A few recent sketches of Corveil and Kurt I just wanted to post for myself. :) With Corveil, I was trying out some hairstyle options for him. I started with a longer hairstyle (which you can see in the top-left initial sketch), because while shorter hair probably suits his character better, I tend to lengthen his hair when I draw him purely because longer hair tends to be more fun for me to draw, haha. I was also doodling one of his outfits here, that I’d been fiddling with in other sketches. I think I semi-recently added the orange ribbon around his waist, at the time of sketching this. With Kurt, I think I just wanted to draw the tails of his jacket (this sketchpage is from the end of December, a little while ago now).
One thing I want to try and do more this year is post a little more about my characters – I’m not sure if it’s a recent thing or if I’ve always been a little like this, but I’m always reticent about sharing info about them for some reason. I think I’m just a bit that way in general – I struggle a bit with preferring to mostly keep to myself. Which is probably why social media has never felt natural to me. But, I shouldn’t have to be concerned about things like that when it’s my own space here on this blog. :) I think this place is a good way for me to unlearn some probably-unhelpful practices I picked up from mainly using social media for sharing art over the past few years, instead of my own space. (In hindsight, I probably should have been doing both, instead of one or the other.) Mainly to try and be a little less guarded here when it comes to expressing myself, because I have never been entirely comfortable doing so on social media. I’m not sure the reason, maybe because it feels more public. I could probably do a Duskbirds page exploring this issue, haha. Well, I don’t think the reason is too important. Probably something that’s mostly in my mind, and likely not noticeable outside my overthinking.
Kurt, one of the characters from my unnamed project.
Happy New Year! Wow, it’s been a bit since I last updated here. I’ve been meaning to start updating my sketchblog again for a while, and the new year seems like a prime time to start. My plan is to start using this blog as an additional archive for posts I make on social media. Which is sort of funny, as when this blog was first created, it was intended as the main archive, and social media was the secondary avenue – how it switched during the heyday of social media during the 2010’s!
Now, with how turbulent social media has become post-2020 (which I largely think began during the NFT-fiasco, and the nail in the coffin was generative AI images – though BlueSky is now sort of a tentative phoenix rising from the ashes), it’s lead me to pursue keeping this blog updated more seriously than I have in the past.
To start, I’ll post a few of my favorite personal artworks from within the past few months, in no particular order. Mostly of my original characters, and two fan pieces.
The first one above is a painting of Kurt with his original blue hair design, instead of the pale brown/blond he’s had for most of his design. I was practicing some painting techniques with this one, something more smooth than what I usually do. It was a fun experiment, and I’m happy with what I learned from it.
“Corveil,” from the same project as Kurt.
Above is a sketch of Corveil, in a looser style I’m more drawn toward. I really like the looseness, though I suspect it might be a little more difficult to read as a viewer. Though I haven’t posted more anywhere yet, I’ve been developing more about these characters over the past few months. I would really love to create a little story involving them, just small ones to explore their characters. I’ve done several small one-shot comic pages involving them, which are in various stages of thumbnails to flats. I’m not sure which of those I’ll finish – their quality varies immensely – but they’ve felt really rewarding to do just for myself over the last year.
One thing I seem to be forever struggling with is coming up with a name I like for the project involving these characters. I’ve tried several last year, and I still am not enamored with any of them. I really want to have some kind of name to unify them with, instead of a vague “my characters,” though I’m leaning toward this not being very important right now and that I’m overthinking it.
Trahearne and Malyck from Guild Wars 2 | With support from ArenaNet.
Above is an in-progress crop of Trahearne and Malyck from Guild Wars 2. I really love painting this characters, and I have so much I want to explore with them – which I have plans for later this year. :)
Corveil
Above is a practice painting of Corveil looking contemplative.
Corveil again.
Here’s a sketch of Corveil looking a little malicious. I’m personally fond of this one, though I also suspect this one doesn’t read very clearly.
“Gul Dukat” from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
And above we have a Cardassian (from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) study, which I just did today as a warm-up painting. Though I first watched DS9 three years ago – and I even did a small painting of Garak afterward, which I had completely forgotten about (it’s not my favorite drawing, otherwise I would post it here) – but that first watch was as background material I had on while I was working. I had the random urge to rewatch the series recently, and upon a rewatch (I’m in the sixth season now), I realized I had missed so much during my initial rewatch.
There is so much that is lost if you are primarily watching the show while not actively viewing it, as I had – so much wonderful physical and non-verbal acting by the performers which adds incredible layers and depth to their characters. I went into my second watch with The NextGeneration as still my favorite Trek (DS9 was the last series of the pre-modern Treks I watched), and by very early on during this rewatch (by season 2 or 3), knew that DS9 had overtaken TNG for me. It is now my favorite Trek, by a long shot (incidentally, TNG is probably now my second-favorite, followed by The Original Series, then Enterprise, and then finally Voyager).
This study is based on the quintessential Cardassian, pioneered by Marc Alaimo – none other than Gul Dukat, of course! After I read how the makeup artist (Michael Westmore) largely based the Cardassian design on Alaimo’s “unusually long” neck, I knew that if I decided to learn how to draw Cardassians, I would start by studying Alaimo’s Gul Dukat appearance.
I really love Alaimo’s portrayal of the Gul Dukat character – there is so much subtlety and nuance to his performance, and his voice has this ASMR-quality to my ears that makes him intoxicating for me to listen to.
I love Alaimo’s/Westmore’s physical representation of a Cardassian so much, that I didn’t want any drawings I do of the character to be a replica. We have seven wonderful seasons to admire their work on the character for that. I knew from the beginning I wanted to try some kind of merger between Alaimo’s physical appearance, and an artistic interpretation of the character. I’ve done a number of “Gul Dukat” sketch studies before this one to try and figure one out – I’m sure this won’t be the end version, but this is probably my favorite result so far.
I don’t think I quite captured his charming malevolence, though I am pleased with how knobby his Cardassian neck turned out.
Crop from an Arquel painting I think might be fun to finish.
Corveil in his fancy new parka. This was mainly an excuse to try out the design.
Corveil in his parka with the hood up.
Arquel practice.
Crop from an Arquel painting I was fiddling with. For whatever reason, I seem to tend to draw the face from this angle when sketching aimlessly.
More experimenting with Corveil’s color scheme.
I was also experimenting with Vaknaa’s color scheme a bit – her original eyes were a dark blue-green color. I was trying out amber eyes with her for a while, and am now pretty settled on giving those to Corveil instead. I was then trying out a more mint color for Vaknaa, but am leaning toward her original darker blue-green coloration again.
This is a paintover of an old Kurt sketch from a few years ago. (It might even be in the archives of this sketchblog, but I couldn’t find it on a cursory search. Which reminds me how I need to improve the search results display for this blog, haha.)
I was curious to see if painting over such an old sketch would have any interesting results, or if it would look noticeably different with my current painting style/skills versus years back. I was expecting disastrous results – but to my surprise, the paintover was an improvement from the original painting.
A few recent sketches of Corveil and Kurt I just wanted to post for myself. :) With Corveil, I was trying out some hairstyle options for him. I started with a longer hairstyle (which you can see in the top-left initial sketch), because while shorter hair probably suits his character better, I tend to lengthen his hair when I draw him purely because longer hair tends to be more fun for me to draw, haha. I was also doodling one of his outfits here, that I’d been fiddling with in other sketches. I think I semi-recently added the orange ribbon around his waist, at the time of sketching this. With Kurt, I think I just wanted to draw the tails of his jacket (this sketchpage is from the end of December, a little while ago now).
