Weekly Art Practice - Week 6
This week we’re breaking from the format. Kind of in a small way, kind of in a big way. For this week I chose goblins.
Now it’s kind of just like doing another creature, except it has humanoid anatomy and it’s well, not real. There are no real life photographs to learn from for fictional creatures. I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to deal with this lack when I started the week but I feel like I found a decent formula.
Day 1 - Drawing from imagination
Day 1 was just like other day ones. I had just recently put together my Pinterest board of goblins so they were decently fresh in my head when I sat down to do this.
Still have that usual day 1 messiness but there was one standout face for me.
This guy surprises me, one of those “did I draw that??” moments. It’s not like it’s overly complicated but I would usually need to be looking at a reference to get down that face shape!
Day 2 - Figure sketching
For this day 2 I didn’t use photographs but instead tried to pull from my whole Pinterest board. I jumped around from image to image, whichever caught my attention. With a goal of trying out very different goblin styles.
I had hoped to be able to put together a bit of a visual history of goblins and identify current goblin media designs, but Pinterest wasn’t super great at providing that selection. The big ones that came to mind were Magic the Gathering goblins and D&D goblins. Then throw in some cartoon goblins like the ones from Adventure Time. This is probably a do-able project but it would have taken many more days than the hour or so I gave myself to collect references and read the Wikipedia page on goblin origins.
Day 3 - Reference studies
For day 3 I took my favourite little guys from day 2 and spent more time on them. Tried to look critically at face shape, general body proportions, and ears. These are the standout goblin qualities to me.
These three felt like they covered different vibes well. I flubbed the very cartoon guys as I tried to push myself on that one instead of re-creating since they had such simple shapes. Maybe not so simple after all…
The ones in red are what I did after the main three. Trying to merge things together and try to identify what kind of vibe I wanted to bring to my own goblin style.
Day 4 - Style studies
Now day 4 is usually style study, but I had basically done that on day 3. I didn’t want to come out of this week having just ripped off someone else’s goblin design so for day 4 I wanted to try out creature design.
I chose my main contenters from day 3 (leaving out simple blob goblin as the first 2 felt like they would make more fitting D&D art). I then found some reference poses, sketched out that wireframe, tripled the frame and drew the same pose 3 times. Times 2 as I did the exercise twice.
The first one was my fave little grumpy guy. I’m very in love with his huge lower jaw. The second guy has great years and a very simple face that looked good on everything. The 3rd one is me taking my favourite parts of the first two and trying to create something new.
Found a middle ground for the ears, mouth from one, nose from the other. Clothing ended up being a bit of a combo and I still don’t love it but this wasn’t a clothing challenge so I let it slide for the exercise.
Overall I’m happy with my 3rd form guy. While it doesn’t feel like the most unique thing in the world, I knew that once I took this design into day 5 I would likely start to deviate even further from my references.
Reference: Grumpy goblin: This one was impossible to find due to the internet being flooded with Baby Yoda art. After a long Instagram scroll I can confirm it’s by camkendell.
Reference: Joe Sparrow goblins
Reference: Green goblin sticker
Day 5 - Drawing from imagination
I didn’t go into day 5 with only imagination, I let myself keep a tab of “action poses” open for this week. Poses wasn’t my area of study for the week and I didn’t want to waste too much time troubleshooting poses when what I was really focused on was character design.
I’m pretty happy with how the goblin guys turned out! The central design didn’t changes too much but I have started to second guess the big ears. I’m also struggling with how to handle the large mouth from multiple angles so that might be a long term project. Playing around with expression would also be fun.
Conclusion
With our iPad being on life support I returned to my Huion and I think I’m really coming around to sketching with it. I’ve warmed up to the default CSP pencils and now really like how they make sketches look.
While there was the extra struggle this week of having to alter the daily programming, I feel like I landed somewhere near typical character design. I could have played with shape language more, and pushed things harder on clothing and expressions but still trying to keep these daily practices fairly focused to avoid feeling overwhelmed.
This week I even spent time inking and colouring one of my practice guys from day 4 instead of day 5 because I was already pretty happy which what I was producing.
Next week I’ll return to a more traditional subject: rabbits.