[Image: A worksheet of 25 Essential Expressions with Audrey’s face drawn in accordingly.]
25 faces for Audrey. I’m starting to get the hang of her face, thankfully! The faces towards the bottom of the sheet are starting to loosen up and feel familiar to me, but I still have to draw her again about a thousand more times, I think.
[Image: A sketch of Hue Scarlett jumping through the air with an arrow cocked to her bow, ready to shoot.]
I love people who make awesome pose reference photography. They are so awesome.
[Image: a sketchbook page of Audrey, a young woman of color, in various head poses.]
I’ve been thinking about Audrey quite a lot lately, and I decided I wanted to base her features off a different branch of African descent. (Before, she was loosely based on Gina Torres’s features.) I really want to see this sort of androgynous, broad, rounder face more often, and it’s pushing my drawing skills in a way that the Torres edition does not.
Most of this sketchbook page was an attempt to get the facial features looking like real life, since I have never drawn a person of color who looked exactly like this before. Then I tried to inject my personal style into the top-right and bottom-middle pictures, to mixed success.
Need more practice! And more photo references.
I’m not totally decided on what to do with her hair, either. I like the cropped-short look of these sketches, and they do fit Audrey’s personality; before, she had long curly hair like Gina, but I’m thinking her hair would be a completely different texture than before, so I don’t think she’d fuss with a lot of hair, it being the apocalypse and all.
[Image description: A pencil drawing of Sami, a medium-skinned girl with black hair in a ponytail, wearing lace fingerless gloves and a slip. She is leaning on a vague wall with her hand and is halfway turned away from the viewer.]
I drew Sami again at work last night.
GUYS GUYS I have the first issue outlined. XDDDDD
[Image description: A pencil drawing of Sami as Hue Spectrum, who wears a black and white costume with bracers, tall boots, and a skirted leotard-ish thing.]
Here’s this thing I drew today on my lunch break! The new Sami in the old school Hue Spectrum uniform. I haven’t yet decided in what capacity the uniforms will be in the new version of the Hues. I’ve got ideas for variations on the basic costume that differ from girl to girl.
Sami is from my upcoming comic series, The Hues.
[Image description: A page of pencil sketches and scribbles.]
Some warmup doodles from this morning. The top two are some ideas I’m considering for art to go on a new banner for my Artist Alley table. The bottom three are Sami, Hannah, and Andrea from The Hues.
[Image description: A pencil sketch of Salime, a Latina teenager, singing exuberantly into a microphone.]
Also drew Salime. :D
[Image description: A pencil sketch of Hannah, a lanky, androgynous teen holding her arms over her head and shuffling a deck of cards between them.]
Drew Hannah awhile back.
I’ve put enough planning into The Hues so far that I’ve got a rough idea of when I want to start actual comic production. So to at least get my ideas out there somewhere tangible, I’m going to write them here!
The Hues is my post-apocalyptic magical girl comic that I first wrote when I was 12!
But of course, since I wrote this in junior high and high school and I’m now in my ripe old mid-twenties, it needs MANY EDITS before I can put it out there. ^_^
I’ve got a plan for the first two issues so far. I’d like to have at least those first two issues in the can before I start posting it online regularly. I’m planning to have 99 cent digital downloads of each issue of the comic available at the beginning of each new chapter, so for 99 cents, readers can get a whole chapter at a time if they don’t wish to wait for it to be posted on a page-by-page basis.
The whole series is comprised of three ‘season’ arcs, and the first arc will be 26 issues long to echo a 26-episode TV season. Issue #13 will be a mid-season finale with a climactic story point.
I’d like to start online publication in June 2012 during the week of the 14th, which is the anniversary of both Garanos and Alex’s Guide, so it’s kind of a personal tradition now. But most importantly, I’m going to start actually drawing for comic pages on February 1st.
It’s going to be an exciting new year. :D
After my pre- and post-Black Friday sprints at work, I now have a mid-week-weekend of three nights off in a row! ^_^ My joints certainly feel like they’ve earned it. I worked a few full backroom shifts, and with all that ladder climbing while holding heavy boxes, it’s definitely the most physically demanding task in the store. It also tends to me the most monotonous, too. Time can really drag!
But I’m VERY happy that over the last couple weeks, bit by bit, I’ve now got a rough feel for what I’m going to do for issue #1 of The Hues. There are lots of worldbuilding details I still need to flesh out first, which will entail some research of various apocalypse scenarios. (Mostly, this is a good excuse/oppurtunity to watch Life After People.)
I’ve been reading Codename: Sailor V over the last week or two as well, and I found that there’s a pretty shockingly fat-shaming chapter in the second volume! I might devote a whole post about this chapter later on, but basically, an enemy of Sailor V gets the civilian population addicted to “Rainbow Chocolate,” which makes everyone gain weight. Then, in order to suck out their energy for their evil nefarious purposes, they advertise a weight-loss spa that really just tricks people into thinking they’re getting thinner by using funhouse mirrors.
Oh, Naoko-sama. I heart you, but I hope your views on the fatties have matured a bit since the early 90s. ^_^;;