! I'd almost completely forgotten  how much I love this sh%t!  It's truly an exciting time to be doing what you love. And everyone should get to do that.  After all: If there ain't no romance,  then why bother?

From now on I'll try to post the pictures as I complete them so it's not all at once like this and over long intervals. And maybe, if the internet cap allows  for it (not everyone has an unlimited ADSL line!), I'll post the pencil scans at the end of every week  so the blog doesn't get stale. I gotta keep all 5 of you loyal fans entertained.  As for now : Giggidy! Giggidy! That's all folks!