Rudy WIP - Beginning Pencils and Flats
- GenreChowderStudios
- Apr 11, 2018
- 3 min read
During the second New Year's update video, Overcast mentioned that more Animal Crossing-related content was in the future for this year. I want to make good on that, both because I said I would but also because Animal Crossing has some darn good character designs. This is the first of , God willing, many more of those darn good character designs.
As I've been doing of the late, I refined the pencils before proceeding with the inking. I do love the look of pencil before they're tied down with the inking. I wish I knew some way to get that rough, sketchy feel in a finished piece without the stiffness of an inked finished piece. Though, honestly, maybe it's just a matter of skill. The inking is, I feel, much better in looseness and energy that it used to be, say, this time last year. Maybe I just need to git gud.
The raw(?) ink lines.
Broken lines bring back some of the lost energy in an inked piece. They share much DNA with sketchy pencil lines. They're "unfinished" but still, they convey just enough information for our minds' eye to complete it. It has that impressionist effect in which, as we're not locked into one defined line or one defined mass of color, we can project any number of minute variations as to how we might complete the line/shape. We can and do. Automatically, it would seem. And subconsciously.
Or something like that. I don't know too too much about impressionism other than it's one of my favorite painting styles. That's just how I understand it and what I recognize in my own thought processes. Don't take my explanation of impressionism as the holy truth.
On to flatting~
Most of the colors were easy to figure out, mostly because there wasn't much of anything to figure out. Rudy has his own canon color scheme. So does his ranch bed. The papers, however... Not so easy. In his character profile (on his wiki page), he's said to be good at cramming for tests or something like that. So for the books and papers involved, what would I do?
My initial thought make them washed out versions of the books. The books, in order to keep everything all nice and related, were the same color as the ranch bed's pillows. Good for balance and whatnot. So maybe the papers could be a continuation of that. No, it didn't look right. I'm sure someone could have pulled it off, but at that moment, I could not. Somehow, it made me think of soaked paper...
The creamy hues came from... I'm not really sure. It may have been his eyes. Or his facial fur. Or the bed posts. Either way, it looked much more like actual paper.
The final flats.
While the colors themselves were fairly simple, the balancing act was not. I'll confess. I am not a much fan of these colors in and of themselves. I believe I've said this here before, but I don't much like blue. I don't much like this particular purple/violet/plum/whatever, either. But that bed is his bed, and those were the colors. Those were the colors that didn't look that nice with the other colors at play. To me, at least. Still had to balance them, though.
That's effectively why I had the books be blue and plum (starting to think I should have reversed their order...). The apple skins are the same as his nose. The apple flesh is the same/similar to his lighter fur. The books he's writing in is a darker version of his nose. It may be the outline for his nose, really. Can't remember.
I don't particularly care for the colors, but at least they're not out of hand now, right...?
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