Bringing Characters To Life

Alra Flies (sketch)

Alra Flies

One of the earliest reasons I had for developing my art was to enhance my stories.  Having read a lot of comic books growing up, I liked the pairing of pictures of words.  Some of my early pictures were versions of my original characters.  One such character was Alra, a villainess from one of my stories.  Her design was something of a mix between Mortal Kombat and Dragonball Z.  I always liked the concept of being able to shoot energy beams from the hands, which is why she's doing that.

Alra's Power

  This was circa 2004.  I didn't yet own my own computer let alone a Wacom tablet, so all my art I did back then was drawn, hand colored, and then scanned in with no additional work done on it.  Especially in early pictures, I had problems with hands and overly bony female bodies.  It wouldn't be until years later that I'd finally get a good grasp on how best to draw both.  I didn't color on a fresh trace of my images then, so most of these colored images were the original sketches just colored over.

Arla (sketch)

Arla

I also at the time liked the idea of duality with heroes and villains, so the heroine version of Alra had been named Arla and was basically the same as far as looks go (hello, Mortal Kombat palette swap!)  As with Alra above, Arla also suffered from similar anatomy issues in regards to an overly bony body and poor hands.  I had wanted to buy some Prismacolor pencils and markers to do my coloring back then, but couldn't afford them.  I made do with traditional colored pencils until I purchased my first Wacom tablet in 2005. 

Below are a couple of more of my original character pieces (except for Cloud, who is of course of Final Fantasy VII fame).  Krimsun is actually part of where my namesake comes from.  Having been a lifelong fan of WWF/E, the wrestler Kane's half-mask served as the inspiration for Krimsun's mask.  The knee pads were inspired by the "blood" knee pads wrestler Scott Hall used to wear.  I believe I based this Krimsun picture off an image of Spider-Man.  He's one of the few early pictures I did that I still really like to this day.

Jack and Monica were my two primary lovebirds in the first action, mostly non-sci-fi story I wrote inspired by the countless action/thriller movies I'd seen.  Especially in this image does my problem with hands show.  I think hands are a pain in the butt for many growing artists. 

FFVII's Cloud Strife

Krimsun

Jack and Monica

 That's it for this post.  In my next one I'll show some more of my original character pieces as well as some of my "spicier" drawings (read: BOOBS!)  Excelsior!