Tag: vaknaa

Recent Sketches + Vaknaa Design Concepts

Posted on November 24, 2022

Happy Thanksgiving! We are likely cooking up a storm in the kitchen right now, but let’s cross-celebrate with a compilation post with a few recent sketches.

Above is a profile sketch practice of Corveil. I was mainly imagining a slightly different shape for the tip and bridge of his nose. Also, his hair was originally toned a bluer hue, but became more grey as the painting progressed. I think I still slightly prefer the bluer tone, but the more monochrome look seems fun to potentially explore.

I do have a story-based reason for tinting his hair more toward blue (it’s probably not too difficult to guess), but still experimenting to see if I like where it goes visually.

This was an Arquel practice painting that was really fun to draw. It didn’t quite turn out the way I was imagining, but it’s closer than past attempts of a similar idea I’ve had for him.

I’ve been experimenting more with Vaknaa’s design, and redesigning her to be slightly more practical. Oh, why don’t I post the very rough sketch sheet I made for her a while back: Main changes are making the head crest feathers more balanced proportionally, reducing their overall size. Same with the horns, and also adjusting their angle to not compete with the crest feathers. I also tried out a few different horn shapes, and this was the one I liked best so far. The most recent painting above deviates from the ref sheet, because I’m still continually adjusting her design to see which works best.

I’ll post a few of the other thumbnail concepts below:

I did an array of sketches, and these were the ones I narrowed them down to.

Here’s the full page of concepts. Not compiled neatly, because I wasn’t intending to show these. But since it’s my blog, I figure why not! My idea for Vaknaa that I’ve been toying with is that I want her & her species to have crests of head feathers, ideally visually identifiable as “feather crests” instead of “head wings.”

I was browsing some old files a few days ago, and nearly forgot that in her very old design, she had outright head wings. Which is a very cool and fun design feature that I always love seeing on characters, but I wanted to see if I could come up with with something that is still distinctly feathery, but more evocative of the crests you see on real birds. I was curious to see if I might be able to come up with a design like this that worked well with the humanoid skull shape.

It’s still an ongoing process that I don’t think completely works yet, but I think I’m getting closer to something I like for her!

Close-up of the painting from further up in the post.

Arquel, Corveil, Vaknaa, & Kurt Sketch Paintings

Posted on November 22, 2022

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.

ZBrush Sculpts & Sculpt+Paintings

Posted on November 14, 2021

I really enjoy using ZBrush as a kind of digital maquette – it was fun to explore the possibilities for Vaknaa’s design this way. Particularly with her head crest feathers.

The above painting is painted over a rough sculpture of her.

This is another sculpt+paint of Vaknaa.

The rest are sculpt+paintings of Aurelle. The hair is very inspired by Entei Ryu’s work as mentioned in the previous Blender post! Her work is elegantly gorgeous and greatly inspires me.

One more sculpt+paint of the same model. Below is the unpainted model on its own.

It’s 2020! Five years! Let’s start posting again with some artwork of Vaknaa

Posted on November 12, 2020

Wow! It’s been five years since my last post to my sketchblog. Are blogs still a thing? Do I even know anyone who still keeps a blog?

I don’t think I do!

I’m kind of drawn to the relative anonymity this blog must have now. I loved blogging, and the only reason I stopped was because posting would take too much time with each entry. That, and also because social media basically replaced casual/personal blogging.

I think I’ll try writing some entries here though! I miss writing in general. I’ve been doing more personal writing lately, and it’s been great fun developing stories and themes.

But first, let’s update this blog with some recent work.

I’m not even sure which artwork I should post here first – where to begin after five years! This post will likely be a little haphazard, but let’s embrace it for the time being – I can always do more concise follow-up posts later on.

Vaknaa rough painting – trying out different designs for her.

Let’s start with something I posted earlier today on social media – a rough painting of Vaknaa! Vaknaa is now one of my older characters. She is the same character in my last post from 2015.

I’ve been playing around with her design lately, though I’ve tried tinkering with it in all the years since 2015. I’ve always wanted her design to combine human and avian features, but I was never completely happy with the designs I came up with so far – I’m not sure if I’ll keep this current design of her, but it’s been a lot of fun to paint with in the meantime!

I should post some of those other designs here sometime – there are a lot of designs I haven’t posted anywhere because they don’t seem like things I particularly want to share on social media, but they’d probably be suited to a personal blog like this.

I’ve made a few other sketches of this design this week – actually, I think I’ll post them here now. It’s interesting how used to I’ve become with social media – things I’ve become used to adhering to, like staggering posts as to not potentially annoy anyone with too frequent updates.

It’s kind of freeing to not have to consider that at all with a blog like this, since this is mainly just for my enjoyment, as I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to have traffic to a blog nowadays.

Anyway, more artwork!

Rough sketch of Vaknaa – I’ve been playing around with a much looser, possibly more expressive style lately. It’s been really enjoyable so far, which is a little surprising for me, because traditionally I’ve been told my artwork can be on the tight side, sometimes too much.

These were all painted this week, mainly as either warm-up paintings or break paintings. I’ve enjoyed painting them, and want to explore more paintings in this style!

Recap from 2015 – 2020

Now that we have some artwork here, I thought it might be fun to do a brief recap of what the past five years have been like. I’ll probably put these thoughts under a cut.

Bit of a strange day

Posted on April 30, 2015

Bit of a strange sketch.