Pepe Wrongstockings

I realized that entire week had gone by without a post so I grabbed a recent doodle and ran it through a quick and grubby coloring process. Wheeeeeeeeeee.

I've actually been doing a little art stuff this week between rounds on the xbox but nothing much beyond random doodles and aborted characters bits. There is this *one thing* but I'm not ready to scan and color it just yet (and eventually there's that stupid zombie thing to construct as well... damn you, xbox!).

Like Zoinks, Scoob! A Zombie Baby!

More of the undead crew... tried to trick the Cintiq this time by selecting colors in my other monitor but I should have kept things on different layers rather than being "faithful" to authentic watercolors since that would have given me some precise color correction control at the end. Oh well...

Zombie Doodles 2: Electric Boogaloo

A few more zombie doodles today as I work out just what the actual cartoon composition is going to consist of and once again, the Cintiq doesn't fail in delivering colors that are VERY different than the ones that appear on my calibrated monitor(s). I've tried tweaking the settings as well as reverting back to factory set-up and I'm seeing such a variance in greens and pink-red and yellows (sometimes in contrast and saturation and other times it's an obvious color shift). Good times. Hopefully when I get around to doing the actual cartoon I will figure out a way to review the colors outside of the Cintiq while I work (a nice added level of complication).

At any rate, one other small disappointment in this doodle is finding that some of the fun, crunchiness of the fake watercolors is totally lost when I reduce the size of the image from 200 ppi to the display resolution. I included a small blow-up portion that holds on to more of the details. See below!

Zombie Head Doodles

Had to take a break from posting for a bit as I was getting a bit burned out by the combination of real-work and self-imposed work.

At any rate, I have an idea for a zombie scene and doodled out a bunch of potential faces/heads today and tossed a little color behind them to flesh 'em out (rotting flesh, that is) BUT imagine my delight when I found that my carefully chosen colors would go form perfect to muppet green thanks to the wildly inaccurate colors on my Cintiq. For a gadget that cost a thousand bucks I am extremely disappointed by how poorly it does in the color department and it's not just my own model as I've seen the same discrepancies with the ones that we have at the office.

A round of color correction in Photoshop got things *close* to where I had originally planned but there is still a green tint to things that is more pronounced than I wanted and I lost some of the yellows in the process. Ignoring the unhappy color mutations, I'm keen on most of the faces. So I guess that's something.

(postscript: now that I look at this again, the bigger project might benefit from a little bit of the faux watercolor treatment... it's worth keeping in mind)

Street Corner Scene

Trying my hand at building a little more of a scene than just a static character pose. I know that there isn't much going on here but it was a nice exercise to put a couple of characters into an environment. I'm not crazy about how I chose to paint/shade this one but I think it's better to post it and move on to something else as I've already spent enough time on it already.

For your potential viewing pleasure I've posted the pencil sketch of the scene (above) and the flat color layout below.